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
"The United States is an imperialist power."
"The United States is the most frightening power in the world—it’s the only power that has the capacity to destroy organized human life."
"The role of the intellectual is to speak the truth, and to expose lies, and to be a witness to history."
"If you want to be a serious intellectual, you have to be able to deal with complexity."
"The American political system is largely a sham."
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.