"Technology provides means for expression and interchange and so on, so yes it should be free and open, but there are a lot of constraints on how its used."
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Noam Chomsky quotes (page 18 of 84)
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"The first modern propaganda agency was the British Ministry of Information a century ago, which secretly defined its task as "to direct the thought of most of the world" - primarily progressive American intellectuals, who had to be mobilized to come to the aid of Britain during World War I."
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"By a generative grammar I mean simply a system of rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences. Obviously, every speaker of a language has mastered and internalized a generative grammar that expresses his knowledge of his language. This is not to say that he is aware of the rules of the grammar or even that he can become aware of them, or that his statements about his intuitive knowledge of the language are necessarily accurate."
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"[Mikhail] Gorbachev complained. He was told look, there's nothing on paper. People didn't actually say it but the implication was look, if you are dumb enough to take faith in a gentleman's agreement with us, that's your problem. NATO expanded to East Germany."
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"It is familiar to mainstream academic scholarship. One very prominent political scientist, in his standard text American Politics 20 years ago, observes that "The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen.""
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"The fact is that if you have not developed language, you simply don't have access to most of human experience, and if you don't have access to experience, then you're not going to be able to think properly."
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"The actual consequences of Plan Colombia are to devastate peasant communities, which have been driven to drug production. These peasants have no particular desire to grow coca, but their other means of livelihood have been wiped out."
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"There is a principle of human affairs that goes back millennia, which is that you don't look in the mirror. You can trace this principle back to the Bible. The designated intellectuals of that time are called prophets, which is a mistranslation of a Hebrew word, but they were basically intellectuals, giving geopolitical analysis, criticizing the moral practice of leadership, etc. Now, these people were not treated very nicely. There were other intellectuals who were treated nicely, namely those who centuries later came to be called false prophets. These were the flatterers of the court."
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"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."
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"[Antonio] Gramsci's words and actions explain their assessment, though I think we should refrain from using the term "model intellectual" for him or others."
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"The Bush administration has created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. This should've been one of the easiest military occupations in history and they succeeded in turning it into one of the worst military disasters in history. They can't control it and it's almost impossible for them to get out for reasons you can't discuss in the United States because to discuss the reasons why they can't get out would be to concede the reasons why they invaded."
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"It's only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it's not terrorism."
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"If there are lessons to be drawn from the sciences, then that should be the concern of everyone, including scientists to the extent that they can make a contribution."
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"State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day."
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"As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss."
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"The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival."
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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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"Hamas is regularly described as 'Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.' One will be hard put to find something like 'democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus'—blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable."
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"French intellectual life has, in my opinion, been turned into something cheap and meretricious by the 'star' system. It is like Hollywood. Thus we go from one absurdity to another - Stalinism, existentialism. Lacan, Derrida - some of them obscene ( Stalinism), some simply infantile and ridiculous ( Lacan, Derrida). What is striking, however, is the pomposity and self-importance, at each stage."
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"I think we can be reasonably confident that if the American population had the slightest idea of what is being done in their name, they would be utterly appalled."
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