Noam Chomsky Quotations
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Noam Chomsky
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
49 Quotation(s) Total:
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...capitalism is basically a system where everything is for sale, and the more money you have, the more you can get. And, in particular, that's true of freedom. Freedom is one of the commodities that is for sale, and if you are affluent, you can have a lot of it. It shows up in all sorts of ways. It shows up if you get in trouble with the law, let's say, or in any aspect of life it shows up. And for that reason it makes a lot of sense, if you acc... |
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...jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you’re trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them. |
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...one of the major reasons for government secrecy is to protect the government from its own population. |
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...one of the major reasons for government secrecy is to protect the government from its own population. |
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...the point of public relations slogans like "Support Our Troops" is that they don't mean anything [...] that's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody is gonna be against and I suppose everybody will be for, because nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. But its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something, do you support our policy? And that'... |
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...there are no two points of view more antithetical than classical liberalism and capitalism -- and that's why when the University of Chicago publishes a bicentennial edition of (Adam) Smith, they have to distort the text (which they did): because as a true classical liberal, Smith was strongly opposed to all of the idiocy they now sprout in his name. |
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...In the past, the U.S. has sometimes been described sardonically -- but not inaccurately -- as a one-party state: the business party, with two factions called Democrats and Republicans.
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All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. |
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Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media. |
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As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss. |
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Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever. |
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Clinton, Kennedy, they all carried out mass murder, but they didn't think that that was what they were doing - nor does Bush. You know, they were defending justice and democracy from greater evils. And in fact I think you'd find it hard to discover a mass murderer in history who didn't think that- |
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Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way. |
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Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune. |
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Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it. |
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Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world. |
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I choose to live in what I think is the greatest country in the world, which is committing horrendous terrorist acts and should stop. |
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If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American President would have been hanged. |
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If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion. |
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If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all. |
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