Maica

“We must recognize the fact that philosophy at the present time is entirely at an impasse concerning the problem of the origin of values. This theoretical failure is reflected in the practical antinomy between submission and rebellion that infects the daily concerns of education, politics, and ethics. If no decision can be made at this level, we must retrace our steps, extricate ourselves from the impasse, and try to gain access, by means of a nonethical approach, to the problem of autonomy and obedience.”
― Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations

“The crowd, in fact, is composed of individuals; it must therefore be in every man's power to become what he is, an individual. From becoming an individual no one, no one at all, is excluded, except he who excludes himself by becoming a crowd. To become a crowd, to collect a crowd about one, is on the contrary to affirm the distinctions of human life. The most well-meaning person who talks about these distinctions can easily offend an individual. But then it is not the crowd which possesses power, influence, repute, and mastery over men, but it is the invidious distinctions of human life which despotically ignore the single individual as the weak and impotent, which in a temporal and worldly interest ignore the eternal truth- the single individual.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“What’s that dreadful phrase? Reader-friendly? It isn’t reader friendly; it’s saying to the reader, “I bet you can’t take this, and if you can you’re the kind of reader I want and you’ll stay with me. If you can’t take it, I don’t want you to read me anyway.”
― Paul West

“If science could comprehend all phenomena so that eventually in a thoroughly rational society human beings became as predictable as cogs in a machine, then man, driven by this need to know and assert his freedom, would rise up and smash the machine.

What the reformers of the Enlightenment, dreaming of a perfect organization of society, had overlooked, Dostoevski saw all too plainly with the novelist's eye: namely, that as modern society becomes more organized and hence more bureaucratized it piles up at its joints petty figures like that of the Underground Man, who beneath their nondescript surface are monsters of frustration and resentment.”
― William Barrett