I know I slept over your birthday but I want to still give my concrats and thank you for all the work you have done. It has changed the way I view the world and changed how I use my logic.
You have helped me to mature and been one of the cornerstones in my studies.

Once again I salute and wish you and your family happy holidays.

Dear Professor Chomsky,
Yours has been an incalculable contribution to the body of moral, political, scientific, and civil thought in the twentieth century. It would be impossible to overstate the importance of the intellectually rigorous, characteristically honest, and powerfully provocative dialogue that your body of work has created, to say nothing of what I have personally gained from reading your work. It is my sincerest hope that I will be able to continue in your tradition. I wish you all the best. Thank you.

Blessings to you and your family as you have bestowed blessings upon us. I understand you have also lost your compan~era and it is with teary-eyed sympathy that I send our condolences and best wishes. The Odawa have taught me that the spirit has a four day journey to the next lands and it is, of course, a time for honored remembrance, life and future life. Carol and you have actively worked to ensure a better and more sustainable future and we honor both of you and - as Cynthia Peters put it about the East Timorese - will learn that we are all leaders with experiences, insights who know what we have to do. My children know of you as an honored elder. I am happy to know we/I am going where we will all end up going: in this life and in 77 generations.

(Kent County, Michigan)
Turtle Island

I would just like to express my appreciation to Noam. I have begun a journey to learn and try and understand as much as I can about the world in which we live in. This has been largely inspired by him. He is truly a bright light in a world that I had seen to be very dark in the past. Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart.

P.S. for anyone interested there is a free copy of American Power and the New Mandarins at Archive.org
http://ia341020.us.archive.org//load_djvu_applet.cgi?file=0/items/Americ...

If the link does not work for any reason just search for it at Archive.org

I think you are very generous with your time and effort in sharing and explaining your thoughts and opinions. With the risk of embarassing you, I must say that I have yet to come across anybody (dead or alive) with your clarity in thinking, and hence your ability to analyze "situations" critically. This includes drawing analogies and similarities at the most fundamental level, despite the superficial differences that often preoccupy the mainstream media (e.g. your interview with william Buckley). Your ability to postulate hypotheses is also remarkable (e.g. propaganda model for manufacturing consent.).

I realize that the above is a poor and limited summary of your contributions. That's my "problem".

Happy Birthday, and thanks.

Albert Liem

Noam

Happy 80th birthday!

I bumped into Tony Benn at a railway station earlier this year (on his way back from the Hay on Wye festival), and reminded him that a few years ago I sent him your review article of Reihhold Niebuhr's main books (Neibuhr was a family friend of the Benn family). It turned out he was due to do a broadcast the following day with you.

Tony Benn has written extensive diaries and therefore doesn't need to write an autobiography. But I really think you need to follow in Bertrand Russell's footsteps (as you have in so many other ways) and produce a late classic. Though Russell waited until he was 94, and we are bit more impatient than that.

I know you've got a thing about "personalities", but I think that book would be at least as important as any of your others.

After 20 years of banging on to my father (now 78) he eventually read one of your books (Hegemony or Survival) and now gets the point!

Best wishes

Gerard Watson

Dear Noam:

As you know, I already wished you a Happy Birthday, but since it's a really, really big one, I'll do it again: Happy Birthday!! Best wishes to you and your loved ones. Looking forward to many more.

Thanks for your all of your contributions. You've made our lives richer. You've made my life richer.

Take care,

Ernie

P.S.: Ok Noam, I gotta ask - In Robert Barsky's latest book (pg. 30) you were quoted as admitting that “I’m not as remote from the popular culture as I sometimes pretend.” For the longest time I've had a gut feeling that this was true when reading your work . So fess up, what's going on here!? Are we going to be treated to some of your observations on our popular culture?

Dear Professor Chomsky,

An unmistakable indicator of the quality of your work is the chorus of hatred and moral panicking it brings about among intellectual communities with a long tradition of subservience. One couldn’t find a better example of this than Eastern Europe where the prevailing perception of the intellectual is that of an educated agent at the service of “higher interests” that the “herd” cannot be expected to grasp. Large sectors of apologists of state socialism turned propagandists of neoliberalism: there’s a common thread and it’s called mindless conformism.
You deserve the highest of credits for showing that dissent is not a passion of some eccentric minds but the basis of intellectual and moral integrity. An attitude in scarce supply where I come from.

Thanks to both your linguistic theory and political writings I have learned about human nature and society things that my own sociological curriculum wouldn’t have taught me.

Thank you for the inspiration and Happy Birthday!

Noam, Just a quick word to honor you and your work on the occasion of your birthday. There are so very few folks who walk the walk as well as talk the talk that when they occur it is a time of joyous declarations. Speaking truth to power is never a popular position so it is no wonder that the mainstream media seeks to ignore or ridicule you. Just know that there are many of us who take great comfort in knowing that there are people like yourself out there. Happy B-Day and I am happy to have this opportunity to thank you. Mahalo!