Quotes

Michael Pearce, Three Little Pigs

If I must be a fool, as all those who reason or believe anything certainly are, my follies shall at least be natural and agreable.

David Hume, A treatise of human nature, Oxford, 1978

“Let the rules with greatest acceptance utility be followed, though the heavens fall!” is no more plausible than “Fiat justitia, ruat coelum!"—and a good bit less ringing.

Peter Railton, Alienation, consequentialism, and the demands of morality, Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 13, no. 2, 1984, pp. 134–71

The orthodox economists, as well as Marx, who in this respect agreed with them, were mistaken in supposing that economic self-interest could be taken as the fundamental motive in social sciences. The desire for commodities, when separated from power and glory, is finite, and can be fully satisfied by a moderate competence. The really expensive desires are not dictated by a love of material comfort. Such commodities as a legislature rendered subservient by corruption, or a private picture gallery of Old Masters selected by experts, are sought for the sake of power or glory, not as affording comfortable places in which to sit. When a moderate degree of comfort is assured, both individuals and communities will pursue power rather than wealth: they may seek wealth as a means to power, or the may forgo an increase of wealth in order to secure an increase of power, but in the former case as in the latter their fundamental motive is not economic.

This error in orthodox and Marxist economics is not merely theoretical, but is of the greatest practical importance, and has caused some of the principal events of recent times to be misunderstood. It is only by realising that love of power is the cause of the activities that are important in social affairs that history, whether ancient or modern, can be rightly interpreted.

Bertrand Russell, Power: a new social analysis, London, 1938, p. 9

El titulado “sentido común” es mucho menos común de lo que parece, en la medida en que no es común a todos los seres humanos en todas las épocas. La historia de la filosofía y de la ciencia ha mostrado que semejante supuesta “facultad” ha experimentado bastantes cambios en el curso de la historia.

José Ferrater Mora, El ser y la muerte: bosquejo de filosofía integracionista, Madrid, 1988, pp. 27-28

Sometimes I feel that the moral life is so close now, I can almost touch it.

The Daily Telegraph, 2004

Thus it is in regard to every important partial truth; there are always two conflicting modes of thought, one tending to give to that truth too large, the other to give it too small, a place: and the history of opinion is generally an oscillation between these extremes. From the imperfection of the human faculties, it seldom happens that, even in the minds of eminent thinkers, each partial view of their subject passes for its worth, and none for more than its worth. But even if this just balance exist in the mind of the wiser teacher, it will not exist in his disciples, less in the general mind. He cannot prevent that which is new in his doctrine, and on which, being new, he is forced to insist the most strongly, from making a disproportionate impression. The impetus necessary to overcome the obstacles which resist all novelties of opinion, seldom fails to carry the public mind almost as far on the contrary side of the perpendicular. Thus every excess in either direction determines a corresponding reaction; improvement consisting only in this, that the oscillation, each time, departs rather less widely from the center, and an ever-increasing tendency is manifested to settle finally on it.

John Stuart Mill, Coleridge, London and Westminster Review, no. 65, 1840

Parecería que la vida de un pensador debiese ser la más rica de las vidas; pero la del pensador abstracto no lo es.

Vicente Fatone, Introducción al existencialismo, Buenos Aires, 1953, p. 12

[E]l humor es la única salida del artista: si no le daría tal horror la realidad y la vida de los seres humanos actuales, que es la vida de siempre, la vieja historia: los buenos corridos y asesinados por los malos que se convierten en buenos con el poder y son corridos por otros malos que con el poder, ya se sabe, se convierten en buenos y la gran masa mira el espectáculo mientras viven como ratas, en fin.

Enrique Villegas, Hablan de Macedonio Fernández, Buenos Aires, 1968, p. 53

En aquella Estancia donde nadie hacía nada hubo un día en que los habitantes se alegraron al divisar que iba llegando lenta, descansadamente, una persona que no conocían. Los que llamaremos estancistas, tenían por momentos la incomodidad de dudar de si no faltaría todavía algo que dejar de hacer, que a lo mejor habían descuidado de omitir; y este desconocido de tranquilo andar, por su desgarbo y modos reposados, expresión personal de descontento y despreocupación, parecióles que tenía todo el aire de ser un experto en el no-hacer y el no-suceder, que eran las cosas en que vivían colaborando los estancistas sin discrepancia, y también si jactancia, pues ya digo que no estaban satisfechos del todo, sospechosos de hallarse, sin darse cuenta, omitiendo todavía alguna omisión.

Macedonio Fernández, El no-hacer

Cho’ entón upasóltome del ástrito i sou sólo unu nugri fus’puntu, i subo pa otro noche solo do no sento ni caló nada: es mi propio peke nugro ke impídeme crusti. Muy viol’puxo i alfin ne resálgome, ya sin ningún taro ni kembre ni gan’, i sou pur’blis, pues no eno forma ni limijte; ra’periexpándome nel cosminoche infinito do too es puedi, hi too yi chi’ pérdese, i nostro mundo es fen’ despuma i mi exvida sólo una bólhita pre crepi, muy yus’. Pero esa tum bolha mui atráigeme desdese mundo, i zás yi fulmicáigome, ra’ ensártinmen los varios mis cuerpos asta kes yus’este mundo, re.

Xul Solar, Visión sobre el trilíneo

[D]efense mechanisms are part of the Western intellectual’s standard equipment. Since I have frequently met with them here, I take the liberty of examining them more closely.

The first argument is really a matter of semantics. Our society has seen fit to be permissive about the old taboos of language. Nobody is shocked any more by the ancient and indispensable four-letter-words. At the same time, a new crop of words has been banished, by common consent, from polite society: words like exploitation and imperialism. The have acquired a touch of obscenity. Political scientists have taken to paraphrases and circumlocution which sound like the neurotic euphemisms of the Victorians. Some sociologists have gone so far as to deny the very existence of a ruling class. Obviously, it is easier to abolish the word exploitation than the thing it designates; but then, to do away with the term is not to do away with the problem. A second defense device is using psychology as a shield. I have been told that it is sick and paranoid to conceive of a powerful set of people who are a danger to the rest of the world. This amounts to saying that instead of listening to his arguments it is better to watch the patient. Now it is not an easy thing to defend yourself against amateur psychiatrists. I shall limit myself to a few essential points. I do not imagine a conspiracy, since there is no need for such a thing. A social class, and especially a ruling class, is not held together by secret bonds, by common and glaringly evident self-interest. I do not fabricate monsters. Everybody knows that bank presidents, generals, and military industrialists do not look like comicstric demons: they are well-mannered, nice gentlemen, possibly lovers of chamber music with a philanthropic bent of mind. There was no lack of such kind people even in the Germany of the Thirties. Their moral insanity does not derive from their individual character, but from their social function.

Finally, there is a political defense mechanism operating with the assertion that all of the things which I submit are just communist propaganda. I have no reason to fear this time-honored indictment. It is inaccurate, vague, and irrational. First of all, the word Communism, used as a singular, has become rather meaningless. It covers a wide variety of conflicting ideas; some of them are even mutually exclusive. Furthermore, my opinion of American foreign policy is shared by Greek liberals and Latin American archbishops, by Norwegian peasants and French industrialists: people who are not generally thought of as being in the vanguard of “Communism”.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, On Leaving America, The New York Review of Books, vol. 10, no. 4, 1968

If we start with the idea of moral reciprocity in which all human beings are treated as equals, we cannot accept the relations that stand between North and South as something that has even the simulacrum of justice.

Kai Nielsen, Global justice and the imperatives of capitalism, Journal of philosophy, vol. 80, no. 10, 1983, pp. 608–610, p. 182

En tiempos de auge la conjetura de que la existencia del hombre es una cantidad constante, invariable, puede entristecer o irritar: en tiempos que declinan (como éstos), es la promesa de que ningún oprobio, ninguna calamidad, ningún dictador podrá empobrecernos.

Jorge Luis Borges, El tiempo circular, Historia de la eternidad, Buenos Aires, 1936

Alone in my tower at midnight, I remember the woods and downs, the sea and sky, that daylight showed. Now, as I look through each of the four windows, north, south, east and west, I see only myself dimly reflected, or shadowed in monstrous opacity upon the fog. What matter? To-morrow sunrise will give me back the beauty of the outer world as I wake from sleep.

But the mental night that has descended upon me is less brief, and promises no awakening after sleep. Formerly, the cruelty, the meanness, the dusty fretful passion of human life seemed to me a little thing, set, like some resolved discord in music, amid the splendour of the stars and the stately procession of geological ages. What if the universe was to end in universal death? It was none the less unruffled and magnificent. But now all this has shrunk to be no more than my own reflection in the windows of the soul through which I look out upon the night of nothingness. The revolutions of nebulae, the birth and death of stars, are no more than convenient fictions in the trivial work of linking together my own sensations, and perhaps those of other men not much better than myself. No dungeon was ever constructed so dark and narrow as that in which the shadow physics of our time imprisons us, for every prisoner has believed that outside his walls a free world existed; but now the prison has become the whole universe. There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendour, no vastness, anywhere; only triviality for a moment, and then nothing.

Why live in such a world? Why even die?

Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, London, 1967, pp. 158-159

¿Dónde terminó el anarquismo? Refiriéndose al caso español un autor sostiene que “su movimiento se perdió en la evolución de los tiempos, pero sus problemas de libertad e igualdad quedaron incroporados a la cultura de la sociedad europea, y por tanto, factibles de extenderse al resto del mundo”. El anarquismo argentino también se extravió en el transcurso del siglo XX y, como su homónimo hispano, instaló en la sociedad local problemas de libertad e igualdad. Fue casi la única corriente contestataria que defendió la libertad individual y la igualdad de todos los hombres como valores supremos. Ni el Estado ni el interés partidario o doctrinario debían interponerse entre el individuo y su libertad, y, en este sentido, se diferenció de cualquier grupo o partido de izquierda. Estas ideas eran heredadas del liberalismo, pero a diferencia de aquél, el anarquismo las puso en práctica (o intentó hacerlo) entre los sectores más oprimidos de la sociedad. Tal vez los actuales movimientos de derechos humanos en su defensa de los derechos civiles y, consecuentemente, de las libertades individuales sean herederos del individualismo libertario.

Juan Suriano, Anarquistas: Cultura y política libertaria en Buenos Aires. 1890 - 1910, Buenos Aires, 2001, p. 342

A proper body’s not an object, not an implement, not a belonging to be admired, it’s just you, yourself. Only when it’s no longer you, but yours, a thing owned, do you worry about it –Is it in good shape? Will it do? Will it last?

Frederik Pohl, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander (eds.), Galaxy, thirty years of innovative science fiction, New York, 1974

The most ardent antigovernment libertarian tacitly accepts his own dependency on government, even while rhetorically denouncing signs of dependency in others. This double-think is the core of the American libertarian stance. Those who propagate a libertarian philosophy–such as Robert Nozick, Charles Murray, and Richard Epstein–speak fondly of the “minimal state.” But describing a political system that is genuinely capable of representing force and fraud as “minimal” is to suggest, against all historical evidence, that such a system is easy to achieve and maintain.

Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein, The cost of rights: why liberty depends on taxes, New York, 1999, p. 64

Surely the partisan of utility cannot be charged with the sins of social contract. A dose of Bentham is the best cure for anyone tempted by the vision of asocial monads giving contractual shape to their natural rights.

Bruce A. Ackerman, Social justice in the liberal state, New Haven, Connecticut, 1980, p. 100

Lo que estamos haciendo en el movimiento es una batalla muy grande contra el furor hegemónico de la mundialización, que se quiere apoderar de valores culturales, y así se quiere apoderar del mundo. Frente a eso nosotros nos hacemos una pregunta: ¿cuáles son los valores verdaderos de una civilización distinta? Y, por el contrario, ¿qué es lo que valora una sociedad globalizacda? Sabemos: el mercado, la rentabilidad, y la persona como un valor de compra y venta. Nosotros tratamos de recuperar y crear otros valores culturales, éticos, otra sabiduría, la creatividad.

Colectivo Situaciones, La hipótesis 891: más allá de los piquetes, Buenos Aires, 2002, p. 69