Noam Chomsky Quotes About Giving

• It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.

  Noam Chomsky

  Freedom, Power, Government

  Noam Chomsky (2013). “How the World Works”, p.217, Soft Skull Press

• The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

  Noam Chomsky

  Smart, Thinking, Views

  Noam Chomsky (2013). “How the World Works”, p.234, Soft Skull Press

• Corporations are totalitarian institutions. Board of directors at the top of managers give orders, everyone follows orders..... At the very bottom of command, if you are lucky you can rent yourself to it and get a job , and if you are sufficiently propagandized you may even buy some of the junk they produce and so on.

  Noam Chomsky

  Jobs, Order, Giving

• If you want to control a population... give them a God to worship.

  Noam Chomsky

  Giving, Population, Want

• Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

  Noam Chomsky

  Yield, Concentration Of Wealth, Giving

  Noam Chomsky (2012). “Occupy”, p.19, Penguin UK

• The threat of China is not military. The threat of China is they can't be intimidated. Europe you can intimidate. When the US tries to get people to stop investing in Iran, European companies pull out, China disregards it. You look at history and understand why - they've been around for 4,000 years, they have contempt for the barbarians, they just don't give a damn.

  Noam Chomsky

  Military, Iran, Years

  Interview with Robert Trivers, seedmagazine.com. September 06, 2006.

• Blacks have no rights - in fact they were three - fifths human according to the constitution to give slave owners more voting rights. So that's African Americans.

  Noam Chomsky

  Rights, Slave Owners, Giving

  Interview with Jegan Vincent de Paul, chomsky.info. August 15, 2012.

• Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.

  Noam Chomsky

  Giving, Speech, Our Society

  "Chomsky on McCutcheon: ‘Let’s Forget Any Pretense of Being a Democratic Society’" by Abel Collins, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 27, 2014.

• If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

  Noam Chomsky

  Giving, Challenges, Trying

• I'll have 15 letters today from mostly young kids who don't like what's going on and want to do something about it, and [they ask me] if I can give them some advice as to what they should do, or can I tell them what to read or something.

  Noam Chomsky

  Kids, Giving, Advice

  Source: www.iww.org

• What has to be done today is (1) large-scale conversion (weatherizing , etc.), (2) sharp change in transportation to greater efficiency, like high-speed rail, (3) serious efforts to move to sustainable energy, probably solar in the somewhat longer term, (4) other adjustments that are feasible. If done effectively, that might be enough to stave off disaster. If not, then we can give up the ghost, because there are no alternatives in this world, at least none that I've seen suggested.

  Noam Chomsky

  Giving Up, Moving, Effort

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

• Prophet just means intellectual. They were people giving geopolitical analysis, moral lessons, that sort of thing. We call them intellectuals today. There were the people we honor as prophets, there were the people we condemn as false prophets. But if you look at the biblical record, at the time, it was the other way around. The flatterers of the Court of King Ahab were the ones who were honored. The ones we call prophets were driven into the desert and imprisoned.

  Noam Chomsky

  Kings, Mean, Biblical

  "The U.S. Role in the World". Interview with Harry Kreisler, globetrotter.berkeley.edu. March 22, 2002.

• Rush Limbaugh has answered - it's the rich liberals who own the banks and run the government, and of course run the media, and they don't care about you - they just want to give everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and communists and so on.

  Noam Chomsky

  Running, Gay, Government

  Source: www.iww.org

• Capitalism is based on the principle that everything has to be privately owned; it can't be held in common. There is even a dogma, which is today called, the "tragedy of the commons" which holds that if things are held in common they are going to be destroyed. If they're privatized, like you give them to Bechtel or Monsanto or ExxonMobil, then they'll be preserved because that's the capitalist's religion.

  Noam Chomsky

  Giving, Tragedy, Principles

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• Wikileaks is a democratizing force. Its giving individuals access to decisions and thinking by their representatives and in a democracy that ought to be reflexive.

  Noam Chomsky

  Thinking, Giving, Decision

  Interview with Jegan Vincent de Paul, chomsky.info. August 15, 2012.

• There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. [Adolf] Hitler was appealing to groups with similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at least they were answers; these groups weren't getting them anywhere else. It was the Jews and the Bolsheviks [that were the problem].

  Noam Chomsky

  Crazy, Giving, Historical

  Source: www.iww.org

• There's an interesting book by the former Brazilian ambassador Celso Amorim. In 2010, he initiated an effort along with Turkey to settle the whole Iran issue. Nobody outside of the United States takes it to be much of an issue. They made a deal with Iran for Iran to essentially give away its low enriched uranium to Turkey for storage, and in return, the Western powers. It was immediately scratched by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And the main reason was they didn't want anybody else to be involved in it. We were supposed to run things, but we didn't say that.

  Noam Chomsky

  Running, Book, Giving

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• There's an internal coherence and logic to what they get from [Rush] Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the rest of these guys. And they sound very convincing, they're very self-confident, and they have an answer to everything - a crazy answer, but it's an answer. And it's our fault if that goes on. So one thing to be done is don't ridicule these people, join them, and talk about their real grievances and give them a sensible answer, like, "Take over your factories."

  Noam Chomsky

  Crazy, Real, Self

  Source: www.iww.org

• The United States is a special case, and for me, very interesting. It's studied carefully and we know a lot about it. One of the most striking features of the elections is the class-based character of the vote. Now, class is not discussed or even measured in the United States. In fact, the word is almost obscene, except for the term "middle class." And you can't get exact class data; the census doesn't even give class data. But you can sort of see the significance of it just from income figures.

  Noam Chomsky

  Character, Giving, Interesting

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• I would feel no hesitation in saying that it is the responsibility of a decent human being to give assistance to a child who is being attacked by a rabid dog, but I would not intend this to imply that in all imaginable circumstances one must, necessarily, act in accordance with this general responsibility.

  Noam Chomsky

  Dog, Children, Responsibility

  "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" by Noam Chomsky, www.nybooks.com. April 20, 1967.

• The main selling appeal of NAFTA to US corporations is that it gives them an advantage in the North American market over their European and Japanese competitors.

  Noam Chomsky

  Giving, Corporations, Selling

• That's a point that Dan Ellsberg has made for years. He said it's kind of like if you and I go into a grocery store to rob it, and I have a gun. The guy may give you the money in the cash register. I'm using the gun even if I don't shoot. Well that's nuclear weapons - essential to post-war deterrence - they cast a shadow over everything.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Gun, Years

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

• Stephen Colbert's recent comment is apropos: When the Republican legislature of North Carolina responded to a scientific study predicting a threatening rise in sea level by barring state and local agencies from developing regulations or planning documents to address the problem, Colbert responded: "This is a brilliant solution. If your science gives you a result that you don't like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved."

  Noam Chomsky

  Giving, Planning, Brilliant

  "Noam Chomsky: On Trump and the State of the Union". Interview with George Yancy, www.nytimes.com. July 5, 2017.

• Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying.

  Noam Chomsky

  Giving, Study, Individual

• In fact, for the majority of the population, wages and incomes have stagnated and conditions have gotten worse. So they are asking, "what did I do wrong?" And the answer that the talk show host is giving them is convincing, in it's internal logic. It's saying, "what's wrong is the rich liberals own everything, run everything, they don't care about you; therefore, distrust them" and so on.

  Noam Chomsky

  Running, Giving, Majority

  Source: theanarchistlibrary.org

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