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There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster' instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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The Iraq War is the first war in history, in which there were huge demonstrations before the war was launched, not beginning five years later and then being broken up. All of these are changes, and the people who are writing in journals today lived through these changes.
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My memory - faded, as I say - is that Paul Johnson was trying to vilify all intellectuals who were at all critical of the states he worships, and of power generally (except, of course, the power of enemies, which we must denounce, imitating the commissars who are his models, though he doesn't understand it).
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Nothing is more inspiring to see how poor and suffering people, living under conditions incomparably worse than we endure, continue quietly and unpretentiously with courageous and committed struggle for justice and dignity.
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I agree with Bill Clinton that US forces should not be sent to Haiti, but not for his reasons.
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That's our nuclear weapons strategy [going to frighten people], as of the early post-Cold War years. And I think this is a real failure of the intellectual community, including scholarship and the media. It's not like you had headlines all over the place. And it's not secret, the documents are there. And I think that's probably the right picture.
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The United States is going to continue to punish Iran because of its defiance.
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Our only real hope for democracy is that we get the money out of politics entirely and establish a system of publicly funded elections.
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Anarchists try to identify power structures. They urge those exercising power to justify themselves. This justification does not succeed most of the time.
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U.S. international and security policy . . . has as its primary goal the preservation of what we might call the Fifth Freedom, understood crudely but with a fair degree of accuracy as the freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced.
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We have a record for Nawaz Sharif but not the others. And judging by the record, it's pretty hard to be optimistic. His [Sharif's] previous governments were very corrupt and regressive in the policies pursued.
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Those who had demanded no more than an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a commitment to negotiations saw their demands being realized, and lapsed into silence.
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We should therefore be opposed to institutional barriers to that freedom: Military dictatorships, for example. Or states run by a Central Committee.
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If you want to control a population... give them a God to worship.
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Western intellectuals, and also Third World intellectuals, were attracted to the Bolshevik counter-revolution because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine which says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals.
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The United States is a violent military state. It's been involved in military action all over the place.
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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 term intellectual is used conventionally to refer to people who happen to have unusual opportunities in this regard, and as always, opportunity confers moral responsibility.
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Latin America is all moving to the left, from Venezuela to Argentina with rare exceptions, but there's a good left and a bad left.
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The American escalation of the war in Laos provoked a response by the Communist forces, which now control more of Laos than ever before.
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From the late 1940s, into and through the '50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country.
Noam Chomsky