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I don't see much use in general slogans. Sometimes it is worth resisting evil with lesser evil, very commonly in fact.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
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East Oak Lane
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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The Iraq War was the first conflict in western history in which an imperialist war was massively protested against before it had even been launched.
Noam Chomsky
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The crimes against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere, particularly Lebanon, are so shocking that the only emotionally valid reaction is rage and a call for extreme actions. But that does not help the victims. And, in fact, it's likely to harm them.
Noam Chomsky
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The Obama administration is dedicated to increasing terrorism. In fact, he is doing it all over the world. Obama is running the biggest terrorist operation that exists, maybe in history. The drone assassination campaigns - which are just part of the special forces operations and so on - all of these operations are terror operations.
Noam Chomsky
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Take Germany and Japan, both defeated in the Second World War. Germany has acknowledged its monstrous crimes to a certain extent, has paid reparations and so on. Japan, in contrast, apologizes for nothing and has paid no reparations, with one exception: It pays reparations to the United States, but not to Asia.
Noam Chomsky
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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.
Noam Chomsky
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Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.
Noam Chomsky
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A big producer can survive price fluctuations on the world market. A small farmer can't.
Noam Chomsky
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The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.
Noam Chomsky
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In Kosovo, the U.S. has chosen a course of action that escalates atrocities and violence. It is also a course of action that strikes a blow against the regime of international order, but which offers the weak at least some protection from predatory states.
Noam Chomsky
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Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?
Noam Chomsky
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The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways. In Europe it's austerity in the midst of recession and that's guaranteed to be a disaster. There's some resistance to that now. In the US, it's essentially off-shoring production and financialization and getting rid of superfluous population through incarceration.
Noam Chomsky
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You have to rely on yourself and your associates - gifts don't come from above you're going to win them, or you won't have them.
Noam Chomsky
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The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is.
Noam Chomsky
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Every wave of immigrants who came [to America] were treated pretty badly, but when they all finally became integrated, all of us became Anglo-Saxons.
Noam Chomsky
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Say the Pentagon Papers, - that material went much deeper. It went into internal government planning back for twenty - five years. Those are things that the public should have known about. In a democracy they should have known what leaders thinking and planning about major enterprises like the Vietnam war. It was kept secret from them.
Noam Chomsky
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The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another.
Noam Chomsky
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America is a very fundamentalist society. It's like Iran in the degree of fanatic religious commitment.
Noam Chomsky
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Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.
Noam Chomsky
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Intellectuals of the categories happen to enjoy unusual privilege, unique in history, I suppose. It's easy enough to find ugly illustrations of repression, malice, dishonesty, marginalization and exclusion in the academic world.
Noam Chomsky
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Nothing can justify crimes such as those of September 11, but we can think of the United States as an innocent victim only if we adopt the convenient path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its allies, which are, after all, hardly a secret.
Noam Chomsky