Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

Linguist, Philosopher, Activist

Noam Chomsky is a renowned linguist and political activist known for his critiques of media and power structures, particularly through his work 'Manufacturing Consent.'

People Thinking War Country Mean Government
Born
December 7, 1928
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1.7K
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Noam Chomsky quotes (page 22 of 84)

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"The Fourteenth Amendment, after the civil war, in principle brought former slaves into the category of persons, theoretically. But if you actually look, almost all the cases brought up for personal rights under the Fourteenth Amendment were by corporations. Freed slaves couldn't do it. In fact they were pretty much driven back into something like slavery by a north - south compact, that allowed former slave states to criminalize black life, which made a criminal force that was basically used as a forced labor force, up until the 1930s."

War Labor Force Rights
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"As long as nuclear weapons exist, the chances of survival of the human species are quite slight."

Long Survival Nuclear
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"[Francisco] Franco's army was mainly Moorish. They were recruiting people from Morocco to come to Spain. There was an uprising in Morocco at the time led by Abd el-Krim (whose tactics influenced Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara) that sought independence for Morocco and Northern Africa."

Army Uprising People
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"In the years of the Reagan-Bush administration alone, about 1.5 million people were killed by South Africa just in the surrounding countries. Forget what was happening in South Africa and Namibia."

Country Media Years
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"One of the Christian fundamentalists' goals seems to be to rebuild the Temple, which means destroying the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which presumably means war with the Arab world - one of the goals, perhaps, in fulfilling the prophecy of Armageddon. So they strongly support Israeli power and expansionism, and help fund it and lobby for it; but they also support actions that are very harmful and objectionable to most of its population - as do Jewish fundamentalist groups, mostly rooted in the US, which, after all, is one of the most extreme religious fundamentalist societies in the world."

Christian Religious War
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"Bradley Manning should be regarded as a hero. He is doing what an honest, decent citizen should be doing: letting your population know what the government, the people who rule you are doing. They want to keep it secret of course."

Hero Government People
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"Greece, alone, is in a very vulnerable position. If the Greeks had had support from progressive left and popular forces elsewhere in Europe they might have been able to resist the demands of the Troika, but they had almost no support. Not even from Portugal, Spain, or other left forces. They were left alone."

Europe Support Greek
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"Obama's primary constituency was financial institutions. They were the core of the funding for his campaign. They expect to be paid back. And they were. They were paid back by coming out richer and more powerful than they were before the crisis that they created."

Powerful Campaigns Financial
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"Another problem is the confrontation with India. Pakistan just cannot survive if it continues to do so (continue this confrontation)."

Pakistan India Problem
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"Let's imagine again an observer looking at us without any preconceptions. I think he would be struck by the fact that although human beings have the capacity to develop scientific knowledge, it must be a very limited capacity because it is only done in very narrow and specific domains."

Thinking Would Be Done
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"If you go back a century in Europe, all over the place people were speaking different languages. There were dozens of languages in France and Italy, and they're all called French [and Italian], but they were not mutually comprehensible. They were different languages. And they have mostly disappeared in the last century or so. Some are being preserved, like Welsh, some are being revived, like Basque or Catelan to some extent. There are plenty of people in Europe who can't talk to their grandmother because they talk a different language."

Grandmother Italian Europe
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"The murder of Lumumba, in which the U.S. was involved, in the Congo destroyed Africa's major hope for development. Congo is now total horror story, for years."

Years Horror Stories Development
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"Anti-union propaganda has been considerably more successful here [ in the U.S.] than in Europe, even among working people who would benefit [from] unions."

Successful Europe People
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"In any institution-factory, university, health center, or whatever-there are a variety of interests that ought to be represented in decision-making: the work force itself, the community in which it is located, users of its products or services, institutions that compete for the same resources. These interests should be directly represented in democratic structures that displace and eliminate private ownership of the means of production or resources, an anachronism with no legitimacy."

Mean Community Decision
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"We need not stride resolutely towards catastrophe, merely because those are the marching orders."

Order Needs Stride
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"The idea that people should be allowed to decide something about their own fate is just anathema to European elites."

Fate Ideas People
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"The one state/two state debate is irrelevant as Israel and the US consolidate Greater Israel."

Israel Two Debate
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"How do I define God? I don't.... People who find such conceptions important for themselves have every right to frame them as they like. Personally, I don't."

Spiritual Atheist Science
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"There are very deep and restrictive principles that determine the nature of human language and are rooted in the specific character of the human mind"

Character Mind Principles
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