Ashwa > Ashwa's Quotes

“The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.”
― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

“The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes. ”
― Michel Foucault

“Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.”
― Michel Foucault, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“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

“Where there is power, there is resistance.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

“Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.”
― Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader

“The whole of language is a continuous process of metaphor, and the history of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture; language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of fossils of life and civilisations.”
― Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks

“Since defeat in the Struggle must always be envisaged, the preparation of one's own successors is as important as what one does for victory.”
― Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks

“The history of education shows that every class which has sought to take power has prepared itself for power by an autonomous education. The first step in emancipating oneself from political and social slavery is that of freeing the mind. I put forward this new idea: popular schooling should be placed under the control of the great workers’ unions. The problem of education is the most important class problem.”
― Antonio Gramsci

“Possibility means "freedom". The measure of freedom enters into the concept of man. That the objective possibilities exist for people not to die of hunder and that people do die of hunger, has its importance, or so one would have thought. But the existence of the objective conditions, of possibilities or of freedom is not yet enough: it is necessary to "know" them, and know how to use them.”
― Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks

“Culture is something quite different. It is organization, discipline of one’s inner self, a coming to terms with one’s own personality; it is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one’s own historical value, one’s own function in life, one’s own rights and obligations.”
― Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“My favourite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence.

[Sources and Acknowledgements: Chapter 19]”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 3001: The Final Odyssey

“It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

“Now I understand,” said the last man.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End

“Roman emperors wanted obedience, not martyrs. They had absolutely no wish to open windows into men’s souls or to control what went on there. That would be a Christian innovation.”
― Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

“For those who wish to be intolerant, monotheism provides very powerful weapons.

Nietzsche and Engels would later equate Christianity and its values with slaves and slave morality.”
― Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

“The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.”
― Bertrand Russell

“As one twentieth-century historian put it: “In an age of anxiety any ‘totalist’ creed exerts a powerful attraction: one has only to think of the appeal of communism to many bewildered minds in our own day.”
― Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

“Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?”
― Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

“Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.”
― Fromm, Eric, The Art of Loving

“Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.”
― Erich Fromm

“Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.”
― Erich Fromm