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If the authors and custodians of history turn out to have an attractive image, it is only reasonable to look beyond and ask whether the image they construct is accurate.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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Half the population hold that the government is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves, as polls regularly show.
Noam Chomsky
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People have to be atomized and segregated and alone. They're not supposed to organize, because then they might be something beyond spectators of action. They might actually be participants if many people with limited resources could get together to enter the political arena. That's really threatening.
Noam Chomsky
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That's a point that Dan Ellsberg has made for years. He said it's kind of like if you and I go into a grocery store to rob it, and I have a gun. The guy may give you the money in the cash register. I'm using the gun even if I don't shoot. Well that's nuclear weapons - essential to post-war deterrence - they cast a shadow over everything.
Noam Chomsky
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The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here.
Noam Chomsky
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There is Pakistan's relationship with Afghanistan which will also be a very tricky issue in the coming years. Then there is a large part of Pakistan which is being torn apart from American drone attacks. The country is being invaded constantly by a terrorist superpower. Again, this is not a small problem.
Noam Chomsky
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Sectors of power are not going to favor the flourishing of dissidence.
Noam Chomsky
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The internet is something created largely by public funding.
Noam Chomsky
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Human needs are served by a sustainable lifestyle, almost by definition, if humans include coming generations. And a shift to such technologies as high-speed rail instead of maximizing fossil fuel use, and solar energy, is not relentless resource extraction.
Noam Chomsky
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Our minds are specifically adapted to developing certain theories, and we have a science if the theories that are available to our minds happen to be close to true. Well, there is no particular reason to suppose that the intersection of true theories and theories that are accessible to the mind is very large. It may not be very large.
Noam Chomsky
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The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into fundamental human values.
Noam Chomsky
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If Palestinian Authority refuse to join the US-run negotiations, their basis for support would collapse. They survive on donations essentially. Israel has made sure that it's not a productive economy.
Noam Chomsky
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Legalizing marijuana would make a lot of sense, I don't think there's a single case of marijuana overdose on record and tens of millions of users. It's much less dangerous than alcohol, for example.
Noam Chomsky
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Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions.
Noam Chomsky
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The target of preventive war must have several characteristics. It must be virtually defenceless it must be important enough to be worth the trouble it must be possible to portray it as the ultimate evil and an imminent threat to our survival.
Noam Chomsky
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I think there are real possibilities of reaching out to many of the Trump voters, those who voted for Obama believing his rhetoric.
Noam Chomsky
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Moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege.
Noam Chomsky
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The threat is that the public will know what the government is up to. Any system of power is going to want to keep free from public surveillance, that's natural. Its shouldn't be but, its very natural.
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).
Noam Chomsky
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A default of the US government would not only be very harmful here, it would probably send the country back into deep recession, but it just might crash the international financial system.
Noam Chomsky
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History records endless struggles to enlarge those realms, inspiring ones it also records painful reversals and setbacks.
Noam Chomsky