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If you accept the institutional lunacy, then the policies are rational.

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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East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
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The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests.
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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.
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The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programmes and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq.
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Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.
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When I was ten years old I wanted to be a taxidermist for some reason, don't ask me why.
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In the primary debates for the 2016 election, every single Republican candidate was a climate change denier, with one exception, John Kasich - the rational moderate - who said it may be happening but we shouldn't do anything about it. For a long time, the media have downplayed the issue.
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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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I don't see how one can believe in organized religion. What does it mean to believe in an organization? One can join it, support it, oppose it, accept its doctrines or reject them. There are many kinds of organized religion. People associate themselves with some of them, or not, for all sorts of reasons, maybe belief in some of their doctrines
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To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.
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The desire for hope and change is easily understandable. In many ways it's even more dramatic in Europe.
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I think the activism of the 1960s had a very definite civilizing effect on the whole society in all kinds of ways. So lots of things that by now are almost taken for granted were heretical in the 1960s. We had anti-sodomy laws until not many years ago.
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You ought to teach kids that elections take place but that's not politics. If you want to know how legislation is made it doesn't come from elections.
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The missile defense component is a minor feature that nobody takes very seriously. Nobody really believes that the US is trying to protect itself from North Korea. That's not serious. But the militarization of space is quite serious.
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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.
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All public resources go to the rich. The poor, if they can survive in the labor market, fine. Otherwise, they die. That's economics in a nutshell.
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It doesn't matter how much you learn in school it's whether you learn how to go on and do things by yourself. And that can be done at any level.
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Anywhere in Latin America there is a potential threat of the pathology of caudillismo and it has to be guarded against.
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I don't see any possibility of Britain and the U.S. allowing a sovereign independent Iraq that's almost inconceivable.
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I hope that a move toward clemency with Judge Afiuni would be a step towards the importance of maintaining a properly functioning justice system.
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States are violent institutions. The government of any country, including ours, represents some sort of domestic power structure, and it's usually violent. States are violent to the extent that they're powerful, that's roughly accurate.
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