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Noam Chomsky Quotes about Children

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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

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.

Children, Real, Ignorance

"The World After September 11th". Noam Chomsky's speech at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) Conference at Tufts University, Massachusetts, December 8, 2001.

Suppose that I see a hungry child in the street, and I am able to offer the child some food. Am I morally culpable if I refuse to do so? Am I morally culpable if I choose not to do what I easily can about the fact that 1000 children die every hour from easily preventable disease, according to UNICEF? Or the fact that the government of my own "free and open society" is engaged in monstrous crimes that can easily be mitigated or terminated? Is it even possible to debate these questions?

Children, Government, Disease

Source: www.publicanthropology.org

The whole intelectual culture has a filtering system, starts as a child in school. You're expected to accept certain beliefs, styles, behavioral patterns and so on. If you don't accept them, you are called maybe a behavioral problem, or something, and you're weeded out. Something like that goes on all the way through universities and graduate schools. There is an implicit system of filtering, which has the, it creates a strong tendency to impose conformism. Now, it's a tendency, so you do have exceptions, and sometimes the exceptions are quite striking.

Strong, Children, School

Source: theanarchistlibrary.org

In Egypt the neoliberal programs have meant statistical growth, like right before the Arab Spring, Egypt was a kind of poster child for the World Bank and the IMF [International Monetary Fund:] the marvelous economic management and great reform. The only problem was for most of the population it was a kind of like a blow in the solar plexus: wages going down, benefits being eliminated, subsidized food gone and meanwhile, high concentration of wealth and a huge amount of corruption.

Children, Spring, Blow

"Noam Chomsky on America's Economic Suicide". Interview with Laura Flanders / GRITtv, www.alternet.org. May 4, 2012.

Take any country that has laws against hate crimes, inspiring hatred and genocide and so on. The first thing they would do is ban the Old Testament. There's nothing like it in the literary canon that exalts genocide, to that extent. And it's not a joke either. Like where I live, New England, the people who liberated it from the native scourge were religious fundamentalist lunatics, who came waving the holy book, declaring themselves to be the children of Israel who are killing the Amalekites, like God told them.

Country, Religious, Children

Talk at the University of Houston, Texas, October 18, 2002.

The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or 'hypothesis-formulating' ability of unknown character and complexity.

Children, Character, Data

Andrea Moro, Noam Chomsky, Ivano Caponigro, Daniel B. Kane (2015). “The Boundaries of Babel: The Brain and the Enigma of Impossible Languages”, p.37, MIT Press

It makes sense for societies to make education compulsory for children. Children are vulnerable. They can't make decisions. But the decisions can't all be left in the hands of the parents. They can be irresponsible too.

Children, Hands, Decision

"Noam Chomsky: Drug Cartels and the Growing Border War". Interview with Luis Fernando Cárdenas, chomsky.info. August 15, 2011.

I am a child of the Enlightenment. I think irrational belief is a dangerous phenomenon, and I try to consciously avoid irrational belief. On the other hand, I certainly recognize that it's a major phenomenon for people in general, and you can understand why it would be. It does, apparently, provide personal sustenance, but also bonds of association and solidarity and a means for expressing elements of one's personality that are often very valuable elements. To many people it does that. In my view, there's nothing wrong with that.

Children, Mean, Thinking

Source: chomsky.info

I would feel no hesitation in saying that it is the responsibility of a decent human being to give assistance to a child who is being attacked by a rabid dog, but I would not intend this to imply that in all imaginable circumstances one must, necessarily, act in accordance with this general responsibility.

Dog, Children, Responsibility

"The Responsibility of Intellectuals" by Noam Chomsky, www.nybooks.com. April 20, 1967.

There was also a national policy, which as a child I didn't know anything about. In 1924 the first major immigration law was passed. Before that, there was an Oriental Exclusion Act, but other than that, European immigrants like my parents were generally admitted in the early years of the twentieth century. But that ended in 1924 with an immigration law that was largely directed against Jews and Italians.

Children, Years, Law

Source: thehumanist.com

Plainly, children learn their language. I don't speak Swahili. And it cannot be that my language is 'an innate property of our brain.' Otherwise I would have been genetically programmed to speak (some variety of) English.

Children, Brain, Language

Source: libcom.org

When I wrote about the Spanish Civil War many years later, I used documents that I picked up when I was a child, as a lot hadn't been published (a lot more resources are available now).

Children, War, Years

Source: thehumanist.com

Women taking care of children . . . it makes sense to pay them for that work . . . they should be paid for it, but that requires tax payments. And the same is true about protection of the environment.

Children, Care, Pay

If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.

Children, Growing Up, Boston

We do not for example say that the person has a perfect knowledge of some language L similar to English but still different from it. What we say is that the child or foreigner has a 'partial knowledge of English' or is 'on his or her way' towards acquiring knowledge of English, and if they reach this goal, they will then know English.

Children, Perfect, Goal

Noam Chomsky (1986). “Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use”, p.16, Greenwood Publishing Group

If you're working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.

Children, People, Age

I've never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who feel really aggrieved. These people think, "I've done everything right all my life, I'm a god-fearing Christian, I'm white, I'm male, I've worked hard, and I carry a gun. I do everything I'm supposed to do. And I'm getting shafted." And in fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or declined, the social conditions have worsened, the children are going crazy, there are no schools, there's nothing, so somebody must be doing something to them, and they want to know who it is.

Christian, Children, Crazy

Source: www.iww.org

No one seriously doubts that if Piraha children are brought up in Boston they'll be speaking Boston English, that is, that the capacities are present, unlike other animals, as far as is known. There's no challenge to the theory - not mine, but everyone's - that the human language faculty provides the means for generation of an infinite array of structured expressions.

Children, Mean, Animal

Source: libcom.org

As a health scientist at Columbia University, Les Roberts, pointed out, sooner or later people are going to be looking at a child in a wheelchair suffering from polio and will say 'the Americans did that to him'. So they continue policies which have similar effects i.e. organising the Taliban. This will come back to them too.

Children, People, Suffering

Source: www.dawn.com

If you owned everything and a tiny little piece gets out of control, then your world's gone. Like some unusual child who has a million toys and one of them is stolen, he's going to perish.

Children, Gone, Pieces

Source: www.truth-out.org

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.

Children, Block, Mind

Source: chomsky.info

Put yourself in the position of a person, sort of an ordinary American, "I'm a hard-working, god-fearing Christian. I take care of my family, I go to church, I, you know, do everything 'right'. And I'm getting shafted. For the last thirty years, my income has stagnated, my working hours are going up, my benefits are going down. My wife has to work two [jobs] to, you know, put food on the table. The children, God, there's no care for the children, the schools are rotten, and so on. What did I do wrong? I did everything you're supposed to do, but something's going wrong to me.

Christian, Jobs, Children

Source: theanarchistlibrary.org

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