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We naturally assume that our mental structures are universal. But I suppose an outside biologist looking at us would see something very different. He would see that, like other organisms, we have a narrow sphere within which we are very good, but that sphere is very limited. And that, in fact, the very achievements we can have within that sphere are related to lack of achievements in other spheres.
Noam Chomsky
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A colonial war is a very dirty kind of war. You're not fighting armed forces. You're fighting mostly unarmed people. And to fight that kind of war requires professional killers, which means mercenaries.
Noam Chomsky
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The American escalation of the war in Laos provoked a response by the Communist forces, which now control more of Laos than ever before.
Noam Chomsky
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Real schools ought to provide people with techniques of self-defense, but that would mean teaching the truth about the world and about the society, and schools couldn't survive very long if they did that.
Noam Chomsky
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In my own professional work I have touched on a variety of different fields. I've done work in mathematical linguistics, for example, without any professional credentials in mathematics; in this subject I am completely self-taught, and not very well taught.
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The very properties of the human mind that provide an enormous scope for human genius in some domains will serve as barriers to progress in other domains, just as the properties that enable each child to acquire a complex and highly articulated human language block the acquisition of other imaginable linguistic systems.
Noam Chomsky
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The House of Representatives, which was closer to the population, had much less power. The executive was more or less an administrator, not an emperor like today.
Noam Chomsky
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Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions.
Noam Chomsky
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One thing that you and I know is language. Another thing that you and I know is how objects behave in perceptual space. We have a whole mass of complex ways of understanding what is the nature of visual space. A proper part of psychology ought to be, and in recent years has been, an effort to try to discover the principles of how we organize visual space. I would say that the same is true of every domain of psychology, of human studies.
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There are huge areas where the human mind is apparently incapable of forming sciences, or at least has not done so. There are other areas - so far, in fact, one area only [physics] - in which we have demonstrated the capacity for true scientific progress.
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Power is concentrated. The general policy is exactly the way that Adam Smith described it: it's designed for the benefit of its principal architects, the powerful. It serves "the vile maxim of the masters: all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else". Those are the basic rules of the world.
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To achieve respectability, to be admitted to the debate, they must accept without question or inquiry the fundamental doctrine that the state is benevolent, governed by the loftiest intentions, adopting a defensive stance, not an actor in world affairs but only reacting to the crimes of others...If even the harshest of critics tacitly adopt these premises, then the ordinary person may ask, who am I to disagree?
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The freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.
Noam Chomsky
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The 'free-floating intellectual' may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.
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If you want to make changes in the world, you're going to have to be there day after day doing the boring, straightforward work of getting a couple of people interested and building a slightly bigger organization and carrying out the next move and suffering frustration and finally getting somewhere. That's how the world changes.
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I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.
Noam Chomsky
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Farming out atrocities to paramilitaries is standard operating procedure.
Noam Chomsky
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The prescription for endless war poses a far greater danger to Americans than perceived enemies do, for reasons the terrorist organisations understand very well.
Noam Chomsky
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After the first International Days of Protest in October, 1965, Senator Mansfield criticized the 'sense of utter irresponsibility' shown by the demonstrators.
Noam Chomsky
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Tough love is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.
Noam Chomsky
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As long as each individual is facing the television tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege
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Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.
Noam Chomsky
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I think that we have basically nothing in the field of human behavior. Maybe that is just a condition of temporary ignorance. But it may be that we are simply not intellectually equipped to develop such a theory.
Noam Chomsky
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Hypocrites are those who apply to others the standards that they refuse to accept for themselves.
Noam Chomsky
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What can one say about a country where a museum of science in a great city can feature an exhibit in which people fire machine guns from a helicopter at Vietnamese huts, with a light flashing when a hit is scored? What can one say about a country where such an idea can even be considered? You have to weep for this country.
Noam Chomsky
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Noam Chomsky
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Born:
December 7, 1928
(age 95)
Bio:
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist.
Known for:
Understanding Power (2002)
Hegemony or Survival (2003)
Chomsky on Anarchism (2005)
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