Christian > Christian's Quotes

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“Gods, whether of Progress or the Old Testament, ghosts of saintly, or revolutionary, ancestors, abstracted moral imperatives, ideals cut wholly off from mere earth and mankind, utopias beckoning from the marshes of their never-never-land—these, and not the facts of social life together with probable generalizations based on those facts, exercise the final controls over arguments and conclusions. Political analysis becomes, like other dreams, the expression of human wish or the admission of practical failure.”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

“The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline & Critical Writings

“Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at most, time's carcass.”
― Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.”
― Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

“Every theory, in sum, carries something potentially Platonic (allowing one to contemplate ecstatically, in the Ideas, the Essence of the Real) or, if mathematized, Pythagorean (allowing one to contemplate ecstatically, in Numbers, the Essence of the Real). Every adherence to a coherent system of ideas about the World enables one to conceive the World as an ordered and perfect system. In this sense, the "Parmenidean" passion for Unity erases disorders, pluralities, uprootings, fragmentations, the diaspora of all things-rendering them mere superficial appearances: the logical thirst for Unity is also a mystical thirst. Likewise, the conception of a world as an impeccable deterministic machine satisfies an obsession with perfection and incorruptibility. Finally, when rationality degrades into rationalization, it magically/analogically encloses the World within the system conceived by the mind thereby allowing the mind to possess the World whose Truth possesses it.”
― Edgar Morin

“I am an anarch in space, a metahistorian in time. Hence I am committed to neither the political present nor tradition; I am blank and also open and potent in any direction.

Dear old Dad, in contrast, still pours his wine into the same decaying old wineskins, he still believes in a constitution when nothing and no one constitutes anything.”
― Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil

“It's truly a lie
I counterfeit myself
It's truly a lie
I counterfeit myself
You don't own, you don't own, you don't own, you don't own
You don't own what none can buy
You don't own
(You don't own)
Neither do I”
― Queens of the Stone Age

“As soon as we conceive a system, the idea of global unity imposes itself to such a point that it blinds us, which means that, instead of reductionist blindness (which sees only the constitutive elements), there follows "holistic" blinding (which sees only the whole). Consequently, if it has been very often noticed that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, the contrary proposition: the whole is less than the sum of the parts, has been very rarely formulated. And nobody at all, to my knowledge, has thought of linking the two propositions:

S > s^1 + s^2 + s^3 + s^4 + … > S
S > s^1 + s^2 + s^3 + s^4 + … < S

This is a formulation by Jacques Sauvan which made me conceive the second proposition; I linked it to the first in an apparently absurd fashion”
― Edgar Morin, La méthode

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
― Benjamin Franklin, Memoirs of the life & writings of Benjamin Franklin

“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”
― Georg Hegel

“Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.”
― David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“People who think they're free in this world just haven't come to the end of their leash yet.”
― Michael Parenti

“But thought is never independent of social being, if only because ideas inevitably are intended to respond to concerns already raised by others, in relations to which they must be assessed.”
― Tom Rockmore, Hegel's Circular Epistemology

“Two contrary reasons. We must begin with that, otherwise we cannot understand anything and everything is heretical. And even at the end of each truth we must add that we are bearing the opposite truth in mind.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“I consider it poor historical form to make fun of ancestral mistakes without respecting the eros that was linked to them. We are no less in bondage to the Zeitgeist; folly is handed down, we merely don a new cap.”
― Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. ”
― Pericles

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Philosophy and the study of the real world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love.”
― Karl Marx, German Ideology

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”
― David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays

“If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole? But he may perhaps aspire to know at least the parts to which he bears some proportion. But the parts of the world are all so related and linked to one another, that I believe it impossible to know one without the other and without the whole.

Man, for instance, is related to all he knows. He needs a place wherein to abide, time through which to live, motion in order to live, elements to compose him, warmth and food to nourish him, air to breathe. He sees light; he feels bodies; in short, he is in a dependant alliance with everything. To know man, then, it is necessary to know how it happens that he needs air to live, and, to know the air, we must know how it is thus related to the life of man, etc. Flame cannot exist without air; therefore to understand the one, we must understand the other.

Since everything then is cause and effect, dependant and supporting, mediate and immediate, and all is held together by a natural though imperceptible chain, which binds together things most distant and most different, I hold it equally impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole, and to know the whole without knowing the parts in detail.”
― Blaise Pascal

“The names of virtues, with their precepts, were:
1. Temperance. Eat not do dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
3. Order. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
4. Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
6. Industry. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. Sincerity. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. Justice. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. Moderation. Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. Cleanliness. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloths, or habitation.
11. Tranquillity. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. Chastity. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
13. Humility. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.”
― Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

“Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“I have opinions of my own - strong opinions - but I don't always agree with them.”
― George H.W. Bush

“If I love freedom above all else, then any commitment becomes a metaphor, a symbol. This touches on the difference between the forest fleer and the partisan:this distinction is not qualitative but essential in nature. The anarch is closer to Being. The partisan moves within the social or national party structure, the anarch is outside of it. Of course, the anarch cannot elude the party structure, since he lives in society.”
― Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols