Efad

“The more we mystify value differences as ultimately personal, subjective, irrational, or intimately spiritual, unfortunately, the more we pull the wool over our own eyes, the more we will misunderstand what value differences involve. The more we presume that value differences are so personally subjective that they are virtually beyond discussion, the less likely will we be even to try to discuss such differences. The more that our own rhetoric of "deep" and "fundamental" value differences presumes unbridgeable chasms between people with differing values, the more likely we will be wring our hands, and the less likely we'll be to look for practical ways to live together, acknowledging and honoring rather than fearing, recognizing rather than shunning, understanding rather than obfuscating whatever real value differences we may have. Deep value differences deserve serious attention, to be sure, but our common ways of speaking about those differences—with the labels fundamental, essential, unbridgeable, for example—can often just make our problems worse, not better.”
― John Forester

“Critical analysis tells us not just that injustice exists, but how and why power plays take place historically and specifically, not simply as the general order of things: how injustice exists changeably rather than inevitably, politically rather than metaphysically—how our lives could have been different. Critical analysis tells us, colloquially speaking, not just what's wrong but also what we can do practically to respond. Complaint, in contrast, tells us what's wrong—unjust, racist, manipulated, sexist, and so on—but tells us nothing new about how the world can be otherwise, how we can change the world, resist injustice, do justice.”
― John Forester

“I love the unanswered question, the unresolved story, the unclimbed mountain, the tender shard of an incomplete dream. Most of the time. But is it mandatory for a writer to be ambiguous about everything? Isn't it true that there have been fearful episodes in human history when prudence and discretion would have just been euphemisms for pusillanimity? When caution was actually cowardice? When sophistication was disguised decadence? When circumspection was really a kind of espousal? Isn't it true, or at least theoretically possible, that there are times in the life of a people or a nation when the political climate demands that we—even the most sophisticated of us—overtly take sides? I think such times are upon us.”
― Arundhati Roy, Power Politics

“...philosophy permits man to interrogate himself about what he says and about what one says to oneself in thinking. No longer to let oneself be swayed or intoxicated by the rhythm of words and the generality that they designate, but to open oneself to the uniqueness of the unique in the real, that is to say, to the uniqueness of the other. That is to say, in the final analysis, to love. To speak truly, not as one sings; to awaken; to sober up; to undo one's refrain. Already the philosopher Alain taught us to be on guard against everything that in our purportedly lucid civilization comes to us from the "merchants of sleep." Philosophy as insomnia, as a new awakening at the heart of the self-evidence which already marks the awakening, but which is still or always a dream.”
― Emmanue Levinas