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. . . among all grammars meeting this condition (of adequacy), we select the simplest.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 96
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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I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.
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When you read about the end of the Soviet Union, it's always about the death of socialism. They never say the death of democracy. But it makes about the same sense.
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The Republican establishment, the mainstream corporate financial wealth, is getting to a point where it can't control the base it's mobilized.
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Somehow the fact of enormous privilege and freedom carries with it a sense of impotence, which is a strange, but striking, phenomenon. The fact is, we can do just about anything. There is no difficulty, wherever you are, in finding groups that are working hard on things that concern you.
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The British had an even stronger [then America] business interest in Nazi Germany. And Benito Mussolini was greatly admired.
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It's true that language is in a sense linear but that is as obvious as perceptual space is three-dimensional.
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The invasion of Panama, what was that? The U.S. killed, according to the Panamanians, 3,000 civilians. Maybe they're right. We don't investigate our own crimes, so nobody knows.
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I am opposed to the accumulation of executive power anywhere.
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Colombia was a big wheat producer in the 1950's. That was eliminated by what sounds like a nice plan, called Food for Peace. It's a plan by which US taxpayers subsidized US agribusiness to send food to poor countries. This, of course, destroyed the domestic agricultural markets of these countries, opening these markets to US agribusiness.
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One can neither agree nor disagree with a terminological proposal, as long as it is clear that it is just that: terminological.
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Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.
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Bohemian Grove seems to be a kind of frat house affair. Bilderberg [philosophy] may be marginally more serious. The CFR is transparent. You can read their publications. In the 18th century it perhaps made some sense to conjure up the Illuminati and Masons. Not since.
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For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.
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The [Ronald] Reagan administration told the business world that they were not going to enforce the labor laws.
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I don't suggest that the observations are surprising or profound. Rather, they seem to me the merest truisms. I was not aware that [ Michel] Foucault had used the phrase speaking truth to power. I had thought it was an old Quaker phrase.
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The UN to some extent diffuses U.S. power. Therefore it's less direct an agency of the United States than the U.S. Army is. But still, it can't escape the distribution of power in the world.
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When I look at public opinion, I'm not far out of the mainstream. I'm in it, in many respects. In some respects, public opinion goes beyond anything I've ever said.
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Governments don't control people like they used to.
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Moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege.
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I don't think that the United States cares. They just assume that North Korea will soon have nuclear weapons.
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