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It's a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
Computer Scientist
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Linguist
Media Critic
Opinion Journalist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
A. Noam Chomsky
Chomsky
Miracle
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Avoided
Near
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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Surely no rational or realistic person will discount the possibility that [during wartime] the United States might suddenly resort to nuclear weapons. Those who retain the instinct for survival, not to speak of minimal concern for their fellow man, will seek ways to act before rather than after the event.
Noam Chomsky
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So Marxism, Freudianism: any one of these things I think is an irrational cult. They're theology, so they're whatever you think of theology I don't think much of it. In fact, in my view that's exactly the right analogy: notions like Marxism and Freudianism belong to the history of organized religion.
Noam Chomsky
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Over the years, there's been case after case when there were very narrow decisions that had to be made about whether to launch nuclear weapons in serious cases. What is this guy [Donald Trump] going to do if his vaunted negotiating skills fail, if somebody doesn't do what he says? Is he going to say, Okay we'll nuke them? We're done?
Noam Chomsky
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I think the foreign policy is really not Donald Trump administration concern. Like the Syria strike. I mean, it meant almost nothing. They hit an empty air base. Within a day, it was functioning again. Planes were flying off it. It was for a domestic show, you know - show what a tough guy I am I'm not Barack Obama.
Noam Chomsky
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The tendencies are considerably weaker in the natural sciences, which, for the past several centuries, have survived and flourished through such constant challenge, and therefore, at best, seek to encourage it. Serving the status quo in political and socioeconomic realms is a different matter.
Noam Chomsky
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If you're in a system where you must make profit in order to survive. You are compelled to ignore negative externalities, effects on others.
Noam Chomsky
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Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.
Noam Chomsky
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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.
Noam Chomsky
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Organization and education, when they interact with each other, they strengthen each other, they are mutually supportive.
Noam Chomsky
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The fact of the matter is that the U.S. is run by an unusually class-conscious, dedicated business class that has a very violent labor history, much worse than in Europe.
Noam Chomsky
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If you accept the institutional lunacy, then the policies are rational.
Noam Chomsky
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The whole basis for the US intervention in Colombia is outrageously racist and arrogant.
Noam Chomsky
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The United States invaded Iraq to gain control of one of the major sources of the world's energy.
Noam Chomsky
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The Soviet Union was pretty much what Lenin and Trotsky said it was.
Noam Chomsky
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It is one thing for the institution to offer space for serious engagement, in thought and action, and to encourage free and independent use of such opportunities it is something else for the university to become engaged as an institution, beyond a fairly narrow range where true consensus exists, and even that raises questions.
Noam Chomsky
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Let's imagine again an observer looking at us without any preconceptions. I think he would be struck by the fact that although human beings have the capacity to develop scientific knowledge, it must be a very limited capacity because it is only done in very narrow and specific domains.
Noam Chomsky
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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.
Noam Chomsky
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To construct a scientific theory from the data and to be able to recognize that it is a reasonable theory is possible only if there are some very sharp restrictive principles that lead you to go in one direction and not in another direction. Otherwise, you wouldn't have science at all, merely randomly chosen hypotheses.
Noam Chomsky
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We can try to gain some of the sensibility of some of the indigenous populations of the world or our predecessors 800 years ago. We can laugh at them as being naive and unsophisticated, but unless we can gain that sensibility that there has to be rights of nature as Bolivians and others put it, then we're going to be destroyed.
Noam Chomsky
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By that time [1966], we did begin to get some protests [against Vietnam War]. But not from liberal intellectuals they never opposed the war.
Noam Chomsky