Noam Chomsky
There is no evolutionary pressure to create minds capable of forming sciences; it just happened. Evolutionary pressure has not led to higher rates of reproduction for people capable of solving scientific problems or creating new scientific ideas. So if, in fact, the science-forming capacities evolved for other reasons, it would not be too surprising if those particular structures that have developed proved to be rather special in their nature, reflecting the contingencies of their evolution or the working of physical law.Collection: Law
To construct a scientific theory from the data and to be able to recognize that it is a reasonable theory is possible only if there are some very sharp restrictive principles that lead you to go in one direction and not in another direction. Otherwise, you wouldn't have science at all, merely randomly chosen hypotheses.Collection: One Direction
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.Collection: Children
I think that we have basically nothing in the field of human behavior. Maybe that is just a condition of temporary ignorance. But it may be that we are simply not intellectually equipped to develop such a theory.Collection: Ignorance
We don’t use the term ‘working class’ here because it’s a taboo term. You’re supposed to say ‘middle class,’ because it helps diminish the understanding that there’s a class war going on.Collection: Understanding
The United States in many ways resembles a Third World country – far more elevated, but it has many of those structural characteristics: the extreme inequality of wealth, the deterioration of infrastructure because it only serves poor people, predatory operations, huge corruption, and so on.Collection: Country
The truth of the matter is that about 99 percent of teaching is making the students feel interestedin the material. Then the other 1 percent has to do with your methods. And that’s not just true of languages. It’s true of every subject.Collection: Reading
It is only in folk tales, children’s stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.Collection: Real
The first thing you ought to do is verify what I present. Just because I say it doesn’t make it true. So check it out, see what looks correct, what looks wrong, look at other material which wasn’t discussed, figure out what the truth really is. That’s what you’ve got a brain for.Collection: Firsts
Well, they really didn’t have to worry, because the way power politics works, the World Court can’t do anything. Look, there’s one country in the world at the moment which has refused to accept World Court decision-that’s the United States. Is anybody going to do anything about it?Collection: Country
I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s, I could read anything. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with contemporary Hebrew. It’s quite difficult.Collection: Reading
Nothing in these abstract economic models actually works in the real world. It doesn’t matter how many footnotes they put in, or how many ways they tinker around the edges. The whole enterprise is totally rotten at the core: it has no relation to reality.Collection: Real
Reagan was extreme. Beginning of his administration, one of the first things was to call in scabs – hadn’t been done for a long time, and it’s illegal in most countries – in the air controller strike.Collection: Country
When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what’s left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.Collection: Fun
States are violent institutions. The government of any country, including ours, represents some sort of domestic power structure, and it’s usually violent. States are violent to the extent that they’re powerful, that’s roughly accurate.Collection: Country
Cuba forces in Angola gave a real shot in the arm to the liberation movements, and it also was a lesson to the white South Africans that the end is coming. They can’t just hope to subdue the continent on racist grounds.Collection: Real
This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Mars – they would think the country has gone insane.Collection: Country
To cite the facts of history is to fall prey to ‘moral equivalence,’ or ‘political correctness,’ or ‘the error of of atheism,’ or one of the other misdeeds concocted to guard against the sins of understanding and insight into the real world.Collection: Real
When I arrived in Laos and found young Americans living there, out of free choice, I was surprised. After only a week, I began to have a sense of the appeal of the country and its people – along with despair about its future.Collection: Country
Unfortunately, you can’t vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place.Collection: Firsts
Anyone can be a moral individual, concerned with human rights and problems; but only a college professor, a trained expert, can solve technical problems by ‘sophisticated’ methods. Ergo, it is only problems of the latter sort that are important or real.Collection: Real
One of the problems of organizing in the North, in the rich countries, is that people tend to think – even the activists – that instant gratification is required. You constantly hear: ‘Look I went to a demonstration, and we didn’t stop the war so what’s the use of doing it again?’Collection: Country
In the 1960s, there was a point, 1968, ’69, when there was a very strong antiwar movement against the war in Vietnam. But it’s worth remembering that the war in Vietnam started – an outright war started in 1962.Collection: Strong
It makes sense to work towards a better world, but it doesn’t make any sense to have illusions about what the real world is.Collection: Real
Real schools ought to provide people with techniques of self-defense, but that would mean teaching the truth about the world and about the society, and schools couldn’t survive very long if they did that.Collection: Real
After the first International Days of Protest in October, 1965, Senator Mansfield criticized the ‘sense of utter irresponsibility’ shown by the demonstrators.Collection: Firsts
Every predecessor has used mercenaries, often drawn from the country that they’re attacking, like England ran India with Indian mercenaries. You take them from one place and send them to kill people in the other place. That’s the standard way to run imperial wars.Collection: Country
From the late 1940s, into and through the ’50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country.Collection: Real
A dramatic, evocative, thoughtful and very accessible account of one of the most important stories of the century – and one of the most ominous, unless citizens are aroused to action to rein in abusive state power.Collection: Stories
There clearly is a serious race problem in the country. Just take a look at what’s happening to African American communities. For example wealth, wealth in African American communities is almost zero. The history is striking.Collection: Country