There is no plausible theory under which the record of the Pentagon Papers can be interpreted as relating to the national defense.
Noam ChomskyRead
Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes. They're designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators.
Interpretation
Sports can foster national pride and biased loyalties among fans.
Noam Chomsky's quote highlights how sports can play a significant role in shaping societal attitudes, often leading to jingoism and chauvinism. By rallying communities around their athletes, sports can create an intense, sometimes exclusionary allegiance that glorifies 'gladiators' representing a nation or group, which may lead to a distorted perception of competition and rivalries in society.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of sports on community identity, this quote could illustrate how local teams foster a sense of loyalty.
There is no plausible theory under which the record of the Pentagon Papers can be interpreted as relating to the national defense.
The 'free-floating intellectual' may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.
If you're teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.
There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster;' instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.
The Republican Party has become overwhelmingly so extreme that it's hardly a traditional political party anymore.
There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information - the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified.
There’s nothing quite as frightening as someone who knows they are right.
The real cost of the State is the prosperity we do not see, the jobs that don’t exist, the technologies to which we do not have access, the businesses that do not come into existence, and the bright future that is stolen from us. The State has looted us just as surely as a robber who enters our home at night and steals all that we love.
These days everyone was insisting on their identity, coming out as a man, woman, gay, black, Jew - brandishing whichever features they could claim, as if without a tag they wouldn’t be human.
Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.
Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses.
Men speak of dreaming as if it were a phenomenon of night and sleep. They should know better. All results achieved by us are self-promised, and all self-promises are made in dreams awake. Dreaming is the relief of labor,the wine that sustains us in act. We learn to love labor, not for itself, but for the opportunity it furnishes for dreaming, which is the great under-monotone of real life, unheard, unnoticed, because of its constancy. Living is dreaming. Only in the graves are there no dreams.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.