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You win by struggle, and that requires understanding and serious analysis of the options and the circumstances, and then you can do a lot.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
Computer Scientist
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Human Rights Activist
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Opinion Journalist
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East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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There are major efforts being made to dismantle Social Security, the public schools, the post office - anything that benefits the population has to be dismantled. Efforts against the U.S. Postal Service are particularly surreal.
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...if you ask me whether or not I'm an atheist, I wouldn't even answer. I would first want an explanation of what it is that I'm supposed not to believe in, and I've never seen an explanation.
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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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We use the official definitions of terrorism. The definitions in the U.S. code, in British law, in U.S. Army manuals and so on. And if you use those definitions it follows instantly that the United States is the leading terrorist state in the world.
Noam Chomsky
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Education is not just you learn how a mosquito flies in the rain, but you learn how to be creative and why it's exciting to learn things and create things and make up new things.
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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.
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As the capacity to coerce declines, it is natural to turn to control of opinion as the basis for authority and domination - a fundamental principle of government already emphasized by David Hume.
Noam Chomsky
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We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.
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I happened to go to a school when I was a kid and that's all we did, pursue our own interests. It was kind of structured so you ended up knowing everything you were supposed to know, arithmetic, Latin, whatever it was. But almost always it was under your own initiative.
Noam Chomsky
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Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
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Whatever the reasons may be, I was very much affected by events of the 1930s - the Spanish Civil War, for example, though I was barely literate.
Noam Chomsky
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China has been there for 3,000 years, has contempt for the barbarians, is overcoming a century of domination, and simply moves on its own. It does not get intimidated when Uncle Sam shakes his fist. That's scary.
Noam Chomsky
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Plainly, children learn their language. I don't speak Swahili. And it cannot be that my language is 'an innate property of our brain.' Otherwise I would have been genetically programmed to speak (some variety of) English.
Noam Chomsky
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As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
Noam Chomsky
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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.
Noam Chomsky
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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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[Barack] Obama was reaching a point [with Syria bombing] where he might not have been able to carry it off.He was losing support internally, and was compelled to send the vote to Congress, and it looked as if he was going to be defeated, which would have been a very serious blow to his presidency, to his authority.
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There certainly are those who worship the state much as divinities are worshipped. Not just the state but even leaders.
Noam Chomsky
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If you accept the institutional lunacy, then the policies are rational.
Noam Chomsky
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A democracy barely functions under the neoliberal system.
Noam Chomsky