Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.
To retire to the monastery, or the woods, or the sea, is to escape from the sharp suggestions that spur on ambition.
There's no excuse therefore, for a 1,152 page book. I think we should all be using 300-page paperbacks. These exist.
I don't think massification and globalization and all those other 'izations' are necessarily hostile to regionalism.
The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.
The worst thing we could do is impose time limits and then expect people to sink or swim once they move off welfare.
The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values.
The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.
Work is the best of narcotics, providing the patient be strong enough to take it. I dread idleness as if it were Hell.
If one looks at the works of Newton to Einstein, they were never scientists in the way modernity understands the term.
The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.
If the meanest man in the republic is deprived of his rights,then every man in the republic is deprived of his rights.
The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject
When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.
Educational institutes can no longer be prizes in church politics or furnish berths for failure in other walks of life.
A wise man has told us that "men are once for all so made that they prefer a rational world to believe in and live in."
Laws are important and valuable in the exact natural sciences, in the measure that those sciences are universally valid.
Most young people today prefer just to move in together and stay together as long, but no longer, as satisfaction lasts.
In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth.
Daily and hourly, the politician inwardly has to overcome a quite trivial and all-too-human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity.
Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide.
Could anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago?
Some people think that as the Chinese economy becomes more and more capitalistic it will inevitably become more democratic
The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words, and ask no more than complicitous silence.
The mass production of distraction is now as much a part of the American way of life as the mass production of automobiles.
If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.
Some people think that as the Chinese economy becomes more and more capitalistic it will inevitably become more democratic.
Today's youth have been cast in a condition of liminal drift, with no way of knowing whether it is transitory or permanent.
The very concept of universal formal education is a product (and a relatively late product) of the capitalist world-economy.
It is the tragic story of the cultural crusader in a mass society that he cannot win, but that we would be lost without him.
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.
Power, in a nutshell, is the ability to get things done, and politics is the ability to decide which things need to be done.
Ingeniously, capitalism discovered that the economy may be moved not by satisfying existing needs, but by creating new ones.
Photography itself is most frequently nothing but the reproduction of the image that a group produces of its own integration.
The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.
For intellectual authority, the appropriate version of Descartes 's cogito would be today: I am talked about, therefore I am.
Jews and Gypsies were well-nigh the only Diasporas in 19th century Europe. Now go to London, it is a collection of Diasporas.
Fate has to do with events in history that are the summary and unintended results of innumerable decisions of innumerable men.
The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.
For progressive people the present is the beginning of the future. For conservative people the present is the end of the past.
Television enjoys a de facto monopoly on what goes into the heads of a significant part of the population and what they think.
Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts.
Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better.