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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

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
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I am not too happy with terms like “the left”, to be honest. And I don’t use it much….if by “the left” you mean people who are committed to peace and justice and freedom and so on, there can’t be elements of the left opposed to workers’ movement, at least under that definition.
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The United States has done some very good things in the world, and that does not change the fact that the World Court was quite correct in condemning the United States as an international terrorist state.
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We have this huge, massive information, but what is it that matters? What doesn't matter? What makes sense, what doesn't make sense? You have to have a framework for understanding and of interpretation in order to make use of the information.
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In the American Jewish community, there is little willingness to face the fact that the Palestinian Arabs have suffered a monstrous historical injustice . . . Until this is recognized, discussion of the Middle East crisis cannot even begin.
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It may be beyond the limits of human intelligence to understand how human intelligence works.
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The war against working people should be understood to be a real war…. Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.
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The Soviet Union was pretty much what Lenin and Trotsky said it was.
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If humans are organisms like every other organism - which they are - then we should expect that if there are some domains where real scientific progress is possible, then there are others where it is not.
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One of the dangers [that Donald Trump poses, due to the augmented risk of nuclear war] is unquestionable. Of the two existential threats - the threats to the termination of the species basically and most other species - one of them, climate change, on that I think there's no basis for discussion.
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If voting could actually change anything, it would be illegal.
Noam Chomsky
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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
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For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.
Noam Chomsky
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I have not suggested that the emergence of language is instantaneous. Rather, that the rewiring of the brain enabling an infinite array of structured expressions was in effect instantaneous. I have never heard of an alternative to this suggestion.
Noam Chomsky
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History records endless struggles to enlarge those realms, inspiring ones it also records painful reversals and setbacks.
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If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that's something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can't live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.
Noam Chomsky
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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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Every single one cabinet appointment: education, environment, labor - every single one is selected to undermine any aspect of government that's of any help to people, and that doesn't benefit the super-rich. And it's absolutely systematic. The interesting question will be how long Donald Trump's constituency can fall for the con game.
Noam Chomsky
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Our minds are specifically adapted to developing certain theories, and we have a science if the theories that are available to our minds happen to be close to true. Well, there is no particular reason to suppose that the intersection of true theories and theories that are accessible to the mind is very large. It may not be very large.
Noam Chomsky
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In the years of the Reagan-Bush administration alone, about 1.5 million people were killed by South Africa just in the surrounding countries. Forget what was happening in South Africa and Namibia.
Noam Chomsky
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One of the real problems of society is that its far too atomized, what sociologists call secondary associations.
Noam Chomsky