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To construct a scientific theory from the data and to be able to recognize that it is a reasonable theory is possible only if there are some very sharp restrictive principles that lead you to go in one direction and not in another direction. Otherwise, you wouldn't have science at all, merely randomly chosen hypotheses.

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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Procurement is a major technique of state subsidy.
Noam Chomsky
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A dramatic, evocative, thoughtful and very accessible account of one of the most important stories of the century - and one of the most ominous, unless citizens are aroused to action to rein in abusive state power.
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Governments don't control people like they used to.
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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).
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That's our nuclear weapons strategy [going to frighten people], as of the early post-Cold War years. And I think this is a real failure of the intellectual community, including scholarship and the media. It's not like you had headlines all over the place. And it's not secret, the documents are there. And I think that's probably the right picture.
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The whole infrastructure of air travel was, and is, part of government policy. It is not a natural development of a free economic system - at least not in the way that is claimed. The same is true of the roads, of course.
Noam Chomsky
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The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is.
Noam Chomsky
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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
Noam Chomsky
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As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
Noam Chomsky
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I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.
Noam Chomsky
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As in the past, the costs and risks of the coming phases of the industrial economy were to be socialized, with eventual profits privatized.
Noam Chomsky
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The term 'globalisation' is conventionally used to refer to the specific form of investor-rights integration designed by wealth and power, for their own interests.
Noam Chomsky
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I felt that we could hardly improve on the conception of the university expressed by one of the founders of the modern system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, also one of the founders of classical liberalism. That seems to me true today as well, though ideals of course have to be adapted to changing circumstances.
Noam Chomsky
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Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college.
Noam Chomsky
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Women taking care of children . . . it makes sense to pay them for that work . . . they should be paid for it, but that requires tax payments. And the same is true about protection of the environment.
Noam Chomsky
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Insofar as the universities are free and independent, they will also be subversive, in the sense that dominant structures of power and their ideological support will be subjected to challenge and critique, a counterpart to attitudes that are fostered in the hard sciences wherever they are taken seriously.
Noam Chomsky
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What can realistically be done depends on the historical moment. The same is true with regard to the agents.
Noam Chomsky
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Technology is basically neutral. It's kind of like a hammer. The hammer doesn't care whether you use it to build a house, or whether a torturer uses it to crush somebody's skull.
Noam Chomsky
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When leaders carry out policies for decades that have no consequences for the stated goal and are very costly, you have to ask whether they are telling you the truth or whether the policies are for a different goal, because they are not reducing drug use.
Noam Chomsky
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They [unions] used straight Marxist rhetoric [in 1930s] - just the values were changed.
Noam Chomsky