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Famous Noam Chomsky Quotes

“If the most important revolutionary part of the George W. Bush Doctrine is that states that harbor terrorists are terrorist states, what do we conclude from that? We conclude exactly what Kissinger was kind enough to say: These doctrines are unilateral. They are not intended as doctrines of international law or doctrines of international affairs. They are doctrines that grant the U.S. the right to use force and violence and to harbor terrorists, but not anyone else.”

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Author:Noam Chomsky
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“I think the use of language is a very important means by which this species, because of its biological nature, creates a kind of social space, to place itself in interactions with other people. It doesn't have much to do with communication in a narrow sense; that is, it doesn't involve transmission of information. There is much information transmitted but it is not the content of what is said that is transmitted.”

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“I think the most important work that is going on has to do with the search for very general and abstract features of what is sometimes called universal grammar: general properties of language that reflect a kind of biological necessity rather than logical necessity; that is, properties of language that are not logically necessary for such a system but which are essential invariant properties of human language and are known without learning. We know these properties but we don't learn them. We simply use our knowledge of these properties as the basis for learning.”

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Author: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.”

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Author:Noam Chomsky
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“There's kind of a hidden point which isn't being brought out, and that is that it is inconceivable that the U.S. would permit democracy in the Middle East, and for a very simple reason. Just take a look at polls of Arab public opinion. They exist. You can't find them in the press, but they exist from prestigious polling agencies. Released by major institutions. And what they show is that if there was democracy in the Middle East, the entire U.S. program for domination of the Middle East would be down the tube.”

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“In Europe there's kind of a reaction to the European Union, kind of a move towards some kind of regionalization. It's more advanced in some regions than others, like in Spain for example. Catelan was repressed under Franco. People spoke it, but not publicly. It's now the language of Catelonia. The Basque language is being revived, not just the language but the culture, the folk music and everything else. So you're getting more diverse societies, and it's happening in Britain as well.”

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Author:Noam Chomsky
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“Moves toward sovereignty in Iraq stimulate pressures first for human rights among the bitterly repressed Shi'ite population but also toward some degree of autonomy. You can imagine a kind of a loose Shi'ite alliance in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, controlling most of the world's oil and independent of the United States. And much worse, although Europe can be intimidated by the United States, China can't. It's one of the reasons, the main reasons, why China is considered a threat. We're back to the Mafia principle.”

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Author:Noam Chomsky
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“China is the center of the Asian energy security grid, which includes the Central Asian states and Russia. India is also hovering around the edge, South Korea is involved, and Iran is an associate member of some kind. If the Middle East oil resources around the Gulf, which are the main ones in the world, if they link up to the Asian grid, the United States is really a second-rate power. A lot is at stake in not withdrawing from Iraq.”

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“The manufacturing industry is starting to press for some kind of national healthcare. Now it's beginning to put it on the agenda. It doesn't matter if the population wants it. What 90% of the population wants would be kind of irrelevant. But if part of the concentration of corporate capital that basically runs the country - another thing we're not allowed to say but it's obvious - if part of that sector becomes in favor then the issue moves onto the political agenda.”

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Author:Noam Chomsky
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“It's kind of interesting and sick that the intellectual culture called the 1960s, "time of troubles," a dangerous period in which a lot of harm was done to the society. And the reason is because we were civilized and that's dangerous. That increased the commitment to democracy, to rights and so on, and this left people much less obedient.”

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Author:Noam Chomsky
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“[The Republican Party] for example, they do run the House of Representatives, they're a majority there, and it's the House that is essentially sending the government into shutdown and maybe default. But they won the majority of seats there because of various kinds of chicanery. They got a minority of the votes, but a majority of the seats, and they're using them to press forward an agenda which is extremely harmful to the public.”

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“Europe is being subjected to the kinds of programs that devastated Latin America for many years. Latin America has thrown them out and is pulling out: It's successful; it's democratizing; it's economically developing; and it's free from the shrapnel of US imperialism for 25 years. Meanwhile, Western Europe is destroying itself systematically, destroying itself going in the opposite direction.”

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Author:Noam Chomsky
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“In England, enclosure programs kind of destroyed the commons. In the United States, it happened later. But, ah, now it's happening in the world. The last remnant of the commons is the environment, which the indigenous people are still trying to preserve and we sophisticated rich people are trying to destroy.”

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“If in fact, the US story is correct, if it is true that Syria used chemical weapons, then it wouldn't be a major crime to send a kind of shot across the bow saying you can't do this anymore. Not the best thing in the world, but not a major crime, either. So, I think at the very least there should have been an inquiry into what happened. But just joining the bandwagon about how we're finally standing up to crimes in Syria, that's ridiculous.”

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Author:Noam Chomsky
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“There are simple things which would make sense. Take, say, weatherization, which would make a big cut in the unemployment rate. That's the kind of work that plenty of people are quick to do, and it would save individual households money, and it would make a significant reduction in the threats of climate change. But something is holding it back: the sociopathic character of market systems.”

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“If by 'intellectual' you mean people who are a special class who are in the business of imposing thoughts and forming ideas for people in power, and telling people what they should believe...they're really more a kind of secular priesthood, whose task it is to uphold the doctrinal truths of the society. And the population SHOULD be anti-intellectual in that repect.”

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“It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.”

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Book:How the World Works
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“Democracy doesn't mean much if people have to confront concentrated systems of economic power as isolated individuals. Democracy means something if people can organize to gain information, to have thoughts for that matter, to make plans, to enter into the political system in some active way, to put forth programs and so on. If organizations of that kind exist, then democracy can exist too. Otherwise it's a matter of pushing a lever every couple of years; it's like having the choice between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola.”

PeopleIfsWayYearsKindMeanMatterPoliticalChoicesIndividualDemocracyPlansEconomicInformationCoupleHeroGainsProgramOrganizationActivePushingHeroicIsolatedOrganizePolitical SystemsLeversEconomic PowerCoca ColaPepsi
Author:Noam Chomsky
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“The media want to maintain their intimate relation to state power. They want to get leaks, they want to get invited to the press conferences. They want to rub shoulders with the Secretary of State, all that kind of business. To do that, you've got to play the game, and playing the game means telling their lies, serving as their disinformation apparatus.”

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Author:Noam Chomsky
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“Now, the Libertarian Party, is a *capitalist* party. It's in favor of what *I* would regard a *particular form* of authoritarian control. Namely, the kind that comes through private ownership and control, which is an *extremely* rigid system of domination - people have to... people can survive, by renting themselves to it, and basically in no other way... I do disagree with them *very* sharply, and I think that they are not..understanding the *fundamental* doctrine, that you should be free from domination and control, including the control of the manager and the owner.”

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Author:Noam Chomsky
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“There isn't much point arguing about the word "libertarian." It would make about as much sense to argue with an unreconstructed Stalinist about the word "democracy" - recall that they called what they'd constructed "peoples' democracies." The weird offshoot of ultra-right individualist anarchism that is called "libertarian" here happens to amount to advocacy of perhaps the worst kind of imaginable tyranny, namely unaccountable private tyranny. If they want to call that "libertarian," fine; after all, Stalin called his system "democratic." But why bother arguing about it?”

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Author:Noam Chomsky
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“Anarcho-syndic alism took for granted that working people ought to control their own work, its conditions, the enterprises in which they work, along with communities, so they should be associated with one another in free associations, and democracy of that kind should be the foundational elements of a more general free society.”

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Author:Noam Chomsky
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“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.”

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Book:How the World Works
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