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Intellectuals (in the standard sense of the term, not [ Edward] Said's prescriptive sense) are the people who write history.

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
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
A. Noam Chomsky
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More quotes by 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.
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Whatever the reasons may be, I was very much affected by events of the 1930s - the Spanish Civil War, for example, though I was barely literate.
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Our only real hope for democracy is that we get the money out of politics entirely and establish a system of publicly funded elections.
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The human digestive and visual systems did clearly evolve over a very long period.
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Since the civil war in Laos was resumed in earnest in 1963, American participation has been veiled in secrecy.
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I don't think that the United States cares. They just assume that North Korea will soon have nuclear weapons.
Noam Chomsky
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Another problem is the confrontation with India. Pakistan just cannot survive if it continues to do so (continue this confrontation).
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Colombia is potentially a very wealthy country. It has tremendous resources, but its wealth is highly concentrated. Most of the population lives in misery, which has led to violent confrontation throughout the century.
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Reagan was extreme. Beginning of his administration, one of the first things was to call in scabs - hadn't been done for a long time, and it's illegal in most countries - in the air controller strike.
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Personally, I am uneasy about the notion of a politically engaged university, for reasons I wrote about over 30 years ago, at the height of protest and resistance (reprinted in For Reasons of State).
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The 50,000 Korean mercenaries we had in Vietnam were professional killers and just massacred people outright. And the American army did plenty of that too, but it couldn't take it after awhile. It's not the kind of job you can give to conscripts who are not trained to be murderers.
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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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The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.
Noam Chomsky
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You might recall, perhaps, that we were probably the only commentators to rely on the most knowledgeable source, State Department intelligence.
Noam Chomsky
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What is credibility? It's a very familiar notion. It's basically the notion that is central to the Mafia. So suppose say the Godfather produces some kind of edict and says you're going to have to pay protection money.
Noam Chomsky
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Education is a system of imposed ignorance.
Noam Chomsky
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The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.
Noam Chomsky
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Power is concentrated. The general policy is exactly the way that Adam Smith described it: it's designed for the benefit of its principal architects, the powerful. It serves the vile maxim of the masters: all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else. Those are the basic rules of the world.
Noam Chomsky
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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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Haitian rice farmers are quite efficient, but they can't compete with U.S. agribusiness that relies on a huge government subsidy, thanks to Ronald Reagan's free market enthusiasms.
Noam Chomsky