"People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction."
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Quote collection
Noam Chomsky quotes (page 6 of 84)
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"The more privilege you have, the more opportunity you have. The more opportunity you have, the more responsibility you have."
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"Social and political issues in general seem to me fairly simple; the effort to obfuscate them in esoteric and generally vacuous theory is one of the contributions of the intelligentsia to enhancing their own power and the power of those they serve."
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"To live a life of honesty and integrity is a responsibility of every decent person."
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"The threat of China is not military. The threat of China is they can't be intimidated. Europe you can intimidate. When the US tries to get people to stop investing in Iran, European companies pull out, China disregards it. You look at history and understand why - they've been around for 4,000 years, they have contempt for the barbarians, they just don't give a damn."
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"In some ways, [the student anti-sweatshop movement] is like the anti-apartheid movement, except that in this case its striking at the core of the relations of exploitation. Much of this was initiated by Charlie Kernaghan of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights."
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"If there are dollars to be made, you destroy the environment. The reason is elementary. The people who are going to be harmed by this are your grandchildren and they don't have any votes in the market. Their interests are worth zero. Anybody that pays attention to their grandchildren's interests is being irrational. Because what you're supposed to do is maximize your own interests, measured by wealth, right now. Nothing else matters. So destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies, but within a framework of institutional lunacy."
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"The term "intellectual" is used conventionally to refer to people who happen to have unusual opportunities in this regard, and as always, opportunity confers moral responsibility."
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"Under capitalism, we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control."
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"The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history."
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"All forms of involuntary servitude are prohibited, not only slavery but also conscription, forced association, and forced welfare distribution."
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"Anyone who studies declassified documents soon becomes aware that government secrecy is largely an effort to protect policy makers from scrutiny by citizens, not to protect the country from enemies."
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"The best defense against democracy is to distract people."
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"Control of thought is more important for governments that are free and popular than for despotic and military states. The logic is straightforward: a despotic state can control its domestic enemies by force, but as the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs, which are none of their business… the public are to be observers, not participants, consumers of ideology as well as products."
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"I have no Facebook page or Twitter - I don't participate in it, and I don't like it particularly. I mean, it's a form of interaction, which strikes me as extremely superficial."
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"You can’t have meaningful political democracy without functioning economic democracy."
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"That's unfortunately common - to blame immigrants, to blame the African-Americans who are being helped by federal programs, to blame anyone available, to direct attention away from the roots of the distress which you're suffering. This combines with xenophobia, white supremacy, racism, misogyny, and other quite unpleasant phenomena which are far from being eradicated. All of this makes for a pretty dangerous brew. But economic issues are right in the center of it. And you can see this in the fact that so many former Obama voters now voted for Trump, or just didn't bother voting."
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"Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation."
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"Take like, say, Obama, he's called "liberal" and he's praised for his "principled objection to the Iraq war". What was his "principled objection"? He says it was a "strategic blunder," like Nazi generals after Stalingrad."
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"Stakeholders - meaning workers and community - the CEO could just as well be responsible to them. This presupposes there ought to be management but why does there have to be management? Why not have the stakeholders run the industry?"
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