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In general, we should be able to agree that those who have greater opportunities and face fewer impediments have a greater responsibility to do more to help achieve such ends.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
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States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.
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Who wrote the Bible? Current scholarship, to my knowledge, assumes that the material that constitutes the Old Testament was put together from various oral and folk traditions (many of them going far back) in the Hellenistic period. That was one of several currents, of which the collection that formed the New Testament was another.
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What the [James] Monroe Doctrine stated, in effect, is that the US should dominate the hemisphere.
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I have not suggested that the emergence of language is instantaneous. Rather, that the rewiring of the brain enabling an infinite array of structured expressions was in effect instantaneous. I have never heard of an alternative to this suggestion.
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I agree with Bill Clinton that US forces should not be sent to Haiti, but not for his reasons.
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Take something you really don't think about: Plastics in the ocean. I mean plastics in the ocean have an enormous ecological effect.
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Suppose that insect wings developed primarily as thermoregulators and then were used for skimming and finally flying, evolving along the way. What would they be for? Or what is the skeleton for? For keeping one upright, protecting organs, storing calcium, making blood cells...?
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We still name our military helicopter gunships after victims of genocide. Nobody bats an eyelash about that: Blackhawk. Apache. And Comanche. If the Luftwaffe named its military helicopters Jew and Gypsy, I suppose people would notice.
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Suppose that, say, China established military bases in Colombia to carry out chemical warfare in Kentucky and North Carolina to destroy this lethal crop [tobacco] that is killing huge numbers of Chinese.
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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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When people say do you believe in God? what do they mean by it? Do I believe in some spiritual force in the world? In a way, yes. People have thoughts, emotions. If you want to call that a spiritual force, okay. But unless there's some clarification of what we're supposed to believe in or disbelieve in, I can't answer.
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There are some very general ideas that people can keep in mind they're kind of truisms. It's only worth mentioning them because they're always denied.
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Popular support for alternative energy has been very high for years. But it harms corporate profits.
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The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.
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I don't think you would have any trouble at all in deciding that you are thinking of some event and then visualizing it happening with its consequences, and constructing a rational analysis of it without being able to verbalize it adequately in anything like its full complexity.
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If you're working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.
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In the American Jewish community, there is little willingness to face the fact that the Palestinian Arabs have suffered a monstrous historical injustice . . . Until this is recognized, discussion of the Middle East crisis cannot even begin.
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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.
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Peter Kropotkin was surely on the left. He was one of the founders of what is now called 'sociobiology' or 'evolutionary psychology' with his book Mutual Aid, arguing that human nature had evolved in ways conducive to the communitarian anarchism that he espoused.
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Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.
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