Noam Chomsky quotes - page 7
The Ottoman Empire was an ugly affair, but they had the right idea. The rulers in Turkey were fortunately so corrupt that they left people alone pretty much -- were mostly interested in robbing them -- and they left them alone to run their own affairs, and their own regions and their own communities with a lot of local self determination.
Noam Chomsky
The idea is to create a picture among the population that we're all one happy family. We're America, we have a national interest, we're working together. There are us nice workers, the firms in which we work and the government who works for us. We pick them - they're our servants. And that's all there is in the world - no other conflicts, no other categories of people, no further structure to the system beyond that. Certainly nothing like class. Unless you happen to be in the ruling class, in which case you're very well aware of it.
Noam Chomsky
![[This view is contrasted with all forms of Empiricism, by which it is] assumed that development is uniform across (cognitive) domains, and that the intrinsic properties of the initial state (of the mind) are homogeneous and undifferentiated - an assumption found across a spectrum reaching from Skinner to Piaget. (Noam Chomsky)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/08/noam-chomsky-across-assumption-276408.webp)
If the population allows it to proceed, it's just going to go on and on like this. Until the next crash - which is so much expected that credit agencies, which evaluate the status of firms, are now counting into their calculations the taxpayer bailout that they expect to come after the next crash... Everywhere you look, policies are designed this way, which should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone. That's what happens when you put power into the hands of a narrow sector of wealth, which is dedicated to increasing power for itself - just as you'd expect.
Noam Chomsky
The U. S. has always insisted on its right to use force, whatever international law requires, and whatever international institutions decide.... The U. S., of course, is not alone in these practices. Other states commonly act in much the same way, if not constrained by external or internal forces.
Noam Chomsky
If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.
Noam Chomsky
Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don't think people didn't know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we're educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don't educate them, what we call "education," they're going to take control -- "they" being what Alexander Hamilton called the "great beast," namely the people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.
Noam Chomsky
