Ajey N

“The slaves of developed industrial Civilization are sublimated slaves, but they are slaves, for slavery is determined "neither by obedience nor by hardness of labour but by the status of being mere instrument, and the reduction of man to the state of a thing.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“Got to make a living' is a rationalization we tell ourselves to do things without integrity.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“In our own time, the thought leaders have often been deployed to help us see problems in precisely the opposite way. They are taking on issues that can easily be regarded as political and systematic—injustice, layoffs, unaccountable leadership, inequality, the abdication of community, the engineered precariousness of ever more human lives—but using the power of their thoughts to cause us to zoom in and think smaller. The feminists wanted us to look at a vagina and zoom out to see Congress. The thought leaders want us to look at a laid-off employee and zoom in to see the beauty of his feeling his vulnerability because at least he is alive. They want us to focus on his vulnerability, not his wage.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” The most widely accepted view of history is also the most childish. History is seen as the doings of Great Men (and occasionally Great Women), of kings and politicians, generals and churchmen, artists and film stars. Such a conception of history can be traced back to the medieval chroniclers, who recorded the doings of monarchs and noblemen, their feasts, wars and adulteries. We are still served up with the same view, by courtesy of the most advanced technology, on the television screen and in the headlines of the daily tabloids.”
― Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx