For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.
NOAM CHOMSKYThat’s all accurate and of some importance, but of far more importance is the fact that elections just don’t take place, not in any meaningful sense of the term ‘election.’
More Noam Chomsky Quotes
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The U.S. – the idea that the U.S. has introduced and imposed principles of international law, that’s hardly even a joke.
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If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
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You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.
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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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John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he’s regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship.
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It is easier to go to the Internet than to go to the library, undoubtedly. But the shift from no libraries to the existence of libraries was a much greater shift than what we’ve seen with the Internet’s development.
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Sometimes I lose my temper.
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Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy, and they have to be – protect themselves.
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The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society.
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The Republican Party has become overwhelmingly so extreme that it’s hardly a traditional political party anymore.
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It matters little, at this point, where the exact truth lies in the maze of perjury, evasion, and of contempt for the normal – hardly inspiring – standards of political conduct.
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It’s dangerous when people are willing to give up their privacy.
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If you’re working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.
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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 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.
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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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No matter what engineering field you’re in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.
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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.
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History shows that, more often than not, loss of sovereignty leads to liberalisation imposed in the interests of the powerful.
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The godfather does not accept disobedience, even from a small storekeeper who doesn’t pay his protection money.
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A war with Pakistan would be an utter disaster.
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Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.
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Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.
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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.
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Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.
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Two days after the Boston marathon bombings, there was a drone strike in Yemen attacking a peaceful village, which killed a target who could very easily have been apprehended. But, of course, it is just easier to terrorise people.
NOAM CHOMSKY