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There is always room for Gramsci's optimism of the will.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
Computer Scientist
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Human Rights Activist
Linguist
Media Critic
Opinion Journalist
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East Oak Lane
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Avram Noam Chomsky
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Optimism
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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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.
Noam Chomsky
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If [Respulicans] can't get rid of [Obamacare], they're going to have to tell their base, we've been lying to you for the last five years. So they're willing to go to almost any extent to do that. That's unusual, in fact I think it's unique in the history of modern parliamentary systems. And it's very dangerous for the country and for the world.
Noam Chomsky
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Of course, everybody says they're for peace. Hitler was for peace. Everybody is for peace. The question is: What kind of peace?
Noam Chomsky
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In fact, it's pretty dramatic when you get to 1975, very revealing, the [Vietnam] war ends. Everybody had to write something about the war, what it meant. You also had polls of public opinion, and they're dramatically different.
Noam Chomsky
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Colombia was a big wheat producer in the 1950's. That was eliminated by what sounds like a nice plan, called Food for Peace. It's a plan by which US taxpayers subsidized US agribusiness to send food to poor countries. This, of course, destroyed the domestic agricultural markets of these countries, opening these markets to US agribusiness.
Noam Chomsky
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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.
Noam Chomsky
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Civil disobedience's main goal typically is to try to arouse and inspire others to join and do something. Well, sometimes that is a good tactic, sometimes not.
Noam Chomsky
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Latin America wants to decriminalize at least marijuana (maybe more or course) the US wants to maintain it. An interesting story. There seems to me no easy way out of this.
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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I don't think that experience is a very useful or convincing attribute for a sensible foreign policy. Henry Kissinger had a lot of experience.
Noam Chomsky
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When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.
Noam Chomsky
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Selfish-gene theory tells us nothing about the value of interacting through language.
Noam Chomsky
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Edward Said is a very honorable representative of the intellectual in the sense of the term that he defines.
Noam Chomsky
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While language can surely be used for communication (as can much else), communication probably has no special role in its design or evolution.
Noam Chomsky
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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
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What is the nature of the genetic endowment? How does acquisition proceed? Etc. Scientists do routinely ask similar questions about the visual system, system of motor organisation, and others - including, in fact, the digestive system.
Noam Chomsky
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That's our nuclear weapons strategy [going to frighten people], as of the early post-Cold War years. And I think this is a real failure of the intellectual community, including scholarship and the media. It's not like you had headlines all over the place. And it's not secret, the documents are there. And I think that's probably the right picture.
Noam Chomsky
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The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist.
Noam Chomsky
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Academics are mostly professionals, involved in their work and other concerns of their own, with no particular interest in the workings of the ideological system.
Noam Chomsky
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Workers and their families may starve to death in the New World Order of economic rationality, but diamond necklaces are cheaper in elegant New York shops, thanks to the miracle of the market.
Noam Chomsky