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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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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
Profit
Negative
Effects
System
Others
Externalities
Order
Compelled
Must
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Survive

More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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Popular support for alternative energy has been very high for years. But it harms corporate profits.
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I think there are real possibilities of reaching out to many of the Trump voters, those who voted for Obama believing his rhetoric.
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We could not bring democracy to South Vietnam at a cost that we were willing to accept. So it was a disaster. That' is the left extreme.
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More generally, independent farmers had to be trained to become docile workers in the expanding industrial system. It was necessary to drive from their heads evil ideas, such as the belief that wage labor was not much different from chattel slavery. That continues to the present, now sometimes taking the form of an attack on public education.
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There are no conservatives in the United States. The United States does not have a conservative tradition. The people who call themselves conservatives, like the Heritage Foundation or Gingrich, are believers in -- are radical statists. They believe in a powerful state, but a welfare state for the rich.
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Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.
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Suppose that we believe what we are taught. . . . destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies . . . of institutional lunacy.
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The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.
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In Kosovo, the U.S. has chosen a course of action that escalates atrocities and violence. It is also a course of action that strikes a blow against the regime of international order, but which offers the weak at least some protection from predatory states.
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There have been repeated cases when nuclear war came ominously close, often a result of malfunctioning of early-warning systems and other accidents, sometimes [as a result of] highly adventurist acts of political leaders.
Noam Chomsky
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If you assume there is no hope, you guarantee there will be no hope.
Noam Chomsky
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If you want to scare people, you talk about evil.
Noam Chomsky
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Occupying armies have responsibilities, not rights. Their primary responsibility is to withdraw as quickly and expeditiously as possible, in a manner determined by the occupied population.
Noam Chomsky
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The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways. In Europe it's austerity in the midst of recession and that's guaranteed to be a disaster. There's some resistance to that now. In the US, it's essentially off-shoring production and financialization and getting rid of superfluous population through incarceration.
Noam Chomsky
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There is no western concern for issues of aggression, atrocities, human rights abuses and so on if there's a profit to be made from them
Noam Chomsky
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Our current prison state has the dual effect of getting rid of a superfluous population of basically unskilled workers (with a close race-class correlation), and also demonizing them... The drug war is basically for this - It has nothing to do with drugs, but it has plenty to do with criminalizing an unwanted population and scaring everybody else.
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There is a big difference between tweeting to your friend about something that is happening and having a real personal relationship with people.
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The US reasserted control over Nicaragua in 1990. Since then, the country has experienced a steep decline. It's now the second poorest country in the hemisphere.
Noam Chomsky
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I just don't care about popular culture. It looks to me pointless and superficial. If I had free time I'd rather read a 19th century novel.
Noam Chomsky
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There is a considerable polarization taking place here, increasing the gap between rich and poor. It's most dramatic in Third World countries, of course, but in the rich countries it's also very noticeable.
Noam Chomsky