Christian

“As soon as we conceive a system, the idea of global unity imposes itself to such a point that it blinds us, which means that, instead of reductionist blindness (which sees only the constitutive elements), there follows "holistic" blinding (which sees only the whole). Consequently, if it has been very often noticed that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, the contrary proposition: the whole is less than the sum of the parts, has been very rarely formulated. And nobody at all, to my knowledge, has thought of linking the two propositions:

S > s^1 + s^2 + s^3 + s^4 + … > S
S > s^1 + s^2 + s^3 + s^4 + … < S

This is a formulation by Jacques Sauvan which made me conceive the second proposition; I linked it to the first in an apparently absurd fashion”
― Edgar Morin, La méthode

“Gods, whether of Progress or the Old Testament, ghosts of saintly, or revolutionary, ancestors, abstracted moral imperatives, ideals cut wholly off from mere earth and mankind, utopias beckoning from the marshes of their never-never-land—these, and not the facts of social life together with probable generalizations based on those facts, exercise the final controls over arguments and conclusions. Political analysis becomes, like other dreams, the expression of human wish or the admission of practical failure.”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

“Every theory, in sum, carries something potentially Platonic (allowing one to contemplate ecstatically, in the Ideas, the Essence of the Real) or, if mathematized, Pythagorean (allowing one to contemplate ecstatically, in Numbers, the Essence of the Real). Every adherence to a coherent system of ideas about the World enables one to conceive the World as an ordered and perfect system. In this sense, the "Parmenidean" passion for Unity erases disorders, pluralities, uprootings, fragmentations, the diaspora of all things-rendering them mere superficial appearances: the logical thirst for Unity is also a mystical thirst. Likewise, the conception of a world as an impeccable deterministic machine satisfies an obsession with perfection and incorruptibility. Finally, when rationality degrades into rationalization, it magically/analogically encloses the World within the system conceived by the mind thereby allowing the mind to possess the World whose Truth possesses it.”
― Edgar Morin

“Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at most, time's carcass.”
― Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy