4 Noam Chomsky Quotes on Theory

Noam Chomsky quotes on theory

27. Property rights are not like other rights, contrary to what Madison and a lot of modern political theory says. If I have the right to free speech, it doesn't interfere with your right to free speech. But if I have property, that interferes with your right to have that property, you don't have it, I have it. So the right to property is very different from the right to freedom of speech. This is often put very misleadingly about rights of property; property has no right. But if we just make sense out of this, maybe there is a right to property, one could debate that, but it's very different from other rights.

280. Neither Chomsky nor Church would make my top ten list. No, I don't actually have such a list, but my feeling is that their impact has been more on what is taught than what is done. Part of my unease is that I'm uncertain to what extent 'Computer Science' is a science. I feel more comfortable comparing what my colleagues and I do with the activities of architects and engineers than with mathematicians, physicists, or biologists. There are things in software that feel more as if they have been discovered than invented, but most of what [passes] for computer science is purely man-made. --Bjarne Stroustrup, November 2000 [261]

290. The most striking fact is how consistently people with anything at all to say about language feel the need to strike some attitude for or against Chomsky's ideas. It's a big problem. --David Pesetsky, November 1995 [271]

291. Chomsky revived ideas that really had been kind of dormant since the Enlightenment of what is a human like and how does that tie in to our political arrangements, and the way we conceptualize humans in the broadest sense. --Steven Pinker, September 25, 2003 [272]