Noam Chomsky Quotes About Human Nature

• A fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work, for creative inquiry, for free creation without the arbitrary limiting effects of coercive institutions. A decent society should maximize the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realized.

  Noam Chomsky

  Creative, Needs, Arbitrary

  Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault (2013). “The Chomsky - Foucault Debate: On Human Nature”, p.35, The New Press

• The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

  Noam Chomsky

  Nature, Powerful, Principles

• To object that the facts about human nature set limits on our ability to change the world and ourselves makes about as much sense as the lament that our lack of wings sets limits on our ability to 'fly' as far as eagles under our own power.

  Noam Chomsky

  Eagles, Wings, World

  Source: libcom.org

• Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature.

  Noam Chomsky

  Doe, Human Nature, Characteristics

  "Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media", www.imdb.com. 1992.

• In studying language we can discover many basic properties of this cognitive structure, its organization, and also the genetic predispositions that provide the foundation for its development. So in this respect, linguistics, first of all, tries to characterize a major feature of human cognitive organization. And second, I think it may provide a suggestive model for the study of other cognitive systems. And the collection of these systems is one aspect of human nature.

  Noam Chomsky

  Thinking, Organization, Trying

  Source: chomsky.info

• There is nothing more mysterious about the concept human nature than about the concept bee or chicken nature, at least for those who regard humans as creatures in the biological world.

  Noam Chomsky

  World, Bees, Mysterious

  Source: libcom.org

• We had one or another form of state capitalism during an extremely brief period of human history, which tells us essentially nothing about human nature. If you look at human societies and human interactions, you can find anything. You find selfishness, you find altruism, you find sympathy.

  Noam Chomsky

  Selfishness, Looks, Human Nature

  Source: pennpoliticalreview.org

• Adam Smith is an egalitarian, he believed in equality of outcome, not opportunity. He is an enlightenment figure, pre-capitalist. He says, suppose in England, one landowner got most of the land and other people would have nothing to live on. He says it wouldn't matter much, because the rich land owner, by virtue of his sympathy for other people would distribute resources among them, so that by an invisible hand, we would end up with a pretty egalitarian society. That is his conception of human nature.

  Noam Chomsky

  Opportunity, Invisible Hand, Hands

  Source: pennpoliticalreview.org

• It's true that many say that [they] object to the idea of "human nature," but it's not clear what that is supposed to mean. Are we different from ants?

  Noam Chomsky

  Mean, Ideas, Different

  Source: thefifthcolumnnews.com

• For one thing, studying language is by itself a part of a study of human intelligence that is, perhaps, the central aspect of human nature. And second, I think, it is a good model for studying other human properties, which ought to be studied by psychologists in the same way.

  Noam Chomsky

  Thinking, Way, Study

  Source: chomsky.info

• Peter Kropotkin was surely on the left. He was one of the founders of what is now called 'sociobiology' or 'evolutionary psychology' with his book Mutual Aid, arguing that human nature had evolved in ways conducive to the communitarian anarchism that he espoused.

  Noam Chomsky

  Book, Psychology, Way

  Source: libcom.org

• Marx's early manuscripts, with their roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, derived fundamental concepts such as alienation from a conception of human nature - what we would call genetically determined.

  Noam Chomsky

  Roots, Enlightenment, Fundamentals

  Source: libcom.org

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