"Unfortunately, you can’t vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place"
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Quote collection
Noam Chomsky quotes (page 8 of 84)
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"Ontological questions are generally beside the point, hardly more than a form of harassment."
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"My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state... It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century."
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"In Egypt the neoliberal programs have meant statistical growth, like right before the Arab Spring, Egypt was a kind of poster child for the World Bank and the IMF [International Monetary Fund:] the marvelous economic management and great reform. The only problem was for most of the population it was a kind of like a blow in the solar plexus: wages going down, benefits being eliminated, subsidized food gone and meanwhile, high concentration of wealth and a huge amount of corruption."
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"In the American Jewish community, there is little willingness to face the fact that the Palestinian Arabs have suffered a monstrous historical injustice . . . Until this is recognized, discussion of the Middle East crisis cannot even begin."
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"Markets have built in inefficiencies, serious inefficiencies which are well known."
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"Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can't tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion."
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"My linguistics is pretty theoretical."
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"If you're in a system where you must make profit in order to survive. You are compelled to ignore negative externalities, effects on others."
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"The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another."
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"If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion."
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"When Israelis in the occupied territories now claim that they have to defend themselves, they are defending themselves in the sense that any military occupier has to defend itself against the population they are crushing. You can't defend yourself when you're militarily occupying someone else's land. That's not defense. Call it what you like, it's not defense."
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"For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination."
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"The corporations plainly want academic scholarship to create a web of mystification that will avoid any public awareness of the way in which power actually functions in the society, and the faculty has caught the message and they do it magnificently."
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"If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long."
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"There is a social responsibility to take care of vulnerable people. It seems that a sensible social responsibility is obligatory education, but also decent education, and that is not happening."
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"Africa's a wreck and it's not because it was hit by an asteroid. It's a wreck largely because it was hit by Europe."
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"Efforts can succeed over time, and not trying ensures that the worst will happen."
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"That was the reason why very few people fleeing the rise of fascism in Europe, especially in Germany, could get to the United States. And there were famous incidents like with the MS Saint Louis, which brought a lot of immigrants, mostly Jewish, from Europe. It reached Cuba, with people expecting to be admitted to the United States from there. But the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt wouldn't allow them in and they had to go back to Europe where many of them died in concentration camps."
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"There’s no more morality in world affairs, fundamentally, than there was at the time of Genghis Khan."
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