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You ought to teach kids that elections take place but that's not politics. If you want to know how legislation is made it doesn't come from elections.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
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Media Critic
Opinion Journalist
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East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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Right now, huge numbers of people cannot obtain even drinking water, and the situation is likely to become worse with predicted climate change and failure to take the actions that are necessary.
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In fact, when drugs are legalized, use sometimes goes down, it's been claimed. Part of the reason is that teenage kids use illicit drugs because they are illicit. They are thumbing their noses at society. If they were legal, they might not.
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It is reported that about 30% of the world's population is unemployed. That's worse than the Great Depression, but it's now an international phenomenon.
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NAFTA was much more popular among US corporations than GATT, because NAFTA is highly protectionist in ways that GATT is not.
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In the late 1990s, some of the worst terrorist atrocities in the world were what the Turkish government itself called state terror, namely massive atrocities, 80 percent of the arms coming from the United States, millions of refugees, tens of thousands of people killed, hideous repression, that's international terror, and we can go on and on.
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The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretationand a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.
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In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.
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It's a lesser-known story, but the Japanese government (after the Russian-Nazi pact, which split Poland) did allow Polish Jews to come to Japan, with the expectation that they would then be sent to the United States. But they weren't accepted, so they stayed in Japan.
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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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I do not see how we can rationally oppose high speed rail because of the environmental and other costs without considering the social and human consequences of the radical elimination of transportation that this entails.
Noam Chomsky
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There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.
Noam Chomsky
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The Andes region is not stable. So we can expect to see more US intervention. It could be under any kind of pretext. We can no longer use the Russians as an excuse, as we did in Central America in the 1980's, so drugs will have to do.
Noam Chomsky
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One of the real problems of society is that its far too atomized, what sociologists call secondary associations.
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.
Noam Chomsky
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Anti-union propaganda has been considerably more successful here [ in the U.S.] than in Europe, even among working people who would benefit [from] unions.
Noam Chomsky
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The worst drug of all by far is tobacco the death toll from tobacco is just overwhelming.
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If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that's something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can't live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.
Noam Chomsky
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To object that the facts about human nature set limits on our ability to change the world and ourselves makes about as much sense as the lament that our lack of wings sets limits on our ability to 'fly' as far as eagles under our own power.
Noam Chomsky
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If you read people like say Bruce Blair one of the leading, most sober, knowledgeable specialists, he says, look, [Donald Trump] statements are all over the map, but his personality is frightening, he's a complete megalomaniac.
Noam Chomsky
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The Irish were treated horribly, even here in Boston. For example, in the late nineteenth century they were treated pretty much like African Americans. You could find signs here in Boston in the restaurants saying No dogs and Irish.
Noam Chomsky