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

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Millions of people are getting the vote, and we have to educate them to keep them from our throats. In other words, we have to train them in obedience and servility, so they're not going to think through the way the world works and come after our throats.
Noam Chomsky
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There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws.
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Of course, everybody says they're for peace. Hitler was for peace. Everybody is for peace. The question is: What kind of peace?
Noam Chomsky
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Dissidents are not imprisoned as in the domains of the Kremlin, in the old days. They do not have their brains blown out by elite forces armed and trained by the reigning superpower, as happens in Washington's domains - with no particular concern at home - an important fact, one of many that help us learn about ourselves, if we choose.
Noam Chomsky
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[Companies that specialized in how to destroy unions] don't make it a secret, and they have all sorts of techniques for management to destroy unions.
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The Russians were doing a lot of rotten things, you can point to them. But the idea that if you consider what Hans Morgenthau called I called abuse of reality, the picture of the world was almost the opposite of what they presented. But somehow this sells and is continually repeated, at least in this kind of situation.
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Most of intellectuals are false prophets, flatterers of the court. The real prophets are the exception and treated badly. How badly they're treated depends on the society. Like in Eastern Europe, they were treated very badly. In Latin America, they were slaughtered.
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There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.
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The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here.
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There are all the activist groups on every imaginable topic - solidarity groups, environmental and feminist groups - sectors of these movements do very valuable work.
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Some international law specialists compare the invasion of Iraq to the 'crimes against the peace' for which Nazi leaders were indicted at Nuremberg.
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Julian Assange shouldn't be the subject of a grand jury hearing, he should be given a medal. He's contributing to democracy.
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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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The Internet is an élite organization most of the population of the world has never even made a phone call.
Noam Chomsky
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When something isn't constantly drummed-up by the media, [people] just don't know about it.
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I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.
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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.
Noam Chomsky
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In a really business-run society like the United States, the business elites are deeply committed to class struggle and are engaged in it all the time. They're instinctive Marxists.
Noam Chomsky
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Growth is a funny sort of concept. For example, our GNP increases every time we build a prison. Well, okay, it's growth in a sense.
Noam Chomsky
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If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.
Noam Chomsky