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I know of people whose actions and words I admire and respect. Some are called intellectuals, some are not.

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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What matters is what happens among the powerful.
Noam Chomsky
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In the late 1990s, some of the worst terrorist atrocities in the world were what the Turkish government itself called state terror, namely massive atrocities, 80 percent of the arms coming from the United States, millions of refugees, tens of thousands of people killed, hideous repression, that's international terror, and we can go on and on.
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There's a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty. And that doesn't mean the soldier that committed them - that means the commanders.
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The neo-cons constitute a radical reactionary fringe of the planning spectrum, but the spectrum is narrow.
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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I am not offering this is a critique of the internet, its just that there are a lot of factors involved. It does offer plenty of possibilities. It also has, it can have, a cheapening effect and I think both exist and I think its true of everything. You could say that about the printing press.
Noam Chomsky
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I haven't seen any claim that Piraha lacks recursion, that is, that there are a finite number of sentences or sentence frames. If that's so, it would mean that the speakers of this language aren't making use of a capacity that they surely have, a normal situation plenty of people throughout history would drown if they fall into water.
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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.
Noam Chomsky
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The major organizing centers, like the labor movement, have been severely weakened in the United States by policy.
Noam Chomsky
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What the [James] Monroe Doctrine stated, in effect, is that the US should dominate the hemisphere.
Noam Chomsky
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In Western Europe, Turkey is regarded as uncivilized, so they can't come in into the European Union until they're civilized. I think it's the other way around. If you could achieve the level of civilization of, say, Turkish intelectuals, it would be quite an achievement.
Noam Chomsky
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The current period of regression is registering some success in producing people who are subordinated to external power, diverted to such superficial things as fashionable consumption and other pursuits more fitting for the bewildered herd than participation in determining the course of individual and social life.
Noam Chomsky
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I just don't care about popular culture. It looks to me pointless and superficial. If I had free time I'd rather read a 19th century novel.
Noam Chomsky
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I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.
Noam Chomsky
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Somehow the fact of enormous privilege and freedom carries with it a sense of impotence, which is a strange, but striking, phenomenon. The fact is, we can do just about anything. There is no difficulty, wherever you are, in finding groups that are working hard on things that concern you.
Noam Chomsky
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There are questions as to whether it should even exist. Who should corporations be responsive to, the management of a corporation? Theoretically they are responsive to the shareholders, but I why not to the so - called stakeholders, the work force and the community? Nothing in economic theory opposes that. Those are social and political decisions.
Noam Chomsky
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If you want to scare people, you talk about evil.
Noam Chomsky
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The invasion of Panama, what was that? The U.S. killed, according to the Panamanians, 3,000 civilians. Maybe they're right. We don't investigate our own crimes, so nobody knows.
Noam Chomsky
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Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.
Noam Chomsky
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As a tactic, violence is absurd. No one can compete with the Government in violence, and the resort to violence, which will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of forceful repression.
Noam Chomsky