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While language can surely be used for communication (as can much else), communication probably has no special role in its design or evolution.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
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
Design
Roles
Probably
Special
Language
Surely
Else
Communication
Used
Evolution
Much
Role

More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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Our current prison state has the dual effect of getting rid of a superfluous population of basically unskilled workers (with a close race-class correlation), and also demonizing them... The drug war is basically for this - It has nothing to do with drugs, but it has plenty to do with criminalizing an unwanted population and scaring everybody else.
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Workers in different countries can easily be played off against each other.
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Capitalism denies the right to live. You have only the right to remain on the labour market.
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If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
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The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery.
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Washington still refuses to provide evidence to support the claims in 1990 that a huge Iraqi military build-up on the Saudi border justified war.
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United States has comparative advantage in military force. It tends to react to anything at first with military force, that's what it's good at. And I think they overdid it. There was more military force than was necessary.
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Nobody can successfully defy the master of the hemisphere [America], in fact of the world, hence the savagery.
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States are violent institutions. The government of any country, including ours, represents some sort of domestic power structure, and it's usually violent. States are violent to the extent that they're powerful, that's roughly accurate.
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Israel has a couple of hundred nuclear weapons and also chemical and biological weapons. This stockpile is not only a threat in itself but encourages others to proliferate in reaction and in self-defense. Is anybody saying anything about this?
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Trump keeps the spotlight on himself with one act after another, assuming correctly that yesterday's antics will be swept aside by today's.
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Evolutionary theory has nothing to say, in general, as to whether cheating is more advantageous than cooperating. There are many circumstances in which the contrary would be true, and empirical evidence, though it exists, has little bearing on real situations.
Noam Chomsky
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Democratic societies can't force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.
Noam Chomsky
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If current tendencies persist, the outcome will be disastrous before too long. Large parts of the world will become barely habitable affecting hundreds of millions of people, along with other disasters that we can barely contemplate.
Noam Chomsky
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It's not radical Islam that worries the US -- it's independence
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...dissent, protest, presures of a wide variety that escape elite control can modify the calculus of costs of planners, and offer a slight hope that Washington can be compelled to permit at least some steps towards justice, freedom and democracy within its domains.
Noam Chomsky
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I do not feel that we should set up PEOPLE as models rather actions, thoughts, principles.
Noam Chomsky
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So Marxism, Freudianism: any one of these things I think is an irrational cult. They're theology, so they're whatever you think of theology I don't think much of it. In fact, in my view that's exactly the right analogy: notions like Marxism and Freudianism belong to the history of organized religion.
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The Internet is an élite organization most of the population of the world has never even made a phone call.
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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.
Noam Chomsky