Noam Chomsky Quotes
Responsibility, I believe, accrues through privilege.
Chomsky, Noam. "The Responsibility of Intellectuals." The New York Review of Books, 23 Feb. 1967.
This quotation is classic in that it illustrates a fundamental difference between a political and religious view of rights. Politically a citizen is entitled to rights with no requirement or condition of responsibility. Politically, we may desire and applaud or even reward responsible behavior, but we may not condition the rights on someone’s version of responsible use of the rights. Indeed, the real test is if people have rights who are generally thought to be irresponsible. See {633640} .
See Charles James Fox, John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, Grover Cleveland, Jeremy Bentham, George Mason, and John Milton for other expressions of this idea. 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
