Quotation by Noam Chomsky:

...one of the major reasons for government secrecy is to protect the government from its own population.

Noam Chomsky     (more by this author)

1928 -

Avram Noam Chomsky , known as Noam Chomsky, is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and political activist. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as one of the fathers of modern linguistics, and a major figure of analytic philosophy. Since the 1960s, he has become known more widely as a political dissident and an anarchist, referring to himself as a libertarian socialist. Chomsky is the author of more than 150 books and has received worldwide attention for his views, despite being typically absent from the mainstream media.

In the 1950s, Chomsky began developing his theory of generative grammar, which has undergone numerous revisions and has had a profound influence on linguistics. His approach to the study of language emphasizes "an innate set of linguistic principles shared by all humans" known as universal grammar, "the initial state of the language learner," and discovering an "account for linguistic variation via the most general possible mechanisms." He elaborated on these ideas in 1957's Syntactic Structures, which then laid the groundwork for the concept of transformational grammar. He also established the Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages in terms of their generative power. In 1959, Chomsky published a widely influential review of B. F. Skinner's theoretical book Verbal Behavior. In this review and other writings, Chomsky broadly and aggressively challenged the behaviorist approaches to studies of behavior and language dominant at the time, and contributed to the cognitive revolution in psychology. His naturalistic[10] approach to the study of language has influenced the philosophy of language and mind.

Author Information from Wikipedia

Country: United States

Type: Prose
Context: Unknown
Context Details: said in Democracy Now interview with Amy Goodman in response to Wikileaks leak of 250,000 diplomatic documents in 11/2010
Source: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/30/n
Uttered: 11