Dialectics Quotes

“Was not Hypatia the greatest philosopher of Alexandria, and a true martyr to the old values of learning? She was torn to pieces by a mob of incensed Christians not because she was a woman, but because her learning was so profound, her skills at dialectic so extensive that she reduced all who queried her to embarrassed silence. They could not argue with her, so they murdered her.”
― Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio

“What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“There's only two types of people in the world: the ones that entertain, and the ones that observe.”
― Britney Spears

“It should be added that, in general, it is the character of every metaphysical and theological argument to seek to explain one absurdity by another.”
― Michael Bakunin, Unknown Book 9062488

“Anger, surprisingly, often follows social hierarchies. Many people easily express anger toward those who are less powerful—a waiter, a child, a junior employee—but suppress it when mistreated by someone more powerful, such as a boss, police officer, or a government body.”
― Mason Carter, Critical Thinking Unchained: From Formal Logic to Dialectics of Emancipation

“What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Don't that make your bosom plim?”
― Thomas Hardy

“Man is that night, that empty Nothingness, which contains everything in its undivided simplicity: the wealth of an infinite number of representations, of images, not one of which comes precisely to mind, or which [moreover] are not [there] insofar as they are really present. It is the night, the interiority - or - the intimacy of Nature which exists here: [the] pure personal-Ego. In phantasmagorical representations it is night on all sides: here suddenly surges up a blood spattered head; there, another, white, apparition; and they disappear just as abruptly. That is the night that one perceives if one looks a man in the eyes; then one is delving into a night which becomes terrible; it is the night of the world which then presents itself to us.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“Logic is also the theory of knowledge of Marxism, but for quite another reason, because the forms themselves of the activity of the ‘spirit’ – the categories and schemas of logic – are inferred from investigation of the history of humanity’s knowledge and practice, i.e. from the process in the course of which thinking man (or rather humanity) cognises and transforms the material world. From that standpoint logic also cannot be anything else than a theory explaining the universal schemas of the development of knowledge and of the material world by social man.”
― Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic

“Languages are like beings:
they thrive, take a dive,
and need care to survive.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“dialectics, as a veteran communist explained . . . 'is the art and technique of always landing on your feet.”
― Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century

“We must draw up a plan for the formation of such a corps with several million people taking up the study of dialectical materialism and historical materialism, the theoretical basis of Marxism, and combating all shades of idealism and mechanical materialism. At present there are many cadres doing theoretical work, but there is still no corps of theoretical workers, much less a powerful one. Without such a corps, the cause of the entire Party, the socialist industrialization and socialist transformation of our country, the modernization of our national defence and our research in atomic energy cannot move along or succeed. I therefore recommend that you comrades read philosophy.”
― Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung: Volume V

“What does it really matter?’ is a line we like to associate with bourgeois callousness, but it is the line most likely to make the individual aware, without dread, of the insignificance of his existence. The inhuman part of it, the ability to keep one’s distance as a spectator and to rise above things, is in the final analysis the human part, the very part resisted by its ideologists.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

“Critical thinking begins with clarity: knowing when we’re dealing with facts, and when we’re dealing with beliefs awaiting verification.”
― Mason Carter, Critical Thinking Unchained: From Formal Logic to Dialectics of Emancipation

“A critical thinker is not someone who knows all the answers, but someone who keeps asking better questions.”
― Mason Carter, Critical Thinking Unchained: From Formal Logic to Dialectics of Emancipation

“Anger is a natural emotion. It arises when we perceive something unjust, unfair, or threatening. There is nothing inherently wrong in feeling angry. Emotions are part of being human. The real problem arises when we express anger impulsively—especially when it targets another person.”
― Mason Carter, Critical Thinking Unchained: From Formal Logic to Dialectics of Emancipation

“The notions of subjective and objective have been completely reversed. Objective means the non-controversial aspect of things, their unquestioned impression, the façade made up of classified data, that is, the subjective; and they call subjective anything which breaches that façade, engages the specific experience of a matter, casts of all ready-made judgments and substitutes relatedness to the object for the majority consensus of those who do not even look at it, let alone think about it — that is, the objective.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“It was a long evolutionary course which the human mind had to traverse, to pass from the belief in a physico-magical power comprised in the Word to a realization of its spiritual power. Indeed, it is the Word, it is language, that really reveals to man that world which is closer to him than any world of natural objects and touches his weal and woe more directly than physical nature. For it is language that makes his existence in a community possible; and only in society, in relation to a "Thee", can his subjectivity assert itself as a "Me.”
― Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth

“The realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking. Thus, dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening. Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. "It bears its end within itself and unfolds it-as Hegel already noticed-by cunning. With the destabilizing of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“It is not that a whole is more than the sum of its parts, but that the parts themselves are redefined and re-created in the process of their interaction. So the reductionist sociobiologists argue that individual human limitations place constraints on society, but, in fact, social organization is the negation of individual limitations.”
― Richard Lewontin

“Chris’ second letter was less noble. She started off by rhapsodizing once again about Dick’s face: “I started looking at your face that night in the restaurant—oh wow, isn’t that like the first line in the Ramones song, ‘Needles & Pins’? ‘I saw your face/It was the face I loved/And I knew’—and I got the same feeling from it that I get every-time I hear that song, and when you called my heart was pounding and then I thought that maybe we could do something together, something that is to adolescent romance what the Ramone’s cover of the song is to the original. The Ramones give ‘Needles & Pins’ the possibility of irony, but the irony doesn’t undercut the song’s emotion, it makes it stronger and more true. Søren Kierkegaard called this “the Third Remove.” In his book ‘The Crisis In The Life Of An Actress’, he claims no actress can play 14-year-old Juliette until she’s at least 32. Because acting’s art, and art involves reaching through some distance. Playing the vibrations between here and there and then and now. And don’t you think reality is best attained through dialectics? PS, Your face is mobile, craggy, beautiful…”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“Communism demonstrates that the formal juridical and political application of the democratic and majority principle of all the citizens while society is divided into opposed classes in relation to the economy, is incapable of making the state an organizational unit of the whole society or the whole nation.”
― Amadeo Bordiga, The Democratic Principle

“Theory must, as a dialectical one – like the Marxist one, by far and away – be immanent, even when it ultimately negates the entire sphere in which it moves.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

“Criticism, rightly practiced, begins and remains a form of introspection.”
― Mason Carter, Critical Thinking Unchained: From Formal Logic to Dialectics of Emancipation

“To understand the truth of any object, event, or idea, we must uncover its constitutive relations—the forces, processes, and structures that made it what it is.”
― Mason Carter, Critical Thinking Unchained: From Formal Logic to Dialectics of Emancipation

“The true dialectic of revolutions, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority to revolutionary tactics, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority — that is the way the road runs.”
― Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution,: And Leninism or Marxism?

“for every man there’s a woman, for every darkness there is light, every prey there’s a
predator and even Noah’s ark had two of each animal on his voyage, each exist in intercourse (sexual,
competitive, or cooperative) with the other. The endless process of procreation, conflict and harmony is
the music of history and of the universe itself, at once melodious and cacophonous, a story with a
setting, theme, characters, conflict and eventual resolution in which evil is eventually vanquished and
those who lived virtuously ascend to the stars”
― Justin Barger, Selected Writings Volume 3 (

“The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act at once lit up the Northern sky like sheets of lightning and electrified thousands of white men and women who up to now had regarded themselves as moderate abolitionists. And suddenly our anger, our consuming rage, did not seem so odd anymore. Which was strange to me, for I had grown used tour family's being both charged by its anger, as if it were our responsibility, and isolated by it as if it were our curse. Now that rage was the norm, however, ours seemed to have been oddly premature and, in this new context, somehow inappropriate and useless. At least to me it did.

Father simply declared that it proved we had been right all along. But we had spent so much time and energy for so many years, all the years of my life, justifying in moral, legal, and Biblical terms the ferocity of our position, that we had not stepped away from it and considered its deeper and more personal sources. We had not even considered whether it had such sources. What was abnormal to others had long seemed normal to us—until, thanks to the Fugitive Law, everyone else turned out as alarmed and angry as we and as determined as we to commit acts pf violence in order to deter the further extension of slavery. Earlier, our alarm and anger and commitment had seemed as evidence of our election, as it were, proof of our moral superiority. Now, however, we were no longer positioned amongst our people like prophets, for every decent person in the North was finally awake to the emergency. Or so it briefly seemed. And during this period, instead of feeling at one with my neighbors and grateful for that, I began to wonder why had we seen so early the horrors of slavery, when practically everyone else was blind to it, and why we had been so ferocious, when nearly every other well-intended Northern white man and woman had merely been concerned or, at best, disgusted.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“Trees into sweaters! Brute matter uplifted to serve human purposes! What could be more dialectical?”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty