Quotes About Noam Chomsky

Dov Weisglass said the Gazans would remain on a diet but not to make them die of hunger. Israeli experts determined precisely how many calories a day Garzans needed for bare survival while also depriving them of medicines and other means of a decent life.

Kill the rich, fuck the middle class, marry the poor! Chomsky out!

Opposition to idealization is simply objection to rationality; it amounts to nothing more than an insistence that we shall not have meaningful intellectual work.

A consistent materialist would consider it as self-evident that the mind has very important innate structures, physically realized in some manner. Why should it be otherwise?

though of course the weak would have to be insane to implement their rights

Terrorism, he said is 'a reaction to the injustice in the region's domestic politics, inflicted in large part by the US.

As another example to amplify this point, there's been an enormous amount of coverage in the last week or so of the declaration of an emergency, to justify building a wall on the southern US border.

It is noteworthy that the pro-Israeli lobby was established, according to the declared aims of its founder, to eliminate pro-Arab influence in the State Department. This particular mission was accomplished, it seems, not so much by the lobby's effort as by the successful endeavors of the Christian Zionists.

No, there is no real Left now. If you are just counting heads, there are probably more people involved than in the 1960s, but they are atomized, committed to different special interests—gay rights, environmental rights, this, that. They don't coalesce into a movement that can really do things.

Syntactic Structures and LSLT.

It is, indeed, virtual dogma that the function of language is communication.

George Orwell coined the useful term "unperson" for creatures denied personhood because they don't abide by state doctrine. We may add the term "unhistory" to refer to the fate of unpersons, expunged from history on similar grounds.

Of course, it was the United States and Israel that had rejected diplomacy and the PLO that had been offering compromise for years, but Lewis's reversal of the facts was quite normal and unchallenged in the mainstream.

part of the potency of the common sense, is to rule out our thinking any differently about the world. That is, to subjugate our own mental capacity to imagine the world otherwise.

The lessons Noam Chomsky sets out to teach us in 'Toward a New Cold War' are invaluable. The United States, like any other nations, can and does err, and often in a big way. But Chomsky cannot support at all his implicit diagnosis that America is 'bad.'

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.

I don't think that experience is a very useful or convincing attribute for a sensible foreign policy. Henry Kissinger had a lot of experience.

Reagan was extreme. Beginning of his administration, one of the first things was to call in scabs - hadn't been done for a long time, and it's illegal in most countries - in the air controller strike.

The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.

The reason I am a political radical is that I work on syntax. If I worked on semantics (which in fact I do), I'd be a good Thatcherite.

Academics are mostly professionals, involved in their work and other concerns of their own, with no particular interest in the workings of the ideological system.

The [Ronald] Reagan administration told the business world that they were not going to enforce the labor laws.

As the Khmer Rouge were about to take over, Noam Chomsky wrote that their advent heralded a Cambodian liberation, "a new era of economic development and social justice." The new era turned out to be the killing-fields that took the lives of two million Cambodians.

The current dimensions of the left's intellectual crisis are more readily grasped in a writer like Noam Chomsky, who, as an anarchist, has never had illusions about existing "socialisms" and has no attachment, intellectual or visceral, to pristine Marxism. Chomsky's intellectual integrity and moral courage, to my mind, set a standard for political intellectuals.4 Yet in a manner that is not only characteristic of the non-Trotskyist left but seems endemic to its