Noam Chomsky

American linguist and activist (born 1928)

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Born 1928 · age 98United States

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Wikipedia
150 languages
Cross-language footprint
Rank in United States
#163
Academics
Age
98
Born 1928
Known for
The Corporation
2003

Summary

Updated 2026-08-14

He rewired how we think about language itself — arguing grammar lives in the brain, not the environment — then spent sixty years dismantling U.S. foreign policy with the same forensic precision.

Biography

About

Born to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia in 1928, Chomsky found anarchist literature in New York bookstores as a teenager and studied at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1955 he earned his doctorate at Harvard and joined MIT; two years later Syntactic Structures landed like a depth charge, introducing transformational grammar and helping kill off behaviorist linguistics. He built universal grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, the minimalist program — work that made him among the most cited living authors and a founder of cognitive science. In 1967 his essay "The Responsibility o…

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In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

said7 Dec 1967

After the first International Days of Protest in October, 1965, Senator Mansfield criticized the "sense of utter irresponsibility" shown by the demonstrators.

— "On Resistance", The New York Review of Books, December 7, 1967.

Noam Chomsky

said1967

Twenty years ago, Dwight Macdonald published a series of articles in Politics on the responsibility of peoples and, specifically, the responsibility of intellectuals.

— Noam Chomsky, The Responsibility of Intellectuals (1967)

Noam Chomsky

said1967