Quote

One of the benefits of a properly functioning democracy is minority rights and majority rule.

Noam Chomsky

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Rights
Functioning
Minority
Minorities
Properly
Rule
Benefits
Majority
Democracy

More quotes by Noam Chomsky

Image
In the Munich agreement in late 1938 [Franklin] Roosevelt sent his chief adviser Sumner Welles, who came back with a very supportive statement saying that Hitler was someone we could really do business with and so on.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Capitalism denies the right to live. You have only the right to remain on the labour market.
Noam Chomsky
Image
On intervention under the UN framework, I think that sometimes that's legitimate, in fact even helpful.
Noam Chomsky
Image
The big change, the really radical change in communication, was in the late 19th century. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph is astronomical. Everything since then has been small increments, including the internet.
Noam Chomsky
Image
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.
Noam Chomsky
Image
For decades Israel has been capturing, and kidnapping Lebanese and Palestinian refugees on the high seas, from Cyprus to Lebanon, killing them in Lebanon, bringing them to Israel, holding them as hostages. It's been going on for decades, has anybody called for an invasion of Israel?
Noam Chomsky
Image
Part of the NAFTA legislation required studies of labor practices, and there was quite a good study that came out by a labor historian on the use of NAFTA to undermine and destroy unions.
Noam Chomsky
Image
States are violent institutions. The government of any country, including ours, represents some sort of domestic power structure, and it's usually violent. States are violent to the extent that they're powerful, that's roughly accurate.
Noam Chomsky
Image
The media are a corporate monopoly. They have the same point of view. The two parties are two factions of the business party. Most of the population doesn't even bother voting because it looks meaningless. They're marginalized and properly distracted. At least that's the goal.
Noam Chomsky
Image
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
Image
The responsibility of the writer as a moral agent is to try to bring the truth about matters of human significance to an audience that can do something about them.
Noam Chomsky
Image
For one thing, studying language is by itself a part of a study of human intelligence that is, perhaps, the central aspect of human nature. And second, I think, it is a good model for studying other human properties, which ought to be studied by psychologists in the same way.
Noam Chomsky
Image
In some ways, [the student anti-sweatshop movement] is like the anti-apartheid movement, except that in this case its striking at the core of the relations of exploitation. Much of this was initiated by Charlie Kernaghan of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights.
Noam Chomsky
Image
I have not suggested that the emergence of language is instantaneous. Rather, that the rewiring of the brain enabling an infinite array of structured expressions was in effect instantaneous. I have never heard of an alternative to this suggestion.
Noam Chomsky
Image
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
Image
You win by struggle, and that requires understanding and serious analysis of the options and the circumstances, and then you can do a lot.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Elements of the Christian fundamentalist right are one of the strongest components of support for Israel - support in an odd sense, because they presumably want to see it destroyed in a cosmic battle at Armageddon, after which all the proper souls will ascend to heaven - or so I understand, again, not from close reading.
Noam Chomsky
Image
In the United States everyone is an illegal immigrant - everyone except the people in Indian Reservations. This is an immigrant society.
Noam Chomsky
Image
The major organizing centers, like the labor movement, have been severely weakened in the United States by policy.
Noam Chomsky
Image
[Moral responsibilities] has nothing particular to do with academia, except insofar as those within it tend to be unusually privileged in the respects just mentioned.
Noam Chomsky