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No sane human being devotes 100% of his or her life to political activism.
Noam Chomsky
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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
Computer Scientist
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Human Rights Activist
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Media Critic
Opinion Journalist
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East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
A. Noam Chomsky
Chomsky
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky
Hume's paradox does hold: power is in the hands of the governed. If they refuse to accept it, you're in trouble, no matter how many guns you have.
Noam Chomsky
My memory - faded, as I say - is that Paul Johnson was trying to vilify all intellectuals who were at all critical of the states he worships, and of power generally (except, of course, the power of enemies, which we must denounce, imitating the commissars who are his models, though he doesn't understand it).
Noam Chomsky
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.
Noam Chomsky
The very properties of the human mind that provide an enormous scope for human genius in some domains will serve as barriers to progress in other domains, just as the properties that enable each child to acquire a complex and highly articulated human language block the acquisition of other imaginable linguistic systems.
Noam Chomsky
The Andes region is not stable. So we can expect to see more US intervention. It could be under any kind of pretext. We can no longer use the Russians as an excuse, as we did in Central America in the 1980's, so drugs will have to do.
Noam Chomsky
The number of illegal firings tripled during the [Ronald] Reagan years. It was at that time that you started getting these companies that specialized in how to destroy unions.
Noam Chomsky
Trump's principal policies make clear what's going to happen. This gives an opportunity. Right now it's going to take hard work, but it's possible that there could be a real revival of the labor movement.
Noam Chomsky
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
In fact, it's pretty dramatic when you get to 1975, very revealing, the [Vietnam] war ends. Everybody had to write something about the war, what it meant. You also had polls of public opinion, and they're dramatically different.
Noam Chomsky
Every great power, every aggressive power has always regarded itself as exceptional and as doing things only for the most moral ends.
Noam Chomsky
In the late 19th century there was a major union organization, Knights of Labor, and also a radical populist movement based on farmers. It's hard to believe, but it was based in Texas, and it was quite radical. They wanted their own banks, their own cooperatives, their own control over sales and commerce.
Noam Chomsky
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
Nothing is more inspiring to see how poor and suffering people, living under conditions incomparably worse than we endure, continue quietly and unpretentiously with courageous and committed struggle for justice and dignity.
Noam Chomsky
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.
Noam Chomsky
It makes sense for societies to make education compulsory for children. Children are vulnerable. They can't make decisions. But the decisions can't all be left in the hands of the parents. They can be irresponsible too.
Noam Chomsky
Those who actually do have a valid claim to such special competence have a particular obligation to make very clear to the general public the limits of what is understood at any serious level these limits are typically very narrow in matters of significance in human affairs.
Noam Chomsky
Modern China one also finds many things that are really quite admirable.
Noam Chomsky
Latin America was the most obedient follower of the neoliberal regime that was instituted by the United States, its allies and the international financial institutions. They followed it most rigorously. Almost everyone who's followed those rules, including the Western countries, have suffered. And in Latin America they suffered severely.
Noam Chomsky
If you assume there is no hope, you guarantee there will be no hope.
Noam Chomsky
I don't suggest that the observations are surprising or profound. Rather, they seem to me the merest truisms. I was not aware that [ Michel] Foucault had used the phrase speaking truth to power. I had thought it was an old Quaker phrase.
Noam Chomsky
