Noam Chomsky
Linguist and political writer, born in 1928, whose American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), his first political book, argued against the Vietnam War and for the responsibility of intellectuals to tell the truth.
Noam Chomsky did not write this page.
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Their wordsIt is sometimes held that their responsibility is “to speak truth to power.” I’ve always found that troubling. The powerful typically know the truth quite well.
↗It’s Life and Death — Intellectuals Can’t Keep Serving the Status Quo (interviewed by C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout)chomsky.info 1st of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsThe task of a responsible person — anyone who wants to uphold intellectual and moral values — is not to speak what they regard as truth to anybody — the powerful or the powerless — but rather to speak with the powerless and to try to learn the truth.
↗It’s Life and Death — Intellectuals Can’t Keep Serving the Status Quo (interviewed by C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout)chomsky.info 2nd of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsIt is now organized human society worldwide that is “threatened with extinction” under the blows of environmental destruction, overwhelmingly by the rich, concentrated in the rich countries.
↗It’s Life and Death — Intellectuals Can’t Keep Serving the Status Quo (interviewed by C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout)chomsky.info 3rd of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsWe are living in an era of confluence of crises that has no counterpart in human history.
↗It’s Life and Death — Intellectuals Can’t Keep Serving the Status Quo (interviewed by C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout)chomsky.info 4th of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsIt is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.
↗American Power and the New Mandarins (Pantheon, 1969)archive.org All 2 from this book
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Their wordsIntellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.
↗American Power and the New Mandarins (Pantheon, 1969)archive.org All 2 from this book