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I think such an inquiry will reveal a rather different picture: namely, it will reveal a very strong tendency for the intellectuals who are respected and privileged to be those who subordinate themselves to power.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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In a moment of crisis, of which there are all too many, Russian military planners may conclude that lacking a deterrent, the only hope of survival is a first strike - which means the end for all of us.
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Pakistan just cannot survive if it continues to do so (continue this confrontation with India).
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It turned out that [Bill] Clinton had authorized Texaco to illegally ship oil to the military junta [in Haiti] during a time when we were supposedly opposing the military junta and supporting democracy instead.
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Democracy was regarded as entering into a crisis in the 1960s. The crisis was that large segments of the population were becoming organized and active and trying to participate in the political arena.
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The childcare tax credit makes some sense.
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States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.
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Modern China one also finds many things that are really quite admirable.
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We could not bring democracy to South Vietnam at a cost that we were willing to accept. So it was a disaster. That' is the left extreme.
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You have to love that government, but hate the government that might work in your interest and that you could control. That's an interesting propaganda task, but it's been carried out very well.
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John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.
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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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Power has to be protected from scrutiny. That's the principle of every dictatorship, of every autocracy. You hear it from high priests at Harvard and every government department, that power has to be kept secret otherwise it will fade and it won't work. But Bradley Manning is violating that principle.
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I happened to go to a school when I was a kid and that's all we did, pursue our own interests. It was kind of structured so you ended up knowing everything you were supposed to know, arithmetic, Latin, whatever it was. But almost always it was under your own initiative.
Noam Chomsky
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Globalization is the result of powerful governments, especially that of the United States, pushing trade deals and other accords down the throats of the world’s people to make it easier for corporations and the wealthy to dominate the economies of nations around the world without having obligations to the peoples of those nations.
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A basic principle of modern state capitalism is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized.
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. . . among all grammars meeting this condition (of adequacy), we select the simplest.
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[After Vietnam] the type of interventions that are carried out are designed so as not to elicit public reactions.
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The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests.
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As long as nuclear weapons exist, the chances of survival of the human species are quite slight.
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Hume's paradox does hold: power is in the hands of the governed. If they refuse to accept it, you're in trouble, no matter how many guns you have.
Noam Chomsky