Quote

Independent development can be a virus that can infect others.

Noam Chomsky

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
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
Viruses
Independent
Development
Others
Infect
Virus

More quotes by Noam Chomsky

Image
When people say do you believe in God? what do they mean by it? Do I believe in some spiritual force in the world? In a way, yes. People have thoughts, emotions. If you want to call that a spiritual force, okay. But unless there's some clarification of what we're supposed to believe in or disbelieve in, I can't answer.
Noam Chomsky
Image
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
Image
Technology can also be used so that private individuals will have access to the way centralized decisions are being made.
Noam Chomsky
Image
We are entering a period of human history that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid.
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
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
Image
Real schools ought to provide people with techniques of self-defense, but that would mean teaching the truth about the world and about the society, and schools couldn't survive very long if they did that.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Look, the United States doesn't have political parties. In other countries, take say Europe, you can be an active member of the political party. Here, the only thing in a political party is gearing to elections, not the other things you do. So it's basically, a way of making people passive, submissive objects.
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
Image
The Zionist movement based in Palestine pretty much took over the camps and instituted the policy that every man and woman between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five should be directed to Palestine - not allowed to go to the West.
Noam Chomsky
Image
You know, you can go to the fiftieth thing on a Google list and that's the one you want, but the ones you are going to be directed to are the funders.
Noam Chomsky
Image
There are no conservatives in the United States. The United States does not have a conservative tradition. The people who call themselves conservatives, like the Heritage Foundation or Gingrich, are believers in -- are radical statists. They believe in a powerful state, but a welfare state for the rich.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Suppose that the US really is trying to get rid of drugs in Colombia. Does Colombia then have the right to fumigate tobacco farms in Kentucky? They are producing a lethal substance far more dangerous than cocaine. More Colombians die from tobacco-related illnesses than Americans die from cocaine. Of course, Colombia has no right to do that.
Noam Chomsky
Image
I am not offering this is a critique of the internet, its just that there are a lot of factors involved. It does offer plenty of possibilities. It also has, it can have, a cheapening effect and I think both exist and I think its true of everything. You could say that about the printing press.
Noam Chomsky
Image
The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretationand a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.
Noam Chomsky
Image
[Moral responsibilities] has nothing particular to do with academia, except insofar as those within it tend to be unusually privileged in the respects just mentioned.
Noam Chomsky
Image
The two tendencies are antithetical in significant respects. These are distinctions that should be kept in mind, however one feels that the problems and dilemmas that constantly arise should be resolved.
Noam Chomsky
Image
In ideal form of social control is an atomised collection of individuals focused on their own narrow concern, lacking the kinds of organisations in which they can gain information, develop and articulate their thoughts, and act constructively to achieve common ends.
Noam Chomsky
Image
The responsibility of the writer as a moral agent is to try to bring the truth about matters of human significance to an audience that can do something about them.
Noam Chomsky
Image
If you want information about sports, I can tell you things from the 1940's, and the couple years that my grandson was kind of a jock, but nothing in between.
Noam Chomsky