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The only way we can put a permanent end to terrorism is to stop participating in it.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
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East Oak Lane
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Avram Noam Chomsky
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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Power has to be protected from scrutiny. That's the principle of every dictatorship, of every autocracy. You hear it from high priests at Harvard and every government department, that power has to be kept secret otherwise it will fade and it won't work. But Bradley Manning is violating that principle.
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I like the cold weather. It means you get work done.
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You win by struggle, and that requires understanding and serious analysis of the options and the circumstances, and then you can do a lot.
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It's roughly the case that if systems become too complex to study in sufficient depth, physics hands them over to chemistry, then to biology, then experimental psychology, and finally on to history. Roughly. These are tendencies, and they tend to distinguish roughly between hard and soft sciences.
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Every great power, every aggressive power has always regarded itself as exceptional and as doing things only for the most moral ends.
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Should a community... be free to enact legislation to say they don't want blacks? Now that's illegal. Fifty years ago it was legal. Is that progress or is that regress?
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When [ Paul Johnson] got to me he was in trouble, because I'm an old-fashioned conservative: married when I was 21, stayed married, 3 kids, live in the suburbs, no scandals, so nothing to write about. So what he did is concoct one of the nuttiest claims I've ever seen.
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Those are possibilities for technology, which don't tend to be used, because of the way power is concentrated. There are all kinds of possibilities, including for coercion. In China, technology is used to control and coerce. Here too, to an extent, but not to that extent.
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We use the official definitions of terrorism. The definitions in the U.S. code, in British law, in U.S. Army manuals and so on. And if you use those definitions it follows instantly that the United States is the leading terrorist state in the world.
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Remember that in any major nuclear war, the first strike destroys the country that attacks it's been known for years. The first strike of a major power is very likely to cause what's called nuclear winter, leads to global famine for years and everything's basically gone. Some survivors straggling around. Could [Donald Trump] do it? Who knows.
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History records endless struggles to enlarge those realms, inspiring ones it also records painful reversals and setbacks.
Noam Chomsky
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Elements of the Christian fundamentalist right are one of the strongest components of support for Israel - support in an odd sense, because they presumably want to see it destroyed in a cosmic battle at Armageddon, after which all the proper souls will ascend to heaven - or so I understand, again, not from close reading.
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Destruction of the environment is not only rational it's exactly what you're taught to do in college.
Noam Chomsky
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The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here.
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Bradley Manning should be regarded as a hero. He is doing what an honest, decent citizen should be doing: letting your population know what the government, the people who rule you are doing. They want to keep it secret of course.
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There's never been anything like the so-called Vietnam Syndrome: it's mostly a fabrication.
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[Health-care system] is largely privatized and unregulated. So of course it's highly inefficient and costly.
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I felt that we could hardly improve on the conception of the university expressed by one of the founders of the modern system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, also one of the founders of classical liberalism. That seems to me true today as well, though ideals of course have to be adapted to changing circumstances.
Noam Chomsky
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Why should workers agree to be slaves in a basically authoritarian structure? They should have control over it themselves. Why shouldn't communities have a dominant voice in running the institutions that affect their lives?
Noam Chomsky
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After all, the internet originated around 1960 and wasn't privatized until 1995. That's thirty five years in the public domain during the hard, creative development period.
Noam Chomsky