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Noam Chomsky Quotes - Page 8

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The more privilege you have, the more opportunity you have. The more opportunity you have, the more responsibility you have.

The more privilege you have, the more opportunity you have. The more opportunity you have, the more responsibility you have.

Noam Chomsky
Responsibility, Opportunity, Privilege

The fact is that if you have not developed language, you simply don't have access to most of human experience, and if you don't have access to experience, then you're not going to be able to think properly.

Noam Chomsky
Thinking, Experience, Able

All media depend on advertisement to survive.

Noam Chomsky
Media, Advertisements, Depends
Source: theanarchistlibrary.org

That's unfortunately common - to blame immigrants, to blame the African-Americans who are being helped by federal programs, to blame anyone available, to direct attention away from the roots of the distress which you're suffering. This combines with xenophobia, white supremacy, racism, misogyny, and other quite unpleasant phenomena which are far from being eradicated. All of this makes for a pretty dangerous brew. But economic issues are right in the center of it. And you can see this in the fact that so many former Obama voters now voted for Trump, or just didn't bother voting.

Noam Chomsky
Xenophobia, Roots, White
Source: www.brooklynrail.org

The entire socioeconomic system is based on production for profit and a growth imperative that cannot be sustained.

Noam Chomsky
Growth, Profit, Imperatives
"Global Warming and the Future of Humanity: An Interview With Noam Chomsky and Graciela Chichilnisky". Interview with C.J. Polychroniou, www.truth-out.org. September 17, 2016.

Power is concentrated. The general policy is exactly the way that Adam Smith described it: it's designed for the benefit of its principal architects, the powerful. It serves "the vile maxim of the masters: all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else". Those are the basic rules of the world.

Noam Chomsky
Powerful, Benefits, World
Source: chomsky.info

I suppose frogs pay no attention to being frogs. They take it for granted. What interests a frog are differences among frogs. From our point of view they are more or less the same, from their point of view they are all radically different.

Noam Chomsky
Views, Differences, Different
Source: chomsky.info

Nothing in these abstract economic models actually works in the real world. It doesn't matter how many footnotes they put in, or how many ways they tinker around the edges. The whole enterprise is totally rotten at the core: it has no relation to reality.

Noam Chomsky
Real, Economic Models, Rotten
"Understanding Power". Book by Noam Chomsky, 2002.

I think there is a good reason why the propaganda system works that way. It recognizes that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore it is important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them.

Noam Chomsky
Thinking, Support, Understanding
Noam Chomsky (2010). “The Chomsky Reader”, p.48, Pantheon

Corporations are totalitarian institutions. Board of directors at the top of managers give orders, everyone follows orders..... At the very bottom of command, if you are lucky you can rent yourself to it and get a job , and if you are sufficiently propagandized you may even buy some of the junk they produce and so on.

Noam Chomsky
Jobs, Order, Giving

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

Noam Chomsky
Powerful, Hero, People
Noam Chomsky (2002). “The Umbrella of U.S. Power: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Contradictions of U.S. Policy”, p.42, Seven Stories Press

People have to be atomized and segregated and alone. They're not supposed to organize, because then they might be something beyond spectators of action. They might actually be participants if many people with limited resources could get together to enter the political arena. That's really threatening.

Noam Chomsky
Media, People, Political
Noam Chomsky (2011). “Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda”, p.23, Seven Stories Press

The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history.

Noam Chomsky
Mass Destruction, Iraq, Numbers

It hardly takes more than a day in Gaza to begin to appreciate what it must be like to try to survive in the world’s largest open-air prison.

Noam Chomsky
Air, Appreciate, Trying
"Gaza’s Dirty Little Secret Finally Revealed By Reporters" by Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 20, 2012.

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.

Noam Chomsky
Media, Democracy, United States
Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault (2006). “The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature”, The New Press

There is a reason why Nelson Mandela went to Cuba to praise Castro and thank the Cuban people almost as soon as he got out of jail. That's a third world reaction and they understand it. Cuba played an enormous role in the liberation of Africa and the overthrow of Apartheid, sending doctors and teachers to the poorest places in the world, to Haiti, to Pakistan after the earthquake, almost everywhere. The internationalism is just astonishing. I don't think there has been anything like it in history.

Noam Chomsky
Teacher, Thinking, Doctors
Source: pennpoliticalreview.org

That was the reason why very few people fleeing the rise of fascism in Europe, especially in Germany, could get to the United States. And there were famous incidents like with the MS Saint Louis, which brought a lot of immigrants, mostly Jewish, from Europe. It reached Cuba, with people expecting to be admitted to the United States from there. But the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt wouldn't allow them in and they had to go back to Europe where many of them died in concentration camps.

Noam Chomsky
Europe, People, Fleeing
Source: thehumanist.com

There’s no more morality in world affairs, fundamentally, than there was at the time of Genghis Khan.

Noam Chomsky
World, Morality, Affair

While Trump keeps the spotlight on himself, the "respectable" Republican establishment chips away at government programs that benefit the general population.

Noam Chomsky
Republican, Program, Respectable
Source: www.truth-out.org

The United States is absolutely the most dangerous country in the world.

Noam Chomsky
Country, United States, World
Source: www.truth-out.org

The US is a country [in which] eighty percent of the population thinks the Bible was written by god. About half think every word is literally true. So it's had to appeal to that - and to the nativist population, the people that are frightened, have always been... It's a very frightened country and that's increasing now with the recognition that the white population is going to be a minority pretty soon, "they've taken our country from us."

Noam Chomsky
Country, Taken, Thinking
"Noam Chomsky on America's Economic Suicide". Interview with Laura Flanders / GRITtv, www.alternet.org. May 4, 2012.

Passivity may be the easy course, but it is hardly the honorable one.

Noam Chomsky
May, Easy, Honorable
Noam Chomsky (2015). “Because We Say So”, p.67, City Lights Books

There have been many measures taken to try to turn the educational system towards more control, more indoctrination, more vocational training, imposing a debt, which traps students and young people into a life of conformity... That's the exact opposite of [what] traditionally comes out of The Enlightenment. And there's a constant struggle between those. In the colleges, in the schools, do you train for passing tests, or do you train for creative inquiry?

Noam Chomsky
Educational, Taken, Struggle

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.

Noam Chomsky
Language Words, Law, Generations
Noam Chomsky (2003). “For Reasons Of State”, p.402, Penguin Books India

The "prophets" were what we would call dissident intellectuals. They provided critical geopolitical analysis, condemned the crimes of the powerful, called for justice and mercy for those who needed help, etc. I wouldn't personally endorse everything they said, any more than I would for critics of power and its crimes today. But rather generally I think they played an honorable role - and suffered accordingly.

Noam Chomsky
Powerful, Thinking, Justice
Source: chomsky.info

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