NCNoam Chomsky

167 collected words

Noam Chomsky

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

Noam Chomsky / quote

02Undated

The Occupy movement did create spontaneously communities that taught people something: you can be in a supportive community of mutual aid and cooperation and develop your own health system and library and have open space for democratic discussion and participation. Communities like that are really important.

Noam Chomsky / quote

03Undated

The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society.

Noam Chomsky / quote

04Undated

Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature.

Noam Chomsky / quote

05Undated

The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

Noam Chomsky / quote

06Undated

I don't join the New Atheists. So, for example, I wouldn't have the arrogance to lecture some mother who hopes to see her dying child in Heaven - that's none of my business, ultimately. I won't lecture her on the philosophy of science.

Noam Chomsky / quote

07Undated

If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

Noam Chomsky / quote

08Undated

Death and genitals are things that frighten people, and when people are frightened, they develop means of concealment and aggression. It is common sense.

Noam Chomsky / quote

09Undated

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

Noam Chomsky / quote

10Undated

As far as U.S. intelligence knows, Iran is developing nuclear capacities, but they don't know if they are trying to develop nuclear weapons or not. Chances are they're developing what's called 'nuclear capability,' which many states have. That is the ability to have nuclear weapons if they decide to do it. That's not a crime.

Noam Chomsky / quote

11Undated

The close Turkish-Israeli relations go back to the late 1950s - military intelligence, commercial, more recently, tourism and cultural relations.

Noam Chomsky / quote

12Undated

When Rumsfeld gets up on television and says we have definitive intelligence that al Qaeda is working with Iraq, how is an ordinary citizen supposed to react? They won't tell you the evidence, and when anyone asks, they say, 'Well, you know: It's secret.'

Noam Chomsky / quote

13Undated

For 500 years, since European explorers came, Latin American countries had been separated from one another. They had very limited relations. Integration is a prerequisite for independence.

Noam Chomsky / quote

14Undated

In 1949, China declared independence - an event known in Western discourse as 'the loss of China' in the U.S. - with bitter recriminations and conflict over who was responsible for that loss.

Noam Chomsky / quote

15Undated

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

Noam Chomsky / quote

16Undated

Social Security is based on a principle. It's based on the principle that you care about other people. You care whether the widow across town, a disabled widow, is going to be able to have food to eat.

Noam Chomsky / quote

17Undated

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

Noam Chomsky / quote

18Undated

One of the best predictors of policy around is Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of politics, as he calls it - very outstanding political economist - which essentially - I mean, to say it in a sentence, he describes elections as occasions in which groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state.

Noam Chomsky / quote

19Undated

I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are 'among the most unspeakable crimes in history.' I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.

Noam Chomsky / quote

20Undated

For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.

Noam Chomsky / quote

21Undated

Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated - Japan's attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example.

Noam Chomsky / quote

22Undated

If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.

Noam Chomsky / quote

23Undated

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

Noam Chomsky / quote

24Undated

The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another.

Noam Chomsky / quote