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For the last couple of hundred years, there have been struggles about this. Even the Fifth and Sixth Amendments of the constitution talk about personal rights.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
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You keep plugging away--that's the way social change takes place. That's the way every social change in history has taken place: by a lot of people, who nobody ever heard of, doing work.
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The question in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided . . . democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured they may well be essential to survival.
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Bradley Manning should be regarded as a hero. He is doing what an honest, decent citizen should be doing: letting your population know what the government, the people who rule you are doing. They want to keep it secret of course.
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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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During the 1990's, Colombia was the leading recipient of US military aid and training in the hemisphere. Approximately half of all US aid in the hemisphere went to Colombia. Colombia was also far and away the leading human rights violator in the hemisphere.
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It is only natural to expect that guilds will tend to protect their turf and to resist challenge.
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If workers are more insecure, that's very 'healthy' for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won't ask for wages, they won't go on strike, they won't call for benefits they'll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that's optimal for corporations' economic health.
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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.
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South America goes its own way dramatically in international affairs.
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We can try to gain some of the sensibility of some of the indigenous populations of the world or our predecessors 800 years ago. We can laugh at them as being naive and unsophisticated, but unless we can gain that sensibility that there has to be rights of nature as Bolivians and others put it, then we're going to be destroyed.
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Private companies can make a personal profile, direct you to things - they will say - that you would be interested in, but that's their choice not your choice.
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Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.
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Take, for example, there is a right-wing populist uprising. It's very common, even on the left, to just ridicule them, but that's not the right reaction. If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real grievances.
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Why should workers agree to be slaves in a basically authoritarian structure? They should have control over it themselves. Why shouldn't communities have a dominant voice in running the institutions that affect their lives?
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I don't think that the United States cares. They just assume that North Korea will soon have nuclear weapons.
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I don't think that any deal was needed: Iran was not a threat. Even if Iran were a threat, there was a very easy way to handle it - by establishing a Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone, which is something that nearly everyone in the world wants.
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If you take an economics or a political science course, you're taught that humans are supposed to be rational wealth accumulators, each acting as an individual to maximize his own wealth in the market.
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We live in this world, not another one that we'd prefer, and sometimes it's necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people.
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You know, people talk about [Richard] Nixon's madman theory. We don't really know much about that. It was in memoirs, by somebody else.
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