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What matters is what happens among the powerful.

Noam Chomsky

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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
Matters
Among
Powerful
Happens
Matter

More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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Obama's latest line is that he didn't establish a red line but the world did through its conventions on chemical warfare.
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The media is uncritical, and their so-called the concept of objectivity translates into keeping everything within the Beltway. However, Iraq was quite different. Here, there were flat-out lies, and they sort of knew it. They were desperately trying to make connections between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.
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Independence of mind, enthusiasm, dedication to the field, and willingness to challenge and question and to explore new direction. There are plenty of people like that, but schools tend to discourage those characteristics.
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The United States in many ways resembles a Third World country - far more elevated, but it has many of those structural characteristics: the extreme inequality of wealth, the deterioration of infrastructure because it only serves poor people, predatory operations, huge corruption, and so on.
Noam Chomsky
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There certainly are those who worship the state much as divinities are worshipped. Not just the state but even leaders.
Noam Chomsky
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It's commonly assumed that the emergence of language was a key element of the great leap. We of course know very little about the sociopolitical conditions that existed at the time, but there's no scenario I can think of that suggests how a sudden change in these conditions could have led to the emergence of language.
Noam Chomsky
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We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.
Noam Chomsky
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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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The book Manufacturing Consent, which I co-authored with Edward Herman, begins with a description of the structure and institutional setting of the commercial media, and then draws some rather simple-minded conclusions about what we would expect the media product to be, given these (not particularly controversial) conditions.
Noam Chomsky
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If you're worried about the deficit, pay attention to the fact that it's almost all attributable to military spending and the totally dysfunctional health program.
Noam Chomsky
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Some kind of settlement in Kashmir is crucial for both India and Pakistan. It's also tearing India apart with horrible atrocities in the region which is controlled by Indian armed forces. This is feeding right back into society even in the domain of elementary civil rights.
Noam Chomsky
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Fed and electoral college could use some tinkering, but they are not the source of the problems.
Noam Chomsky
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Marx's early manuscripts, with their roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, derived fundamental concepts such as alienation from a conception of human nature - what we would call genetically determined.
Noam Chomsky
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I've occasionally been asked to talk on Israel-Palestine. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it elicits hysteria in the community.
Noam Chomsky
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It's not in doubt that tobacco is far more lethal than hard drugs.
Noam Chomsky
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Plainly, children learn their language. I don't speak Swahili. And it cannot be that my language is 'an innate property of our brain.' Otherwise I would have been genetically programmed to speak (some variety of) English.
Noam Chomsky
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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.
Noam Chomsky
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I think the Christian Coalition could be extremely dangerous. We should always be concerned when any group wants to impose their doctrinal concerns on all. To an extent that's what they are trying to do.
Noam Chomsky
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We had one or another form of state capitalism during an extremely brief period of human history, which tells us essentially nothing about human nature. If you look at human societies and human interactions, you can find anything. You find selfishness, you find altruism, you find sympathy.
Noam Chomsky
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People are dangerous. If they're able to involve themselves in issues that matter, they may change the distribution of power, to the detriment of those who are rich and privileged.
Noam Chomsky