Edvaldo Junior > Edvaldo's Quotes

“the identity of an individual is essentially a function of her choices, rather than the discovery of an immutable attribute”
― Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity

“A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.”
― Amartya Sen

“The increasing tendency towards seeing people in terms of one dominant ‘identity’ (‘this is your duty as an American’, ‘you must commit these acts as a Muslim’, or ‘as a Chinese you should give priority to this national engagement’) is not only an imposition of an external and arbitrary priority, but also the denial of an important liberty of a person who can decide on their respective loyalties to different groups (to all of which he or she belongs).”
― Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice

“To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.”
― Martha Nussbaum

“All told, U.S. allies in Central America during Reagan's two terms killed over 300,000 people, tortured hundreds of thousands, and drove millions into exile.”
― Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism

“If the apostles reminded even Paul himself to remember the poor (Galatians 2:10), then surely the rest of us need such a reminder.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“The hope that fuels the pursuit of endless economic growth – that billions of consumers in India & China will one day enjoy the lifestyles of Europeans and Americans – is as absurd & dangerous a fantasy as anything dreamt up by Al-Qaeda. It condemns the global environment to early destruction & looks set to create reservoirs of nihilistic rage & disappointment among hundreds of millions of have-nots – the bitter outcome of the universal triumph of Western Modernity, which turns the revenge of the East into something darkly ambiguous, and all its victories truly Pyrrhic.”
― Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia

“One of the curious things about our educational system, I would note, is that the better trained you are in a discipline, the less used to dialectical method you're likely to be. In fact, young children are very dialectical; they see everything in motion, in contradictions and transformations. We have to put an immense effort into training kids out of being good dialecticians. Marx wants to recover the intuitive power of the dialectical method and put it to work in understanding how everything is in process, everything is in motion. He doesn't simply talk about labor; he talks about the labor process. Capital is not a thing, but rather a process that exists only in motion. When circulation stops, value disappears and the whole system comes tumbling down.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital, Volume 1

“Neoliberalization has meant ,in short,the financialization of everything.There was unquestionably a power shift away from production to the world of finance.”
― David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism

“A feminism that is truly anti-racist and anti-imperialist must also be anticapitalist.”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%

“Many gnostics, on the contrary, insisted that ignorance, not sin, is what involves a person in suffering.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

“Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.”
― Richard Sennett, The Craftsman