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Noam Chomsky Quotes
born 1928 United States
Avram Noam Chomsky (born 7 December 1928) is an American linguist, analytical philosopher, cognitive scientist, political analyst, human rights activist and anarcho-socialist.
United States Academics Activists Environmentalists Essayists Also known as: Chomsky, Chomsky, Noam, Noam Chomsky's political views
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211 quotes
You can make heroic statements, if you’d like, about not liking hurricanes, or not liking the solution. But that’s not doing anyone any good.
Until the United States prosecutes its own leaders, it is guilty of grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that means war crimes.
Armies usually aren't interested in wars.
As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
The pathology of Islamophobia is growing throughout the West — it is taking its most lethal form in India.
Modern linguistics has also failed to deal with the Cartesian observations regarding human language in any serious way.
Cartesian Linguistics (1966)
The president is not the first to ask: "Why do they hate us?"
Very commonly substances are criminalized because they're associated with what's called the dangerous classes, you know, poor people, or working people.
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.
Powers and Prospects (1996)
They can't comprehend what your question is, because you can't comprehend that we should apply to ourselves the standards that you apply to others. That is incomprehensible!
Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times (2002)
It is sometimes claimed that NATO membership increases security for Poland and others. A much stronger case can be made that NATO membership threatens their security by heightening tensions.
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.
One who pays some attention to history will not be surprised if those who cry most loudly that we must smash and destroy are later found among the administrators of some new system of repression.
American Power and the New Mandarins (1969)
I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.
Language and Politics (1988)
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
Roughly speaking, states are violent to the extent that they have the power to act in the interests of those with domestic power...
The deep structure that expresses the meaning is common to all languages, so it is claimed, being a simple reflection of the forms of thought.
Cartesian Linguistics (1966)
And after that every single memoirist radically changed their story about what had happened.
I have a parrot. It can say 'sovereignty to all the people' in Portuguese.
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