Noam Chomsky Quotes

I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality

The only thing that can effect a big change in personality is something that physically rewires the brain and/or alters the body's chemical milieu.

Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement.

Doubt is thought's despair; despair is personality's doubt. . . . Doubt and despair . . . belong to completely different spheres; different sides of the soul are set in motion. . . . Despair is an expression of the total personality, doubt only of thought.

Sometimes I overtinker, which is something wrong with my brain chemistry. But in figuring out why I do that, maybe I'll make myself a better person. I doubt it.

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.

Donald Trump is a brilliant and talented person, without a doubt.

Schwartz's research suggests something important: we can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point. Our inborn temperaments influence us, regardless of the lives we lead. A sizeable part of who we are is ordained by our genes, by our brains, by our nervous systems. And yet the elasticity that Schwartz found in some of the high-reactive teens also suggests the converse: we have free will and can use it to shape our personalities.

I'd have given ten conversations with Einstein for a first meeting with a pretty chorus girl.

those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

To expect a personality to survive the disintegration of the brain is like expecting a cricket club to survive when all of its members are dead.

When I look at the human brain I'm still in awe of it. Every single time you lift off the bone and open the durra and there it is - the human brain, the thing that gives a person a personality, that distinguishes each one of us, that there could be more than 6 billion of us here on this planet with brains that look the same, but each one being distinctly different because of what is going on in that thing. I'll never get over my awe of that.

It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in "It's a nice day," or "You're very tall," or "So this is it, we're going to die." His first theory was that if human beings didn't keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up. After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this--"If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.

Is it better to work out consciously and critically one's own conception of the world and thus, in connection with the labours of one's own brain, choose one's sphere of activity, take an active part in the creation of the history of the world, be one's own guide, refusing to accept passively and supinely from outside the moulding of one' own personality?

Charm is the next best asset after looks and brains - and can almost make up for looks.

What's your name?" "Becky Thatcher. What's yours? Oh, I know. It's Thomas Sawyer." "That's the name they lick me by. I'm Tom when I'm good. You call me Tom, will you?" "Yes

Our brain is the factory of the emotions

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

When I was in N.W.A. and didn't get paid all the money I was owed, that's when the business side of showbiz hit me. I thought, "Half of this is workin'. I'm famous, but now I need to be famous with some money." That got my brain started at trying to figure out the business end. And once I figured out the business side, I next came to understand that success really comes down to the product, not to me, my personality, or what club I'm seen going into or coming out of. None of that matters.

Women are quite able to make friends with a man; but to preserve such a friendship - that no doubt requires the assistance of a slight physical antipathy

The amount you laugh in your relationships with others is the true measure of the health of your personality.

The brain, is the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe.

The human brain, then, is the most complicated organization of matter that we know.

A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone's nose, but if a girl's got brains and looks and personality, she's going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.