Noam Chomsky Quotes About Tradition

• The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.

  Noam Chomsky

  Responsibility, Intelligent, Power

  Interview on BBC's "The Late Show", November 25, 1992.

• A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.

  Noam Chomsky

  Communication, Community, Culture

  "We Still Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân". Documentary, January 10, 2011.

• There's a strong nativist tradition - saying, "we have to protect ourselves" - that comes from the founding of the country. If you read Benjamin Franklin, who was one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment in the United States and the most distinguished representative of the movement here, he actually advised that the newly founded republic should block Germans and Swedes because they were too "swarthy" - dark.

  Noam Chomsky

  Country, Strong, Block

  Source: thehumanist.com

• Who wrote the Bible? Current scholarship, to my knowledge, assumes that the material that constitutes the Old Testament was put together from various oral and folk traditions (many of them going far back) in the Hellenistic period. That was one of several currents, of which the collection that formed the New Testament was another.

  Noam Chomsky

  Together, Assuming, Tradition

  Source: chomsky.info

• There are no conservatives in the United States. The United States does not have a conservative tradition. The people who call themselves conservatives, like the Heritage Foundation or Gingrich, are believers in -- are radical statists. They believe in a powerful state, but a welfare state for the rich.

  Noam Chomsky

  Powerful, Believe, People

  "On US Military Budgets". Interviewed with Ira Shorr, chomsky.info. February 11, 1996.

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