Noam Chomsky quotes - page 7

A study of the inter-American system published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London concluded that, while the US pays lip service to democracy, the real commitment is to "private, capitalist enterprise." When the rights of investors are threatened, democracy has to go; if these rights are safeguarded, killers and torturers will do just fine. (Noam Chomsky)
Modern linguistics has also failed to deal with the Cartesian observations regarding human language in any serious way. View quote
Noam Chomsky
... the stupefying effect spectator sports have in making people passive, atomized, obedient nonparticipants-nonquestioning, easily controlled and easily disciplined. View quote
Noam Chomsky
The whole question of recognizing the right of a state to exist was invented solely for Israel. People, on the other hand, have a right to exist. So the people who live on the land - Israelis and Palestinians - have a right to live in security and peace. View quote
Noam Chomsky
The deep structure that expresses the meaning is common to all languages, so it is claimed, being a simple reflection of the forms of thought. View quote
Noam Chomsky
We will consider the facts about postwar Indochina insofar as they can be ascertained, but a major emphasis will be on the ways in which these facts have been interpreted, filtered, distorted or modified by the ideological institutions in the West. View quote
Noam Chomsky
Cartesian linguistics was not concerned simply with descriptive grammar, in this sense, but rather with "grammaire générale,” that is, with the universal principles of language structure. View quote
Noam Chomsky
We take for granted that the organism does not learn to grow arms or to reach puberty... When we turn to the mind and its products, the situation is not qualitatively different from what we find in the case of the body. View quote
Noam Chomsky
The Ottoman Empire was an ugly affair, but they had the right idea. The rulers in Turkey were fortunately so corrupt that they left people alone pretty much -- were mostly interested in robbing them -- and they left them alone to run their own affairs, and their own regions and their own communities with a lot of local self determination. View quote
Noam Chomsky
The idea is to create a picture among the population that we're all one happy family. We're America, we have a national interest, we're working together. There are us nice workers, the firms in which we work and the government who works for us. We pick them - they're our servants. And that's all there is in the world - no other conflicts, no other categories of people, no further structure to the system beyond that. Certainly nothing like class. Unless you happen to be in the ruling class, in which case you're very well aware of it. View quote
Noam Chomsky
[This view is contrasted with all forms of Empiricism, by which it is] assumed that development is uniform across (cognitive) domains, and that the intrinsic properties of the initial state (of the mind) are homogeneous and undifferentiated - an assumption found across a spectrum reaching from Skinner to Piaget. (Noam Chomsky)
If the population allows it to proceed, it's just going to go on and on like this. Until the next crash - which is so much expected that credit agencies, which evaluate the status of firms, are now counting into their calculations the taxpayer bailout that they expect to come after the next crash... Everywhere you look, policies are designed this way, which should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone. That's what happens when you put power into the hands of a narrow sector of wealth, which is dedicated to increasing power for itself - just as you'd expect. View quote
Noam Chomsky
The U. S. has always insisted on its right to use force, whatever international law requires, and whatever international institutions decide.... The U. S., of course, is not alone in these practices. Other states commonly act in much the same way, if not constrained by external or internal forces. View quote
Noam Chomsky
The Crisis, the civilizational crisis of the West at this point is devastating... it does bring up childhood memories of listening to Hitler raving on the radio to raucous crowds... it makes you wonder if this species is even viable. View quote
Noam Chomsky
If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. View quote
Noam Chomsky
Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don't think people didn't know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we're educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don't educate them, what we call "education," they're going to take control -- "they" being what Alexander Hamilton called the "great beast," namely the people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow. View quote
Noam Chomsky
[...] one must be cautious in assessing the political significance of the relative freedom from repression - at least for the privileged - in the United States. Exactly what does it mean, concretely? View quote
Noam Chomsky
The pathology of Islamophobia is growing throughout the West - it is taking its most lethal form in India. View quote
Noam Chomsky
Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists. View quote
Noam Chomsky
You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it. View quote
Noam Chomsky
Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony. (Noam Chomsky)
States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions. View quote
Noam Chomsky
If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion. View quote
Noam Chomsky
The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful. View quote
Noam Chomsky
Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world. View quote
Noam Chomsky