211 quotes
For about a couple of decades I've had a very simple question that I've been posing to my postmodern friends: "Can you find something in postmodernism which is not either a triviality cloaked in polysyllables or is false?", and nobody's answered it yet.
The whole question of recognizing the right of a state to exist was invented solely for Israel. People, on the other hand, have a right to exist. So the people who live on the land - Israelis and Palestinians - have a right to live in security and peace.
Even today, as regards East Timor, where our brutal Indonesian satellite (authors of the 1965-1966 butcheries) have very possibly killed as many people as did the Khmer Rouge, there is a virtually complete blackout of information in the Free Press. This is a bloodbath carried out by a friendly power and is thus of little interest to our readers. It is a “benign bloodbath” in our terminology.
Chomsky and Herman (1979)
The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.
A linguistic theory must contain a definition of “grammar,” that is, a specification of the class of potential grammars. We may, correspondingly, say that a linguistic theory is descriptively adequate if it makes a descriptively adequate grammar available for each natural language.
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965)
We can determine the adequacy of a linguistic theory by developing rigorously and precisely the form of grammar corresponding to the set of levels contained within this theory, and then investigating the possibility of constructing simple and revealing grammars of this form for natural languages.
Syntactic Structures (1957)
The child must acquire a generative grammar of his language on the basis of a fairly restricted amount of evidence. To account for this achievement, we must postulate a sufficiently rich internal structure – a sufficiently restricted theory of universal grammar that constitutes his contribution to language acquisition.
Language and Mind (1968)
The Ottoman Empire was an ugly affair, but they had the right idea. The rulers in Turkey were fortunately so corrupt that they left people alone pretty much–were mostly interested in robbing them–and they left them alone to run their own affairs, and their own regions and their own communities with a lot of local self determination.
A grammar of a language purports to be a description of the ideal speaker-hearer’s intrinsic competence. If the grammar is, furthermore, perfectly explicit—in other words, if it does not rely on the intelligence of the understanding reader but rather provides an explicit analysis of his contribution—we may (somewhat redundantly) call it a generative grammar.
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965)
There is no indication that China is planning to invade Taiwan. If the United States increases the escalation, they might do it.
Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place. The corporate executives and the corporation lawyers and so on who overwhelmingly staff the executive, assisted increasingly by a university based mandarin class, remain in power no matter whom you elect.
Government in the Future (1970)
China is by no means saintly. Plenty of criticisms you can make of China. But I would like to describe the world situation as it is, not as it’s presented by US-British propaganda.
The criticisms were so tepid they were embarrassing. Almost nobody, including me, dared to criticize the U.S. attack on South Vietnam. That's like talking Hittite. Nobody even understood the words.
Now, under the very confused circumstances of KAL 007, if that was the worst atrocity in human history, well, what about the freedom fighters that we support along with South Africa, who did something much worse?
Talk at University of California, Berkeley (1984)
Either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests, guided by values of solidarity, sympathy and concern for others, or alternatively there will be no destiny for anyone to control.
In the American Jewish community, there is little willingness to face the fact that the Palestinian Arabs have suffered a monstrous historical injustice, whatever one may think of the competing claims. Until this is recognized, discussion of the Middle East crisis cannot even begin.
Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on Justice and Nationhood (1974)
Advertisers will want to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the “buying mood”. They seek programs that will lightly entertain and thus fit in with the spirit of the primary purpose of program purchases—the dissemination of a selling message.
Independent nationalism is unacceptable to the West, no matter where it is, and it has to be driven back into subordination. In the case of Grenada, you can do it in a weekend; in the case of the Soviet Union it may take 70 years. But these are matters of scale, the logic is essentially the same.
We cannot say much about human affairs with any confidence, but sometimes it is possible. We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war, or there won't be a world—at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.
In summary, it is the diversity of human behavior, its appropriateness to new situations, and man's capacity to innovate – the creative aspect of language use providing the principal indication of this –that leads Descartes to attribute possession of mind to other humans, since he regards this capacity as beyond the limitations of any imaginable mechanism.
Cartesian Linguistics (1966)