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 28 of 84)

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"Kaplan can't understand trivialities. The triviality here is that nobody except the ultra right-wing jingoists like Kaplan are comparing atrocities by various countries. What honest people are saying seems to be incomprehensible: that we should keep to the elementary moral level of the gospels. We should pay attention to our own crimes and stop committing them. This would be true even if we were killing one person, OK? And it's even more true when we're killing millions of people."

Country Wings People
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"...a very terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe [war and human suffering]. I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler ...or other that crop up - these people would not able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity - and therefore I think that it is in some sense the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who should share a very serious burden of guilt, that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and more violent."

War Thinking People
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"Borders are semiporous. Capital flows more freely than people across them. on C Span."

People Borders Flow
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"The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here."

College People Understanding
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"The U.S. - the idea that the U.S. has introduced and imposed principles of international law, that's hardly even a joke. The United States has even gone so far as to veto Security Council resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. That was in the 1980s under Reagan."

Law Ideas Principles
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"In the case of Yugoslavia v. NATO, one of the charges was genocide. The U.S. appealed to the court, saying that, by law, the United States is immune to the charge of genocide, self-immunized, and the court accepted that, so the case proceeded against the other NATO powers but not against the United States."

Self Law Yugoslavia
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"Moves toward sovereignty in Iraq stimulate pressures first for human rights among the bitterly repressed Shi'ite population but also toward some degree of autonomy. You can imagine a kind of a loose Shi'ite alliance in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, controlling most of the world's oil and independent of the United States. And much worse, although Europe can be intimidated by the United States, China can't. It's one of the reasons, the main reasons, why China is considered a threat. We're back to the Mafia principle."

Moving Independent Rights
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"Younger people who are being indoctrinated into the contemporary system of falsification - they really have to do some research to find out what is the truth. In the general population, people forget or don't care that much. And gradually what you hear drilled into your head everyday comes to be believed. People don't understand what you're talking about any more if you discuss the American war on South Vietnam."

War Talking People
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"Enormous and growing parts of the population are basically superfluous for profit-making purposes. Along with this, the jail population is increasing very rapidly; it's the highest in the industrial world by far. New and onerous crime bills are being passed to deal with this superfluous population."

Jail Population Purpose
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"Very commonly I get queries. Somebody saw something of mine on YouTube and of course if there is a talk on YouTube, there aren't any footnotes - and they want to know why did you say this. Well if they bothered to look up something in print, they would've seen why I said that. If they ask for evidence, I just say well take a look and mention something they can read and that usually ends the conversation."

Looks Want Saws
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"I don't even know if I ever knew - some sweatshop in Baltimore. I knew with my other relatives - some of the women were in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and men were shop boys and things like that. I happened to be in Philadelphia, but the family was in New York. I could see what the union was doing for them.It really saved their lives."

New York Boys Men
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"Most of intellectuals are false prophets, flatterers of the court. The real prophets are the exception and treated badly. How badly they're treated depends on the society. Like in Eastern Europe, they were treated very badly. In Latin America, they were slaughtered."

Real Latin Europe
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"Take a look at the Supreme Court decision that just authorized an effort by U.S. claimants against Iran for terrorist acts. What are the terrorist acts? The terrorist acts are bombings of U.S. military installations in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, which Iran is claimed to have something to do with. Well suppose they did. That's not terrorism. I mean if we have a military base in Lebanon that while we're shelling Lebanese naval ships, the Navy is shelling Lebanese installations and somebody attacks [that's not terrorism]."

Military Mean Iran
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"Go back to classical times, say classical Greece. Who drank the hemlock? Was it someone who was conforming, obeying the gods? Or was it someone who was disrupting the youth and questioning the faith and belief? Socrates, in other words. It was Socrates."

Hemlock Belief Youth
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"The Soviet Union was pretty much what Lenin and Trotsky said it was."

Unions Said Trotsky
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"The main selling appeal of NAFTA to US corporations is that it gives them an advantage in the North American market over their European and Japanese competitors."

Giving Corporations Selling
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"I think there are all kinds of intrusions into private rights that make use of contemporary technology."

Technology Thinking Rights
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"I think it's just been a core part of the Cuban revolution to have a very high level of internationalism. I mean, these cases you've mentioned are cases in point, but the most extreme case was the liberation of Africa. Take the case of Angola for example, and there are real connections between Cuba and Angola-much of the Cuban population comes from Angola."

Real Mean Thinking
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"The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the 'engineering of consent' by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays."

Attitude Engineering Perception
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"I don't see how one can "believe in organized religion." What does it mean to believe in an organization? One can join it, support it, oppose it, accept its doctrines or reject them. There are many kinds of organized religion. People associate themselves with some of them, or not, for all sorts of reasons, maybe belief in some of their doctrines."

Believe Mean Organization
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