Noam Chomsky
(1928-)

American Linguist, Social Activist

birthdate: December 7
birthplace:
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

QUOTES

...corporate personhood is a real scandal...

...the meaning of the 14th Amendment was expanded so that 'person' included corporations, and over the years corporations have gotten rights that are way beyond those of persons of flesh and blood...

...there's plenty of anti-corporate feeling in the country but it's unfocused...

...a constitutional amendment would be a great idea...

...there has to be a lot of organizing and educational work to build up a major groundwell of support which will call for restoring the 14th Amendment to what the words say...

...the idea that a corporation should be given personal rights is a major attack on classical liberal doctrines which held that rights inhere in 'persons' - persons of flesh and blood, not collectivist legal entities established by state power...

"It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies."

"…jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you're trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them."

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

Personally, I'm in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions of society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism, we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control.

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - "indoctrination," we might say - exercised through the mass media.

"The 'corporatization of America' during the past century [has been] an attack on democracy."

There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past.

We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.

You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.

 

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