Noam Chomsky Quotes About Progress

• Labor #‎ Unions are the leading force for #‎ democratization and #‎ progress .

  Noam Chomsky

  Progress, Unions, Force

• If you look at history, even recent history, you see that there is indeed progress. . . . Over time, the cycle is clearly, generally upwards. And it doesn't happen by laws of nature. And it doesn't happen by social laws. . . . It happens as a result of hard work by dedicated people who are willing to look at problems honestly, to look at them without illusions, and to go to work chipping away at them, with no guarantee of success — in fact, with a need for a rather high tolerance for failure along the way, and plenty of disappointments.

  Noam Chomsky

  Disappointment, Hard Work, Law

• In the literal sense, there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has been substantial progress towards higher standards of rights, justice and freedom - along with all too many illustrations of how remote is the goal of a decent society.

  Noam Chomsky

  Rights, Illustration, Justice

• I think that in order to achieve progress in the study of language and human cognitive faculties in general it is necessary first to establish 'psychic distance' from the 'mental facts' to which Köhler referred, and then to explore the possibilities for developing explanatory theories... We must recognize that even the most familiar phenomena require explanation and that we have no privileged access to the underlying mechanisms, no more so than in physiology or physics.

  Noam Chomsky

  Distance, Thinking, Order

• Take the US. Women were not even able to vote until 90 ago, at about the same time they gained the right in Afghanistan. Rights of former slaves were very limited until the 1960s, and in some ways still are. In these and other domains there has been progress in democracy, though still seriously flawed. In other dimensions - the control of concentrated wealth over the political process, for example, things have gotten much worse in recent years. And there is much more, in both directions.

  Noam Chomsky

  Rights, Years, Political

  Source: chomsky.info

• There are huge areas where the human mind is apparently incapable of forming sciences, or at least has not done so. There are other areas - so far, in fact, one area only [physics] - in which we have demonstrated the capacity for true scientific progress.

  Noam Chomsky

  Mind, Progress, Done

  Source: chomsky.info

• Physics and those parts of other fields that grow out of physics - chemistry, the structure of big molecules - in those domains, there is a lot of progress. In many other domains, there is very little progress in developing real scientific understanding.

  Noam Chomsky

  Real, Understanding, Progress

  Source: chomsky.info

• The very properties of the human mind that provide an enormous scope for human genius in some domains will serve as barriers to progress in other domains, just as the properties that enable each child to acquire a complex and highly articulated human language block the acquisition of other imaginable linguistic systems.

  Noam Chomsky

  Children, Block, Mind

  Source: chomsky.info

• If humans are organisms like every other organism - which they are - then we should expect that if there are some domains where real scientific progress is possible, then there are others where it is not.

  Noam Chomsky

  Real, Progress, Should

  Source: chomsky.info

• To say that the United States has pursued diplomacy with North Korea is a little bit misleading. It did under the Clinton administration, though neither side completely lived up to their obligations. Clinton didn't do what was promised, nor did North Korea, but they were making progress. So when Bush came into the presidency, North Korea had enough uranium or plutonium for maybe one or two bombs, but then very limited missile capacity. During the Bush years it's exploded. The reason is, he immediately canceled the diplomacy and he's pretty much blocked it ever since.

  Noam Chomsky

  Korea, Years, Two

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

• Should a community... be free to enact legislation to say they don't want blacks? Now that's illegal. Fifty years ago it was legal. Is that progress or is that regress?

  Noam Chomsky

  Years, Community, Progress

  "Noam Chomsky: Drug Cartels and the Growing Border War". Interview with Luis Fernando Cárdenas, www.guernicamag.com. August 15, 2011.

• The lessons are, unfortunately, that a small weak country that is facing an extremely hostile and very violent superpower will not make much progress unless there's a strong solidarity movement within the superpower that will restrain its actions. With more support within the United States, I think the Haitian efforts could have succeeded.

  Noam Chomsky

  Country, Strong, Thinking

  "Chomsky on Haiti". Interview with Keane Bhatt, www.counterpunch.org. March 9, 2010.

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