3 Noam Chomsky Quotes on Reputation

Noam Chomsky quotes on reputation

231. [Noam Chomsky is] so far out on the lunatic fringe that even the sensible things he has to say are lost. --David Rieff, August 4, 1991 [212]

265. Although he lost some of his appeal in the late-1970s and 1980s by his defense of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, he has used September 11 to restore his reputation, indeed to surpass his former influence and stature. --Keith Windschuttle, May 2003 [246]

285. When Noam Chomsky was merely the most original, arresting, and widely talked-about linguistic theorist in America, he was never referred to as a leading American intellectual. That came only after he expressed his outrage over American involvement in the war in Vietnam, about which he knew nothing, since he read The Nation instead of Parade. It was the outrage that gained him entry into that 'charming aristocracy,' to borrow the words of Catulle Mendes. Or as Marshall McLuhan once put it, 'Moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity.' --Tom Wolfe, December 19, 2005 [266]