Noam Chomsky — "If you want to achieve something, you build a structure. If you want to prevent …"
If you want to achieve something, you build a structure. If you want to prevent something, you mess it up.
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More from Noam Chomsky
"It’s very easy to be a pacifist when you’re not threatened."
"The more you understand the world, the more angry you get."
"The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know."
"The United States has a long and bloody history of intervention in the affairs of other countries, often with devastating consequences."
"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.