Quotes

“Libertarian” capitalism sacrifices liberty to capitalism, a truth its advocates are able to deny only because they are prepared to abuse the language of freedom.

G. A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, Cambridge, 1995, p. 37

The anarchists attack the principle of authority which is central to contemporary social forms, and in doing so they arouse a guilty kind of repugnance in ordinary people; they are rather like Ivan Karamazov crying out in the court-room, ‘Who does not desire his father’s death?’ The very ambivalence of the average man’s attitude to authority makes him distrust those who speak openly the resentments he feels in secret, and thus it is in the psychological condition which Erich Fromm has named ’the fear of freedom’ that we may find the reason why—against the evidence of history—so many people still identify anarchism with unmitigated destruction and nihilism and political terror.

George Woodcock, Anarchism: a history of libertarian ideas and movements, Peterborough, Ont. ; Orchard Park, NY, 1975, pp. 14

Es frecuente entre los historiadores y sociólogos que se ocupan hoy del anarquismo afirmar que éste representa una ideología del pasado. Si con ello se quiere decir simplemente que tal ideología logró su máxima influencia en el pueblo y en el movimiento obrero a fines del siglo XIX y durante la primera década del XX, nada podemos objetar. Pero si ese juicio implica la idea de que el anarquismo es algo muerto y esencialmente inadecuado al mundo del presente, si pretende que él no puede interpretar ni cambiar la sociedad de hoy, creemos que constituye un notorio error. Frente a la grave crisis (teórica y práctica) del marxismo, que se debate entre un stalinismo más o menos vergonzante y una socialdemocracia que suele renegar de su pasado, el anarquismo representa, más bien, la ideología del futuro.

Angel Cappelletti, La ideología anarquista, Buenos Aires, 1992, pp. 130-131

Anarquista es el que cree posible vivir sin el principio de autoridad. Hay organismos esencialmente anarquistas, por ejemplo la ciencia moderna, cuyos progresos son enormes desde que se ha sustituido el criterio autoritario por el de la verificación experimental.

Rafael Barrett, Moralidades actuales, Montevideo, 1910

We produce in order to be able to afford certain amenities and comforts as “consumers”. If, however, somebody demanded these same amenities and comforts while he was engaged in “production”, he would be told that this would be uneconomic, that it would be inefficient, and that society could not afford such inefficiency.

E. F. Schumacher, Small is beautiful: economics as if people mattered, New York, 1974, p. 87

The success of my endeavours was due, I think, to a rule of ‘method’: that we should always try to clarify and strengthen our opponents’ position as much as possible before criticizing him, if we wish our criticism to be worth while.

Karl R. Popper, The logic of scientific discovery, London, 2008

With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Fortnightly Review, vol. 291, 1891

There have been times in my life when I came very near thinking that I could not lose even a single game.

José Raúl Capablanca, My chess career, New York, 1920

It would be good if we could somehow insulate our passions from our reasoning powers; and to some extent we can. Some people are quite good at compartmentalizing their emotions. Often, however, they don’t have very strong emotions in the first place. They may get what they want, but they do not want very much. Granting supreme importance to cognitive rationality is achieved at the cost of not having much they want to be rational about.

Jon Elster, Nuts and bolts for the social sciences, Cambridge, 2012, p. 70

Those readers troubled by the fact that millions of people will die this year, who could have been saved for a few dollars each, might want to consider making a contribution to Oxfam. In the United States, the address is: Oxfam America, P.O. Box 4215, Boston MA 02211-4215.

Shelly Kagan, Normative ethics, Boulder, Colorado, 1998, p. 316

Alan Carter, Marx: a radical critique, Brighton, 1988, p. xiv

A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create: the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the hart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope informed and fortified by thought.

Bertrand Russell, Roads to freedom, London, 1918, p. 111

We’re working on our relationships constantly, and our feelings and reflections, but look what’s left out of that. What’s left out is a deteriorating world. So shy hasn’t therapy noticed that? Because psychotherapy is only working on that “inside” soul. By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the baking system’s sick, the schools, the streets—the sickness is out there.

James Hillman and Michael Ventura, We've had a hundred years of psychotherapy, and the world's getting worse, San Francisco, Calif., 1992, pp. 3-4

Money has an enormous voice. It has never spoken louder.

George Steiner, Teaching in the age of mockery, The Independent, 2003

Deontology is individualistic: we are not in it together, but each on our own. To say that the compliance effects of a constraint against killing should be fairly distributed among all agents would be like saying that the children of two families that have no contact with each other should all be treated fairly by the four parents.

Liam B. Murphy, Moral demands in nonideal theory, Oxford, 2000, p. 94

[E]very candidate of the party that votes is being forced this year to take a stand on abortion, and if the stand should be taken on law and not on the Good Book, the result can be very ugly indeed for the poor politician because abortion is against God’s law: “Thou shalt not kill.” Since this commandment is absolute any candidate who favors abortion must be defeated as a Satanist. On the other hand, any candidate who does not favor capital punishment must be defeated as permissive. In the land of the twice-born, the life of the fetus is sacred; the life of the adult is not.

Gore Vidal, United States: essays: 1952-1992, New York, 2001, p. 953

Conflict of interest is a social phenomenon unlikely to disappear, and potential recourse to violence and damage will always suggest itself if the conflict gets out of hand Man’s capability for self-destruction cannot be eradicated–he knows too much! Keeping that capability under control–providing incentives to minimize recourse to violence–is the eternal challenge.

Thomas C. Schelling and Morton H. Halperin, Strategy and arms control, Washington, 1985, p. 5

The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the woods, Boston, 1854

Human beings are not the only creatures smart enough to suffer[.]

Daniel C. Dennett, Précis of Consciousness Explained, Philosophy and phenomenological research, vol. 53, no. 4, 1993, pp. 889–892, p. 449

The role that intuitions can play in moral philosophy is the role that we are content to let them play in other departments of thought (it is only in moral philosophy that they have risen so far above their epistemological station). In mathematics, the natural sciences, and other branches of philosophy, finding a conclusion intuitively repugnant does not close an argument; it is a reason to start looking for a good argument.

James Griffin, Well-being: Its meaning, measurement, and moral importance, Oxford, 1988, p. 2