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If you're working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
Computer Scientist
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Opinion Journalist
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East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
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As elite attitudes towards public education over time illustrate, simple formulas are far from adequate. There are conflicting tendencies.
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Regulate the banks, get money out of elections raise the minimum wage, environmental issues. They're all very important and the Occupy movement made a difference. It shifted not only the discourse but to some extent, action on these issues.
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There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information - the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified.
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What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded. The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane.
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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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Private companies can make a personal profile, direct you to things - they will say - that you would be interested in, but that's their choice not your choice.
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I think the activism of the 1960s had a very definite civilizing effect on the whole society in all kinds of ways. So lots of things that by now are almost taken for granted were heretical in the 1960s. We had anti-sodomy laws until not many years ago.
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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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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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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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Intellectuals (in the standard sense of the term, not [ Edward] Said's prescriptive sense) are the people who write history.
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People will find some ways of identifying themselves, becoming associated with others, taking part in something. They're going to do it some way or other. If they don't have the options of participation in labor unions, political organizations that actually function, they'll find other ways. Religious fundamentalism is a classic example.
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Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.
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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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I still think, despite everything, that the US is very unlikely to attack Iran. It could be a huge catastrophe nobody knows what the consequences would be. I imagine that only an administration that's really desperate would resort to that.
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Popular support for alternative energy has been very high for years. But it harms corporate profits.
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The first step is to penetrate the clouds of deceit and distortion and learn the truth about the world, then to organize and act to change it. That's never been impossible and never been easy.
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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.
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We have to be irrational and vindictive, because that's going to frighten people. And we have to maintain this for years. And then we'll be able to carry out the actions that we want to carry out.
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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.
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