So yes in theory there is a kind of a formal democracy and in many ways these were achievements and an improvement over the feudal system and more advanced than anything else in the world, but nothing that we ought to call democracy.
Noam ChomskyVery commonly substances are criminalized because they're associated with what's called the dangerous classes, you know, poor people, or working people.... Actually, the peak of marijuana use was as I said, in the seventies, but that was rich kids, so you don't throw them in jail. And then it got seriously criminalized, you know, you really throw people in jail for it, when it was poor people.
Noam ChomskyWith regard to nuclear weapons, it's kind of hard to say. [Donald Trump] is said lots of things. The national security experts are terrified. But they're more terrified by his personality than by his statements.
Noam ChomskyThere is no evolutionary pressure to create minds capable of forming sciences; it just happened. Evolutionary pressure has not led to higher rates of reproduction for people capable of solving scientific problems or creating new scientific ideas. So if, in fact, the science-forming capacities evolved for other reasons, it would not be too surprising if those particular structures that have developed proved to be rather special in their nature, reflecting the contingencies of their evolution or the working of physical law.
Noam ChomskyI did not say that language as a completed system emerged in an individual in an instant. But I cannot think of a coherent alternative to the idea that mutations take place in individuals, not communities, so that whatever rewiring of the brain yielded the apparently unique properties of language, specifically recursive generation of hierarchically structured expressions, would therefore have taken place in an individual, and only later been used among individuals who had inherited this capacity.
Noam Chomsky