Noam Chomsky Quotes About Study

• There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.

  Noam Chomsky

  Edification, Too Much, Reason Why

  KGNU benefit at the University of Colorado at Boulder, April 05, 2003.

• I mean, it’s true, nobody talks about them, but when you bring it up, the idea that you have to rent yourself to somebody and follow their orders, and that they own and you work there, and you built it but you don’t own it, that’s a highly unnatural notion. You don’t have to study any complicated theories to see that this is an attack on human dignity.

  Noam Chomsky

  Respect, Work, Mean

  Noam Chomsky (2013). “On Anarchism”, p.109, New Press, The

• Anyone who studies declassified documents soon becomes aware that government secrecy is largely an effort to protect policy makers from scrutiny by citizens, not to protect the country from enemies.

  Noam Chomsky

  Country, Government, Effort

• One of the questions asked in that study was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture?

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Thinking, Average

  "Media Control". Book by Noam Chomsky, 1991.

• 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

• A 1998 study was done in Hebrew by an Israeli scholar, Yosef Grodzinsky, and the English translation of the title is Good Human Material. That's what they wanted sent to Palestine for colonization and for the eventual conflict that took place some years later. These policies were somewhat complementary to the U.S. policy of pressuring England to allow Jews to go to Palestine, but not allowing them here. The British politician Ernest Bevin was quite bitter about it, asking, "if you want to save the Jews, why send them to Palestine when you don't admit them?"

  Noam Chomsky

  Years, Titles, Asking

  Source: thehumanist.com

• 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

• Plainly, such an approach does not exclude other ways of trying to comprehend the world. Someone committed to it (as I am) can consistently believe (as I do) that we learn much more of human interest about how people think and feel and act by reading novels or studying history than from all of naturalistic psychology, and perhaps always will; similarly, the arts may offer appreciation of the heavens to which astrophysics cannot aspire.

  Noam Chomsky

  Appreciation, Art, Reading

• In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT's Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!

  Noam Chomsky

  Daughter, Military, War

  "Peace netter". Interviewed with Hamish Mackintosh, www.theguardian.com. October 16, 2002.

• Part of the NAFTA legislation required studies of labor practices, and there was quite a good study that came out by a labor historian on the use of NAFTA to undermine and destroy unions.

  Noam Chomsky

  Practice, Use, Unions

  Source: www.iww.org

• Long before the technology revolution there was declassification of documents and I've spent quite a lot of time studying declassified internal documents and written a lot about them. In fact, anybody who's worked through the declassified record can see very clearly that the reason for classification is very rarely to protect the state or the society from enemies. Most of the time it is to protect the state from its citizens, so they don't know what the government is doing.

  Noam Chomsky

  Technology, Government, Long

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

• It's roughly the case that if systems become too complex to study in sufficient depth, physics hands them over to chemistry, then to biology, then experimental psychology, and finally on to history. Roughly. These are tendencies, and they tend to distinguish roughly between hard and soft sciences.

  Noam Chomsky

  Hands, Psychology, Depth

  Source: libcom.org

• What the polls don't tell you is, though other polls do, is that if you do a study of CEOs, top executives in corporations, they're liberal.

  Noam Chomsky

  Corporations, Study, Polls

  Source: theanarchistlibrary.org

• 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

• There's a strange myth of Anglo-Saxonism. When the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson, for example, its law school offered the study of "Anglo-Saxon Law." And that myth of Anglo-Saxonism carries right over into the early twentieth century.

  Noam Chomsky

  School, Virginia, Law

  Source: thehumanist.com

• One thing that you and I know is language. Another thing that you and I know is how objects behave in perceptual space. We have a whole mass of complex ways of understanding what is the nature of visual space. A proper part of psychology ought to be, and in recent years has been, an effort to try to discover the principles of how we organize visual space. I would say that the same is true of every domain of psychology, of human studies.

  Noam Chomsky

  Years, Space, Effort

  Source: chomsky.info

• Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.

  Noam Chomsky

  Goal, Principles, Analysis

  Noam Chomsky (2002). “Syntactic Structures”, p.11, Walter de Gruyter

• The book [Manufacturing Consent] itself is then devoted to a series of case studies, selected, we hope [with Edward Herman], to offer a fair and in fact rather severe test of those conclusions.

  Noam Chomsky

  Book, Tests, Facts

  Source: www.publicanthropology.org

• There have, for years, been comparative studies of religious fanaticism and factors that correlate with it. By and large, it tends to decline with increasing industrialization and education. The US, however, is off the chart, ranking near devastated peasant societies. About 1/2 the population believe the world was created a few thousand years ago: the justification for the belief is that that is what they were ordered to believe by authority figures to whom they were taught one must subordinate oneself. And on, and on.

  Noam Chomsky

  Religious, Believe, Years

  Source: chomsky.info

• 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

• There is extensive critical scholarship that provides illustrations in many areas of scholarship. I've discussed many cases myself, while also citing and often relying on academic studies that disentangle these webs of mystification woven for the general public. It's impossible to provide illustrations that would even approach accuracy, let alone carry any conviction, without going well beyond the bounds of this discussion.

  Noam Chomsky

  Illustration, Woven, Citing

  Source: www.publicanthropology.org

• If kids are studying for a test, they're not going to learn anything. We all know that from our own experience.

  Noam Chomsky

  Kids, Tests, Study

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• Science talks about very simple things, and asks hard questions about them. As soon as things become too complex, science can't deal with them... But it's a complicated matter: Science studies what's at the edge of understanding, and what's at the edge of understanding is usually fairly simple. And it rarely reaches human affairs. Human affairs are way too complicated.

  Noam Chomsky

  Simple, Understanding, Matter

  "Science in the Dock". Discussion with Noam Chomsky, Lawrence Krauss & Sean M. Carroll in "Science & Technology News", chomsky.info. March 1, 2006.

• I've never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who feel really aggrieved. These people think, "I've done everything right all my life, I'm a god-fearing Christian, I'm white, I'm male, I've worked hard, and I carry a gun. I do everything I'm supposed to do. And I'm getting shafted." And in fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or declined, the social conditions have worsened, the children are going crazy, there are no schools, there's nothing, so somebody must be doing something to them, and they want to know who it is.

  Noam Chomsky

  Christian, Children, Crazy

  Source: www.iww.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.

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