10 Zitate von Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky, einer der größten Denker unserer Zeit, ist gestern 80 Jahre geworden. Happy Bithday.

10 Zitate des Linguisten, Informatikers, Sozialisten und Revoluzzers:

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.

The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries, who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.

Property rights are not like other rights, contrary to what Madison and a lot of modern political theory says. If I have the right to free speech, it doesn’t interfere with your right to free speech. But if I have property, that interferes with your right to have that property, you don’t have it, I have it. So the right to property is very different from the right to freedom of speech. This is often put very misleadingly about rights of property; property has no right. But if we just make sense out of this, maybe there is a right to property, one could debate that, but it’s very different from other rights.

Thomas Jefferson, the leading Enlightenment figure in the United States, along with Benjamin Franklin, who took exactly the same view, argued that dependence will lead to “subservience and venality”, and will “suffocate the germs of virtue”. And remember, by dependence he meant wage labor, which was considered an abomination under classical liberal principles. There’s a modern perversion of conservatism and libertarianism, which has changed the meanings of words, pretty much the way Orwell discussed

A lot of the people who call themselves Left I would regard as proto-fascists.

There is a noticeable general difference between the sciences and mathematics on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences on the other. It’s a first approximation, but one that is real. In the former, the factors of integrity tend to dominate more over the factors of ideology. It’s not that scientists are more honest people. It’s just that nature is a harsh taskmaster. You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like, and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry, and it’ll be refuted tomorrow.

There’s a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.

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.

In certain intellectual circles in France, the very basis for discussion — a minimal respect for facts and logic — has been virtually abandoned

We cannot say much about human affairs with any confidence, but sometimes it is possible. 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.