Noam Chomsky — "It's a very simple rule: if you want to understand anything, you have to look at…"
It's a very simple rule: if you want to understand anything, you have to look at the power relations.
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More from Noam Chomsky
"The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime and foreigners, the more you can control all the people."
"The whole point of the corporate system is to get people to internalize the values of the dominant institutions."
"The United States is the greatest terrorist organization in the world."
"The United States has devoted a great deal of effort to trying to ensure that democracy does not function in the Middle East."
"The function of the media in the United States is to mobilize support for the policies of the powerful."
About Noam Chomsky (born 1928)
American linguist whose generative-grammar revolution (Syntactic Structures, 1957) reshaped linguistics, and whose Manufacturing Consent (1988, with Edward Herman) reshaped media criticism. Closely associated with Edward S. Herman (media-criticism co-author) and Howard Zinn (left historian peer and friend). For an intellectual contrast, see B.F. Skinner, Harvard behaviorist psychologist (1904-1990) — Chomsky's 1959 review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior is the most-cited demolition in 20th-century psychology — the moment behaviorism's dominance ended and the cognitive-science era began. Skinner's stimulus-response account of language and Chomsky's innate-faculty account are the cleanest 'environment vs nature' linguistic poles.
The standard scholarly entry points to Noam Chomsky's work: Robert F. Barsky (Vanderbilt, Chomsky biographer) — Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent (1997); James McGilvray (McGill, philosophy of language) — The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky (ed., 2005). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Noam Chomsky.