Noam Chomsky

(23 votes)   The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

Noam Chomsky
American, Activist Quotes

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(263 votes)   The consistent anarchist should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. Some sort of council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is largely a sham when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers, and technocrats, a ''vanguard'' party, or a State bureaucracy.

Noam Chomsky
1928-, American Linguist, Political Activist

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(82 votes)   Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can't tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion.

Noam Chomsky
1928-, American Linguist, Political Activist

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(80 votes)   Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid-twentieth century.

Noam Chomsky
1928-, American Linguist, Political Activist

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(67 votes)   We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.

Noam Chomsky
1928-, American Linguist, Political Activist

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(59 votes)   The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.

Noam Chomsky
1928-, American Linguist, Political Activist

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(38 votes)   The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

Noam Chomsky
American, Activist Quotes

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(34 votes)   If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.

Noam Chomsky
American, Activist Quotes

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(31 votes)   Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.

Noam Chomsky
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(31 votes)   The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

Noam Chomsky
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(30 votes)   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.

Noam Chomsky
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(29 votes)   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.

Noam Chomsky
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(29 votes)   If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

Noam Chomsky
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(29 votes)   If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

Noam Chomsky
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(26 votes)   The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert.

Noam Chomsky
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