Duncan Murray

“Never mind that some children might not want to grow up to run a business, that some might rather be teachers or mechanics, or even nothing in particular just yet; forget that imagination and creativity might be something other than a source of wealth. The cult of entrepreneurship’s commodification of imagination, its celebration of self-sacrifice, and its bootstraps individualism make it a perfect ethic for social disinvestment masquerading as reform and profiteering disguised as charity. Entrepreneurship means that now you’re on your own, kid.”
― John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism

“Martin Heidegger’s challenge to Husserl came in the opening lines of a book, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), which he published in Husserl’s own phenomenological Yearbook series in 1927. The first page contained an innocuous-seeming quotation from Plato’s dialogue The Sophist: For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression ‘being’. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.”
― Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others

“Progress in human affairs, whether in science or in history or in society, has come mainly through the bold readiness of human beings not to confine themselves to seeking piecemeal improvements in the way things are done, but to present fundamental challenges in the name of reason to the current way of doing things and to the avowed or hidden assumptions on which it rests”
― Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History?

“We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity