Noam Chomsky — "It's not that I don't believe in government, it's that I don't believe in legiti…"
It's not that I don't believe in government, it's that I don't believe in legitimate authority.
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More from Noam Chomsky
"The purpose of education is to enable people to think for themselves."
"It's a truism that almost any scientist will tell you: The more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know."
"The whole point of the corporate system is to get people to internalize the values of the dominant institutions."
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very spirited debate within that spectrum."
"The business world has a kind of religion: profit maximization. And that's what drives it."
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.