Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomskyis an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, logician, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy, and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He has spent more than half a century at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is Institute Professor Emeritus, and is the author of over 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTeacher
Date of Birth7 December 1928
CityPhiladelphia, PA
CountryUnited States of America
I do not think psychoanalysis has a scientific basis. If we can't explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something?
Nineteen sixty-eight was one exciting moment in a much larger movement. It spawned a whole range of movements. There wouldn't have been an international global solidarity movement, for instance, without the events of 1968. It was enormous, in terms of human rights, ethnic rights, a concern for the environment, too.
There were plenty of other hominids, but they disappeared, probably because humans exterminated them, but nobody knows for sure.
Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good deal about that.
Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.
If humans were totally unstructured creatures, they would be... a tool which can properly be shaped by outside forces.
Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature.
It may be beyond the limits of human intelligence to understand how human intelligence works.
[I]n the humanities and social sciences, and in fields like journalism and economics and so on ... people have to be trained to be managers, and controllers, and to accept things, and not to question too much.
When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the U.N. vetoed several resolutions right away, calling for an end to the fighting and so on, and that was a hideous invasion.
The United States is afraid of China; it is not a military threat to anyone and is the least aggressive of all the major military powers.
Is the Iranian record of intervention and terror worse than that of the U.S.?
Israelis would mostly breathe a sigh of relief if Palestinians were to disappear.
Israel is following policies which maximise its security threats... policies which choose expansion over security... policies which lead to their moral degradation, their isolation, their delegitimation, as they call it now, and very likely ultimate destruction. That's not impossible.