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Quotes of Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (Hebrew) , Ph.D (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, and a prolific author and lecturer. He is the Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to the field of linguistics made in the 20th century. He also helped spark the cognitive revolution in psychology through his review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, in which he challenged the behaviorist approach to the study of behavior and language dominant in the 1950s. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has also affected the philosophy of language and mind (see Harman and Fodor). He is also credited with the establishment of the Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages in terms of their generative power. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar during the 1980–1992 time period, and was the eighth most cited scholar in any time period.
- 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.
- Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
- As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
- 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.
- Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
- 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.
- 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.
- Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.
- Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.
- I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.
- If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
- If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.
- If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
- In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.
- 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.
- Personally, I'm in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions of society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism, we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control.
- Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
- 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.
- Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes. They're designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators.
- States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.
- The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.
- The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.
- The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.
- Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.
- 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.
- You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.