"The Republican Party among the public is a minority party."
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Noam Chomsky quotes (page 57 of 84)
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"If you owned everything and a tiny little piece gets out of control, then your world's gone. Like some unusual child who has a million toys and one of them is stolen, he's going to perish."
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"It's kind of interesting and sick that the intellectual culture called the 1960s, "time of troubles," a dangerous period in which a lot of harm was done to the society. And the reason is because we were civilized and that's dangerous. That increased the commitment to democracy, to rights and so on, and this left people much less obedient."
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"The Iraq War is the first war in history, in which there were huge demonstrations before the war was launched, not beginning five years later and then being broken up. All of these are changes, and the people who are writing in journals today lived through these changes."
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"I do not see how we can rationally oppose high speed rail because of the environmental and other costs without considering the social and human consequences of the radical elimination of transportation that this entails."
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"What has to be done today is (1) large-scale conversion (weatherizing , etc.), (2) sharp change in transportation to greater efficiency, like high-speed rail, (3) serious efforts to move to sustainable energy, probably solar in the somewhat longer term, (4) other adjustments that are feasible. If done effectively, that might be enough to stave off disaster. If not, then we can give up the ghost, because there are no alternatives in this world, at least none that I've seen suggested."
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"Not being optimistic falls a long way short of predicting that all is finished."
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"A functioning eco-system is a human need."
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"Human needs are served by a sustainable lifestyle, almost by definition, if humans include coming generations. And a shift to such technologies as high-speed rail instead of maximizing fossil fuel use, and solar energy, is not "relentless resource extraction.""
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"Modifying the core institutions of the society is no small challenge."
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"The developing world voice can be amplified enormously by support from the wealthy and the privileged, otherwise it's very likely to be marginalized."
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"The manufacturing industry is starting to press for some kind of national healthcare. Now it's beginning to put it on the agenda. It doesn't matter if the population wants it. What 90% of the population wants would be kind of irrelevant. But if part of the concentration of corporate capital that basically runs the country - another thing we're not allowed to say but it's obvious - if part of that sector becomes in favor then the issue moves onto the political agenda."
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"I remember talking to, 40 years ago, one of the leading people in the government who was involved in arms control, pressing for arms control measures, détente, and so on. He's very high up, and we were talking about whether arms control could succeed. And only partially as a joke he said, "Well it might succeed if the high tech industry makes more profit from arms control than it can make from weapons-related research and production. If we get to that tipping point maybe arms control will work." He was partially joking but there's a truth that lies behind it."
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"I still think, despite everything, that the US is very unlikely to attack Iran. It could be a huge catastrophe; nobody knows what the consequences would be. I imagine that only an administration that's really desperate would resort to that."
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"Hamas is a political party and political parties don't recognize other countries."
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"Hamas must agree to first recognize Israel, second to end all violence, third to accept past agreements. Try to find a mention of the fact that the United States and Israel reject all three of those. They obviously don't recognize Palestine, they certainly don't withdraw the use of violence or the threat of it - in fact they insist on it - and they don't accept past agreements, including the road map."
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"For the past century or so that's [ Monroe Doctrine] actually been true, but it's declining very significantly."
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"Israel produces and stores chemical weapons. So therefore the US will prevent the Chemical Weapons Convention from being imposed on the Middle East. But it's necessary to evade this by misrepresenting the convention, and I think maybe 100 percent of the media, or close to it, go along. But that's a critical issue. Actually, Syria's chemical weapons were developed largely as a deterrent to Israeli nuclear weapons. Also, not mentioned."
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"[Barack] Obama was reaching a point [with Syria bombing] where he might not have been able to carry it off.He was losing support internally, and was compelled to send the vote to Congress, and it looked as if he was going to be defeated, which would have been a very serious blow to his presidency, to his authority."
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"There was very little international support, even England wouldn't support [bombing of Syria], which is amazing."
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