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
"Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you're unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so."
"The United States is a failed state. It's a failed state from many points of view, but it's a failed state in terms of its social policy."
"There are two conceptions of democracy. One is that the public should be able to participate, and the other is that the public should be spectators."
"The intellectual's role is to speak the truth and to expose lies."
"The United States is the only country in the world that has been condemned for international terrorism by the World Court."
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.