Thiago Brant > Thiago's Quotes

“It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“And there are always people who find their lives have become so unsupportable they believe the best thing they could do would be to hasten their transition to another plane of existence.'
'They kill themselves, you mean?' said Bod. [...]
'Indeed.'
'Does it work? Are they happier dead?'
'Sometimes. Mostly, no. It's like the people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“ideology signifies a phenomenon intermediate between a simple lie at one pole, and an error, which is the result of a distorted and faulty conceptual apparatus, at the other.”
― Karl Mannheim

“The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).”
― Michel Foucault

“The man who no longer expects miraculous changes either from a revolution or from an economic plan is not obliged to resign himself to the unjustifiable. It is because he likes individual human beings, participates in communities, and respects the truth, that he refuses to surrender his soul to an abstract ideal of humanity, a tyrannical party, and an absurd scholasticism. . . . If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe.

If they can abolish fanaticism, let us pray for the advent of the sceptics.”
― Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals

“Only in imaginary experience (in the folk tale, for example), which neutralizes the sense of social realities, does the social world take the form of a universe of possibles equally possible for any possible subject.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell

“Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.”
― Michel Foucault

“Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.”
― Michel Foucault

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“There are two basic ways to criticize an argument:
■ Challenge the premises-show that at least one is false.
■ Challenge the reasoning-show that the premises are not a good reason for the conclusion.”
― Ian Hacking, An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic

“Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.”
― Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History?

“The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while. The commonest mistake made about freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the external or physical side of activity.”
― John Dewey

“A critique does not consist in saying that things aren't good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based... To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy.”
― Michel Foucault