Noam Chomsky Quotes

I want to turn the whole thing upside down I'll find the things they say just can't be found I'll share the love I find with everyone We'll sing and dance to Mother Nature's song I don't want this feeling to go away.

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.

There are two ways you can receive energy from your environment: One is molecules bumping against you. That's the air. The other is radiative energy. That's what you're feeling from the sun. When they say "Get out of the sun, out of the heat," the air is the same temperature; it's just you're exposed to sunlight.

Men best show their character in trifles, where they are not on their guard. It is in the simplest habits, that we often see the boundless egotism which pays no regard to the feelings of others and denies nothing to itself.

I never contemplated. I just went in there and did my acting. I never thought, "What's the character actually feeling here? What's he trying to get across?" And never looked at it from that classically trained actor's point of view.

I never liked anyone who didn't have a temper. If you don't have a temper, you don't have any passion.

Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious attempt to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try.

I like characters that do big things boldly and are driven by intensely personal feelings.

The tools we use have a profound and devious influence on our thinking habits, and therefore on our thinking abilities.

If the idea of the universe is presented to the child in the right way, it will do more for him than just arouse his interest, for it will create in him admiration and wonder, a feeling loftier than any interest and more satisfying.

I have endeavoured to show that no absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves; and I may add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a physical distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life.

It was a style not of perfection, but warmth. Even mistakes had a good feeling about them

Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong.

Any time a body goes outside the environmental conditions for which it developed it has to acclimate.

Learning, like love, death and eating, are fundamental human activities. It's at the core of human existence and its character has a resilience of continuity that is part of what makes up human nature. That is not fundamentally going to change.

I would far rather add a character who generates strong feelings than someone who just kind of floats along, generating medium-warmth smiles of gentle affirmation.

Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can't persist much longer. If it does, then we won't.

Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed.

Our passions are ourselves.

Every state of welfare, every feeling of satisfaction, is negative in its character; that is to say, it consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of existence.

Mass, time , magnetic moment, the unconscious: we have grown up with these symbolic concepts, so that we are startled to be told that man had once to create them for himself. He had indeed, and he has: for mass is not an intuition in the muscle, and time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's.

The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or 'hypothesis-formulating' ability of unknown character and complexity.

It depends on the scripts and the character and just everybody involved, the other actors and directors. It's just a gut feeling when you find something, you're like, 'Yes, I want to sink my teeth into that.'

The religion and the environmentalism of the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something that they do not really wish to destroy. We all live by robbing nature, but our standard of living demands that the robbery shall continue. We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do.

We're not locked in to these conditions that degrade the environment, and jeopardize the future of our children.