Nothing should be done to impede people from teaching and doing their research even if at that very moment it was being used to massacre and destroy. [...] the radical students and I wanted to keep the labs on campus, on the principle that what is going to be going on anyway ought to be open and above board, so that people would know what is happening and act accordingly.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Chomsky argues research should remain open and accessible even if misused, so people can know the truth and act on it rather than hiding it.
- In plain terms
- Keep research open even if it is used for bad things so people can see the truth and react.
- What can you take from it?
- Transparency enables public oversight better than restricting information.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- Is transparency always better than restriction?
- How do we manage dual-use research?
Another view
Absolute openness ignores risks of dangerous technologies falling into wrong hands.
More from Noam Chomsky
Watergate was a matter of a bunch of guys from the Republican National Committee breaking in a Democratic Party office for essentially unknown reasons and doin…
Permalink to quote #169 If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. …
Permalink to quote #171 If we try to keep a sense of balance, the exposures of the past several months are analogous to the discovery that the directors of Murder, Inc. were also chea…
Permalink to quote #168
Related quotes
'[P]eople talk about the potential for good that can come from destroying these little embryos and how we might be able to solve the problem of juvenile diabet…
James DobsonJames Dobson quote #1 After remaking the animal's organism in accordance with our design, which naturally caused more or less damage to the experimental animal, we had to find a mod…
Ivan PavlovIvan Pavlov quote #5 There is one feature I notice that is generally missing in 'cargo cult science'... It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that …
Richard FeynmanRichard Feynman quote #12