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I pretend no originality in observing that mass education was motivated in part by the perceived need to educate them to keep them from our throats, to borrow Ralph Waldo Emerson's parody of elite fears that inspired early advocates of public mass education.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
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We don't live in tyrannies, you know, the king doesn't decide what's legitimate, and there's much more freedom than there was in the past.
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It's a class war, and a war on young people too... that's why tuition is rising so rapidly. There's no real economic reason for that. It's a technique of control and indoctrination. And this is really the first organized, significant reaction to it, which is important.
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In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria of the anti-Japanese propaganda. The Germans were evil, but treated with some respect: They were, after all, blond Aryan types, just like our imaginary self-image. Japanese were mere vermin, to be crushed like ants.
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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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Whether the person should then be called an intellectual seems to reduce the issue to a question of terminology.
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The House of Representatives, which was closer to the population, had much less power. The executive was more or less an administrator, not an emperor like today.
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Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.
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A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.
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I think there are all kinds of intrusions into private rights that make use of contemporary technology.
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That's a large part of the source of the gun culture. You have to have a gun when you go into Starbucks, because who knows what's going to happen. It just doesn't happen in other countries.
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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.
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Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
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For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.
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The change between horse and buggy to automobile is a big change and there hasn't been a major change since.
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That's our nuclear weapons strategy [going to frighten people], as of the early post-Cold War years. And I think this is a real failure of the intellectual community, including scholarship and the media. It's not like you had headlines all over the place. And it's not secret, the documents are there. And I think that's probably the right picture.
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George Washington hated the guerrillas. He wanted to imitate the British red coat armies, fighting as gentlemen are supposed to fight.
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I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust.
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If you sell me a car, we have perhaps made a good bargain for ourselves. But there are effects of this transaction on others, which we do not take into account. There is more pollution, the price of gas goes up, there is more congestion.
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Advertising is tax deductible, so we all pay for the privilege of being manipulated and controlled.
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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