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We don't live in tyrannies, you know, the king doesn't decide what's legitimate, and there's much more freedom than there was in the past.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
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Human Rights Activist
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Media Critic
Opinion Journalist
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East Oak Lane
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In Kosovo, the U.S. has chosen a course of action that escalates atrocities and violence. It is also a course of action that strikes a blow against the regime of international order, but which offers the weak at least some protection from predatory states.
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Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.
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I do not feel that we should set up PEOPLE as models rather actions, thoughts, principles.
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Politicians don't want democracy here in America, why would they want it in the Middle East?
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My position is that we should not succumb to irrational belief.
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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.
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History records endless struggles to enlarge those realms, inspiring ones it also records painful reversals and setbacks.
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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.
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In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT's Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!
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I have written occasionally on links between my scientific work and political thinking, but not much, because the links seem to me abstract and speculative.
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Citizenship means every four years you put a mark somewhere and you go home and let other guys run the world. It's a very destructive ideology.
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America is a very fundamentalist society. It's like Iran in the degree of fanatic religious commitment.
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Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying.
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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.
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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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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.
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The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another.
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Noam Chomsky