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I haven't seen any claim that Piraha lacks recursion, that is, that there are a finite number of sentences or sentence frames. If that's so, it would mean that the speakers of this language aren't making use of a capacity that they surely have, a normal situation plenty of people throughout history would drown if they fall into water.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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In the humanities and social sciences, and in fields like journalism and economics and so on, people have to be trained to be managers, and controllers, and to accept things, and not to question too much.
Noam Chomsky
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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.
Noam Chomsky
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I do not see how we can rationally oppose high speed rail because of the environmental and other costs without considering the social and human consequences of the radical elimination of transportation that this entails.
Noam Chomsky
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The free market is 'socialism' for the rich: the public pays the costs and the rich get the benefit - markets for the poor and plenty of state protection for the rich.
Noam Chomsky
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That's a point that Dan Ellsberg has made for years. He said it's kind of like if you and I go into a grocery store to rob it, and I have a gun. The guy may give you the money in the cash register. I'm using the gun even if I don't shoot. Well that's nuclear weapons - essential to post-war deterrence - they cast a shadow over everything.
Noam Chomsky
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It is now well-known that the Taliban's creation was facilitated by the CIA and the ISI as part of the 1980s anti-Soviet war.
Noam Chomsky
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The good news from the U.S. military survey of focus groups is that Iraqis do accept the Nuremberg principles. They understand that sectarian violence and the other postwar horrors are contained within the supreme international crime committed by the invaders.
Noam Chomsky
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English is a second language in most of the educated sectors of Europe and much of the world. But maybe in the future Chinese will be. But I doubt that national languages will disappear. In fact, to some extent they're becoming more diverse, like in Europe.
Noam Chomsky
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The rise of what's called Islamic fundamentalism is to a significant extent a result of the collapse of secular nationalist alternatives which were either discredited internally or destroyed, leaving few other options. Something like that may be true of American society.
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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Peace is preferable to war. But it’s not an absolute value, and so we always ask, “What kind of peace?
Noam Chomsky
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The first step is to penetrate the clouds of deceit and distortion and learn the truth about the world, then to organize and act to change it. That's never been impossible and never been easy.
Noam Chomsky
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As elite attitudes towards public education over time illustrate, simple formulas are far from adequate. There are conflicting tendencies.
Noam Chomsky
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A good education instills in you the intuitive comprehension - it becomes unconscious and reflexive - that you just don't think certain things, things that are threatening to power interests.
Noam Chomsky
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As far as DSA is concerned, I'm perfectly happy to be associated with it while disagreeing with a large part of the leadership.
Noam Chomsky
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I mean, what's the elections? You know, two guys, same background, wealth, political influence, went to the same elite university, joined the same secret society where you're trained to be a ruler - they both can run because they're financed by the same corporate institutions.
Noam Chomsky
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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.
Noam Chomsky
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The basic principle is that the losers have to confess, not the victors. When they do it, it's a crime. When we do it, it's not. And more generally, it's the defeated who are tried, not the victors.
Noam Chomsky
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The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programmes and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq.
Noam Chomsky
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A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production, and the wage-slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.
Noam Chomsky