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If the rewiring of the brain that yielded recursive generation of hierarchically structured expressions took place in an individual, not a group (and there seems to be no coherent alternative), then interaction must have been a later phenomenon.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
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If you're working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.
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Bear in mind that we [ with Edward Herman] did not devise the terms manufacture of consent and engineering of consent. We borrowed them from leading figures in the media, public relations industry, and academic scholarship.
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Marx's early manuscripts, with their roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, derived fundamental concepts such as alienation from a conception of human nature - what we would call genetically determined.
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More generally, independent farmers had to be trained to become docile workers in the expanding industrial system. It was necessary to drive from their heads evil ideas, such as the belief that wage labor was not much different from chattel slavery. That continues to the present, now sometimes taking the form of an attack on public education.
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The Iraq War is the first war in history, in which there were huge demonstrations before the war was launched, not beginning five years later and then being broken up. All of these are changes, and the people who are writing in journals today lived through these changes.
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In the primary debates for the 2016 election, every single Republican candidate was a climate change denier, with one exception, John Kasich - the rational moderate - who said it may be happening but we shouldn't do anything about it. For a long time, the media have downplayed the issue.
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Latin America is all moving to the left, from Venezuela to Argentina with rare exceptions, but there's a good left and a bad left.
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The worst drug of all by far is tobacco the death toll from tobacco is just overwhelming.
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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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If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That's not going to happen if you care only about yourself.
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If you want to make changes in the world, you're going to have to be there day after day doing the boring, straightforward work of getting a couple of people interested and building a slightly bigger organization and carrying out the next move and suffering frustration and finally getting somewhere. That's how the world changes.
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I don't see how one can believe in organized religion. What does it mean to believe in an organization? One can join it, support it, oppose it, accept its doctrines or reject them. There are many kinds of organized religion. People associate themselves with some of them, or not, for all sorts of reasons, maybe belief in some of their doctrines
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[Health-care system] is largely privatized and unregulated. So of course it's highly inefficient and costly.
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The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is.
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The entire socioeconomic system is based on production for profit and a growth imperative that cannot be sustained.
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Remember, the U.S. is a powerful state, it's not like Libya. If Libya wants to carry out terrorist acts, they hire Carlos the Jackal or something. The United States hires terrorist states.
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We have to be irrational and vindictive, because that's going to frighten people. And we have to maintain this for years. And then we'll be able to carry out the actions that we want to carry out.
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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.
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Radical activists can't ignore the fact that we live in this world, like it or not, and have to make difficult decisions about which paths are the best - or sometimes, the least harmful. There are no abstract formulas. Have to think through each case on its own.
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Greece, alone, is in a very vulnerable position. If the Greeks had had support from progressive left and popular forces elsewhere in Europe they might have been able to resist the demands of the Troika, but they had almost no support. Not even from Portugal, Spain, or other left forces. They were left alone.
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