It could be – and it has been argued, in my view rather plausibly, though neuroscientists don’t like it – that neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track.
NOAM CHOMSKYI don’t think that experience is a very useful or convincing attribute for a sensible foreign policy. Henry Kissinger had a lot of experience.
More Noam Chomsky Quotes
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Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, that reason was gone. So, first question: why does NATO exist?
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Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.
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Nicaragua dealt with the problem of terrorism in exactly the right way.
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Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.
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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.
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In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.
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But China, they’ve been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don’t see any need to.
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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.
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If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.
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I mean, to say it in a sentence, he describes elections as occasions in which groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state.
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Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.
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There’s never been anything like the so-called Vietnam Syndrome: it’s mostly a fabrication.
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Civil disobedience is – it’s no fun.
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The elections are run by the same industries that sell toothpaste on television.
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The invasion of Iraq, particularly, gave a big shot in the arm to the jihadi extremists.
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Now that’s so deep in history that there’s no point even bringing it up, but it did once exist.
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The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.
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The term ‘globalisation’ is conventionally used to refer to the specific form of investor-rights integration designed by wealth and power, for their own interests.
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The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.
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That’s why you have state secret laws. Citizens are not supposed to know what their government is doing to them.
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The Federal Reserve has an official commitment to two different policies. One is to prevent inflation from getting too high. The second is to maintain high employment.
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The polls show that concern over inequality among the general public rose pretty sharply after the Occupy movement started, very probably as a consequence. And there are other policy issues that came to the fore, which are significant.
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Nationalism has a way of oppressing others.
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If workers are more insecure, that’s very ‘healthy’ for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health.
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France had a policy, initiated by General de Gaulle, of trying to turn Europe into what was then called a ‘third force,’ independent of the two superpowers, so Europe should pursue an independent course.
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I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.
NOAM CHOMSKY