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The question in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided . . . democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured they may well be essential to survival.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
Computer Scientist
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Human Rights Activist
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Media Critic
Opinion Journalist
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East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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One of the benefits of a properly functioning democracy is minority rights and majority rule.
Noam Chomsky
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It makes sense for societies to make education compulsory for children. Children are vulnerable. They can't make decisions. But the decisions can't all be left in the hands of the parents. They can be irresponsible too.
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Say the Pentagon Papers, - that material went much deeper. It went into internal government planning back for twenty - five years. Those are things that the public should have known about. In a democracy they should have known what leaders thinking and planning about major enterprises like the Vietnam war. It was kept secret from them.
Noam Chomsky
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Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.
Noam Chomsky
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For the last couple of hundred years, there have been struggles about this. Even the Fifth and Sixth Amendments of the constitution talk about personal rights.
Noam Chomsky
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A lot of people who voted for Trump, working class people, voted for Obama in 2008. They were seduced by the slogans hope and change. They didn't get hope, they didn't get change, they were disillusioned. This time they voted for another candidate who is calling for hope and change and has promised to deliver all kinds of amazing things.
Noam Chomsky
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There is a considerable polarization taking place here, increasing the gap between rich and poor. It's most dramatic in Third World countries, of course, but in the rich countries it's also very noticeable.
Noam Chomsky
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You don't get to be a respected intellectual by uttering truisms in monosyllables.
Noam Chomsky
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I have written occasionally on links between my scientific work and political thinking, but not much, because the links seem to me abstract and speculative.
Noam Chomsky
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I mean you look back at American history and American culture, it's pretty striking. I mean this has been the safest country in the world forever, and the most frightened country in the world.
Noam Chomsky
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Anywhere in Latin America there is a potential threat of the pathology of caudillismo and it has to be guarded against.
Noam Chomsky
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It's hard to achieve that, especially in a free society, but it's been done, and that's the kind of thing that activists in the IWW have to work against, right on the shop floor. It's not so simple, but it's been done before.
Noam Chomsky
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Given their unusual privilege, Western intellectuals can realistically accomplish a great deal. The limits are imposed by will more than objective circumstances. And about human will predictions are without value.
Noam Chomsky
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You know, we have little bits of understanding, glimpses, a little bit of light here and there, but there's a tremendous amount of darkness, which is a challenge. I think life would be pretty boring if we understood everything. It's better if we don't understand anything and know that we don't, that's the important part.
Noam Chomsky
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Human language is nothing like the signalling systems of other animals.
Noam Chomsky
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We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.
Noam Chomsky
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The change between horse and buggy to automobile is a big change and there hasn't been a major change since.
Noam Chomsky
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Everything depends very much on who you are, what your values are, what your commitments are, what circumstances you live in and what options you're willing to undertake, and that determines what you ought to be doing.
Noam Chomsky
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The Russians were doing a lot of rotten things, you can point to them. But the idea that if you consider what Hans Morgenthau called I called abuse of reality, the picture of the world was almost the opposite of what they presented. But somehow this sells and is continually repeated, at least in this kind of situation.
Noam Chomsky
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We have never had class-based parties. We've had parties run by the business classes. There's slight variations. Like in the New Deal period, there was a lot of popular activism, so things shifted slightly, but not much.
Noam Chomsky