Quote

In fact, by universal grammar I mean just that system of principles and structures that are the prerequisites for acquisition of language, and to which every language necessarily conforms.

Noam Chomsky

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Noam Chomsky
Age: 96
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
System
Acquisition
Fact
Structures
Language
Grammar
Facts
Conform
Mean
Necessarily
Every
Structure
Universal
Conforms
Principles
Prerequisites

More quotes by Noam Chomsky

Image
What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded. The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Physics and those parts of other fields that grow out of physics - chemistry, the structure of big molecules - in those domains, there is a lot of progress. In many other domains, there is very little progress in developing real scientific understanding.
Noam Chomsky
Image
[With] military threats, you can see them actually, you can imagine it. People don't think about it enough. But if you think about it for a minute, you can see that a nuclear attack could be the end of everything.
Noam Chomsky
Image
People are capable of seeing the deceit they're ensnared in. They just have to make the effort.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Parts of the United States are taking on a Third World look.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Globalization is the result of powerful governments, especially that of the United States, pushing trade deals and other accords down the throats of the world’s people to make it easier for corporations and the wealthy to dominate the economies of nations around the world without having obligations to the peoples of those nations.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Anywhere in Latin America there is a potential threat of the pathology of caudillismo and it has to be guarded against.
Noam Chomsky
Image
I mean you look back at American history and American culture, it's pretty striking. I mean this has been the safest country in the world forever, and the most frightened country in the world.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Farming out atrocities to paramilitaries is standard operating procedure.
Noam Chomsky
Image
John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.
Noam Chomsky
Image
You have to love that government, but hate the government that might work in your interest and that you could control. That's an interesting propaganda task, but it's been carried out very well.
Noam Chomsky
Image
You can go into the Library of Congress and find information on just about anything, but that doesn't do you much good unless you know what you are looking for.
Noam Chomsky
Image
The dangers of unexamined and unregulated monopoly power, particularly in the state executive, are hardly news. The right reaction is not passive acquiescence.
Noam Chomsky
Image
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.
Noam Chomsky
Image
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.
Noam Chomsky
Image
For one thing, studying language is by itself a part of a study of human intelligence that is, perhaps, the central aspect of human nature. And second, I think, it is a good model for studying other human properties, which ought to be studied by psychologists in the same way.
Noam Chomsky
Image
A colonial war is a very dirty kind of war. You're not fighting armed forces. You're fighting mostly unarmed people. And to fight that kind of war requires professional killers, which means mercenaries.
Noam Chomsky
Image
The target of preventive war must have several characteristics. It must be virtually defenceless it must be important enough to be worth the trouble it must be possible to portray it as the ultimate evil and an imminent threat to our survival.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.
Noam Chomsky
Image
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