But I would not intend this to imply that in all imaginable circumstances one must, necessarily, act in accordance with this general responsibility.
NOAM CHOMSKYIf you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.
More Noam Chomsky Quotes
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Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.
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There’s very little dislike of Americans in the world, shown by repeated polls, and the dissatisfaction – that is, the hatred and the anger.
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There’s a lot of fuss on the Left about election irregularities, like, you know, the voting machines were tampered with, they didn’t count the votes right, and so on.
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If you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.
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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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By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population.
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Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy, and they have to be – protect themselves.
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Our only real hope for democracy is that we get the money out of politics entirely and establish a system of publicly funded elections.
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The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.
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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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There’s never been anything like the so-called Vietnam Syndrome: it’s mostly a fabrication.
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In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued – they may be essential to survival.
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It’s dangerous when people are willing to give up their privacy.
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There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‘That person I see is a savage monster;’ instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.
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If you’re teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.
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The United States is afraid of China; it is not a military threat to anyone and is the least aggressive of all the major military powers.
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States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.
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The elections are run by the same industries that sell toothpaste on television.
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In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.
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One of the best predictors of policy around is Thomas Ferguson’s investment theory of politics, as he calls it – very outstanding political economist – which essentially.
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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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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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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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The murder of Lumumba, in which the U.S. was involved, in the Congo destroyed Africa’s major hope for development. Congo is now total horror story, for years.
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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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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