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: 96
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
Minorities
Properly
Rule
Benefits
Majority
Democracy
Rights
Functioning
Minority

More quotes by Noam Chomsky

Image
The Zionist movement based in Palestine pretty much took over the camps and instituted the policy that every man and woman between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five should be directed to Palestine - not allowed to go to the West.
Noam Chomsky
Image
It is the worst atrocity underway [in Rwanda]. But it's barely in the media, and people just don't know about it. And that's quite generally true.
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
Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions.
Noam Chomsky
Image
There is always room for Gramsci's optimism of the will.
Noam Chomsky
Image
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.
Noam Chomsky
Image
It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.
Noam Chomsky
Image
You know, we have little bits of understanding, glimpses, a little bit of light here and there, but there's a tremendous amount of darkness, which is a challenge. I think life would be pretty boring if we understood everything. It's better if we don't understand anything and know that we don't, that's the important part.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Enormous and growing parts of the population are basically superfluous for profit-making purposes. Along with this, the jail population is increasing very rapidly it's the highest in the industrial world by far. New and onerous crime bills are being passed to deal with this superfluous population.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Governments don't control people like they used to.
Noam Chomsky
Image
It's very hard to look in the mirror. We all know this. It's much easier to have illusions about yourself. And in particular, when you think, well, I'm going to believe what I like, but I'll say what the powerful want, you do that over time, and you believe what you say.
Noam Chomsky
Image
The target of preventive war must have several characteristics. It must be virtually defenceless it must be important enough to be worth the trouble it must be possible to portray it as the ultimate evil and an imminent threat to our survival.
Noam Chomsky
Image
The social system is taking on a form in which finding out what you want to do is less and less of an option because your life is too structured, organised, controlled and disciplined.
Noam Chomsky
Image
People who spend their working hours in a lab or research library or a classroom might be intent primarily on keeping or advancing their elite positions, thereby lending tacit support to power structures. Or they might not be.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Given their unusual privilege, Western intellectuals can realistically accomplish a great deal. The limits are imposed by will more than objective circumstances. And about human will predictions are without value.
Noam Chomsky
Image
There's a very committed effort to convert the US into something resembling a Third World society, where a few people have enormous wealth and a lot of others have no security.
Noam Chomsky
Image
These are fashionable people who call themselves philosophers.
Noam Chomsky
Image
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.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.
Noam Chomsky
Image
The current period of regression is registering some success in producing people who are subordinated to external power, diverted to such superficial things as fashionable consumption and other pursuits more fitting for the bewildered herd than participation in determining the course of individual and social life.
Noam Chomsky