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Noam Chomsky Quotes

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"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."

"To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public."

"You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it."

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."

"As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss."

"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."

"American society is now remarkably atomized. Political organizations have collapsed. In fact, it seems like even bowling leagues are collapsing. The left has a lot to answer for here. There's been a drift toward very fragmenting tendencies among left groups, toward this sort of identity politics."

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

"States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.""

"Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes. They're designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators."

"If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion."

"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media."

"If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged."

"We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others."

"I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system."

"Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists."

"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."

"Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation."

"The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself."

"The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - "indoctrination," we might say - exercised through the mass media."

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