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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.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
Computer Scientist
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Linguist
Media Critic
Opinion Journalist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
A. Noam Chomsky
Chomsky
People
Denied
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Truism

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What matters is what happens among the powerful.
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The neo-cons constitute a radical reactionary fringe of the planning spectrum, but the spectrum is narrow.
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Some kind of settlement in Kashmir is crucial for both countries [Pakistan and India]. It's also tearing India apart with horrible atrocities in the region which is controlled by Indian armed forces.
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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.
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Why not stakeholder action? There's no economic principal that says that management should be responsive to shareholders, in fact you can read in texts of business economics that they could just as well have a system in which the management is responsible to stakeholders.
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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.
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Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.
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In many respects, the United States is the freest country in the world. I don't just mean in terms of limits on state coercion, though that's true too, but also in terms of individual relations. The United States comes closer to classlessness in terms of interpersonal relations than virtually any society.
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The United States is unique among the rich countries, developed countries, in not having some kind of a national health-care system.
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Destruction of the environment is not only rational it's exactly what you're taught to do in college.
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Barack Obama is an opportunist, mostly supported by the financial institutions. He had no positions on anything. He's very intelligent. If you look at his program, almost no substance. Change, hope, what's that? I mean, he had some policies, but it was almost certain that he would give them up instantly, which he did.
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The focus on creativity and independence exists in pockets of resistance in the educational system, which, to thrive, should be integrated with the needs and concerns of the great majority of the population. One finds them everywhere.
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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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It doesn't matter what we cover, it matters what you discover.
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It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.
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NAFTA was much more popular among US corporations than GATT, because NAFTA is highly protectionist in ways that GATT is not.
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It is one thing for the institution to offer space for serious engagement, in thought and action, and to encourage free and independent use of such opportunities it is something else for the university to become engaged as an institution, beyond a fairly narrow range where true consensus exists, and even that raises questions.
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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.
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Quite generally, international affairs have more than a slight resemblance to the Mafia. The Godfather does not take it lightly when he is crossed, even by a small storekeeper.
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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