Quotes About Chomsky

If you're worried about the deficit, pay attention to the fact that it's almost all attributable to military spending and the totally dysfunctional health program.

In the 1960s, there was a point, 1968, '69, when there was a very strong antiwar movement against the war in Vietnam. But it's worth remembering that the war in Vietnam started - an outright war started in 1962.

Chomsky is a pencil-and-paper theoretician who wouldn't know Jabba the Hutt from the Cookie Monster

The word 'glamour' comes from the word 'grammar', and since the Chomskyan revolution the etymology has been fitting. Who could not be dazzled by the creative power of the mental grammar, by its ability to convey an infinite number of thoughts with a finite set of rules?

The linguist Noam Chomsky once suggested that our igno- rance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like.

according to the transition probabilities of English. Remember Chomsky's sentence Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. He contrived it not only to show that nonsense can be grammatical but also to show that improbable word sequences can be grammatical. In English texts the probability that the word colorless is followed by the word green is surely zero. So is the probability that green is followed by ideas, ideas by sleep, and sleep by furiously.

Thus, in short, in sum, in all, it was but a babystep for Chomsky, graced with this understanding of the ineffable richness of our bio-abilities, to become the universalist that he be, to extend his understanding to the political realm ...and to leap, by bio-necessity, into his political work-

I think Noam Chomsky is a national treasure - make that an international treasure.

If Chomsky says the educational system is an undemocratic system, you can say, well, you're there, you have a position at MIT. Well, it's perfectly attuned to the American system of control, a very sophisticated system of control that allows just enough dissidence so that those in power can point to the fact that the university is democratic but not enough dissidence to create a real danger to the system.

Karl Marx was in favor of socialist and communist-socialist revolutions, but he had a pretty nuanced view about it.

One night, Tim stumbled across a documentary called Manufacturing Consent. After viewing it, he found some writing online by its subject, Noam Chomsky, and as a result began to feel that there wasn't really a point to anything, that free will was an illusion, and that the things most people invested time and energy in were systems of control designed by those who sought to manipulate the general populace

My speculation is that the U.S. does not want to establish the principle that it has to defer to some higher authority before carrying out the use of violence.

Ras is a big fan of Noam Chomsky; calling it the Propaganda Ministry keeps things honest, he says. Like having a Ministry of War rather than a Department of Defense, or Counting Other People's Murdered Children instead of talking about Collateral Damage.

The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.

The effort to try to present the Social Security program as if it's a major problem, that's just a hidden way of trying to undermine and destroy it.

If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long. There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly. This hypothetical Martian would probably conclude that human beings were an evolutionary error.

Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions

the crisis of democracy" as when normally passive and apathetic populations become organized and seek to enter the political arena to pursue their interests and demands, threatening stability and order.

Now, the popular perception certainly is that violence is greater today-but that's mostly propaganda: that's just a part of the whole effort to make people frightened, so that they'll abandon their rights.

Thats the danger of democracy: If organizations can develop, if people are no longer just glued to the tube, you may have all these funny thoughts arising in their heads, like sickly inhibitions against the use of military force. That has to be overcome, but it hasn't been overcome.

I don't think we're smart enough to design, in any detail what a perfectly just and free society would be like. I think we can give some guidelines and more significant, we can ask how we can progress in that direction.

We're in favor of independence as long as it's in other people's empires, not in our own.)

It is useful to remember that no matter where we turn, there is rarely any shortage of elevated ideals to accompany the resort to violence.

Both parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period of the past generation. Mainstream Democrats are now pretty much what used to be called "moderate Republicans." Meanwhile, the Republican Party has largely drifted off the spectrum, becoming what respected conservative political analyst Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein call a "radical insurgency" that has virtually abandoned normal parliamentary politics. With