Quotes

Maxims do not merely express what kind of a person one is; they constitute that person, in some sense. They constitute the person as character. In other words, to have a certain set of maxims and to have character (or to be a person) is one and the same thing. This is perhaps the most important point of Kant’s anthropological discussion of maxims. Maxims are character-constituting principles. They make us who we are, and without them we are, at least according to Kant, nobody.

Manfred Kuehn, Kant: a biography, New York, 2001, p. 146

Equilibrio, porque si uno no piensa en términos de equilibrio, se piensa en terminos de choque, y con el choque, ¿quien gana? Gana el que tiene la guita y las armas, es siempre lo mismo.

Tomás Abraham, El misterio argentino: entrevistas de Pablo E. Chacón, Buenos Aires, 2003, p. 229

The best incentive is not the threat of want, but the consciousness of useful achievement.

George Woodcock, Anarchism: a history of libertarian ideas and movements, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England ; New York, N.Y., U.S.A, 1963, p. 192

Man is not yet an ideal creature. At his present best many of his ways are so unpleasant that they are unmentionable in polite society, and so painful that he is compelled to pretend that pain is often a good. Nature, also called Providence, holds no brief for the human experiment: it must stand or fall by its results. If Man will not serve, Nature will try another experiment.

Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah, Memphis, Tenn., 1945

Me oprimen vagas asfixias de deseos, como nieblas enemigas que rivalizan, mortíferas; en medio de mi agitación mi espíritu revolotea por los espacios buscando ayuda para hacerme huir, no sé hacia donde. Desgranarse de olas oigo entre el pedal del mar y siento brisas refrescantes; pero se desvanecen las flotas nocturnas de barcas peregrinas al llamarlas; cabalgatas de adustos gigantes pasan silenciosas por los lejanos desiertos del aire ocultando la color-ceñida luna, pero su alma inferior no me comprende; fantasmas, cosas veladas llenan la atmósfera y ágiles movimientos oídos me atraen fatalmente, mientras como serpientes las nieblas se disipan. Visiones claras en la noche, rítmicos suspiros musicales de la selva florida, variados arrullos de aguas que van danzando y el aliento-perfume de la primavera adolescente que juega y me rodea como llamas deliciosas, en fiebre delirante me anonadan, oh!, y en un grupo movido de doncellas delicadas y magníficas sirenas! Pero sus danzas y cercanas palabras no entiendo, con la más bella junto a mí, y el cansador deleite me adormece dolorosamente, ocultando las nieblas tristes el cuadro, digno de eternizarse en su juvenil vida. —Oh! qué manos, qué llamadas, me llevarán al aire puro, al sol radioso y al satisfecho mediodía? En esta lucha angustiosa me haré veterano; con mis manos, mis ojos y oídos divinos, con mi ardiente é hirviente cerebro encontraré el camino, si no lo hay, si no hay país sin angustia para mí, todo yo, dentro de mis pensamientos, para mis hermanos, me haré un mundo!

Xul Solar, Noche, Noche, 1910

Rational and kindly behavior tends to produce good results and these results remain good even when the behavior which produced them was itself produced by a pill.

Aldous Huxley, Michael Horowitz, and Cynthia Palmer, Moksha: Aldous Huxley's classic writings on psychedelics and the visionary experience, Rochester, VT, 1977, p. 99

[La] tendencia a vestir los enunciados emotivos con el ropaje de los enunciados referenciales es endémica en los trabajos de filosofía, sociología y teoría jurídica. Tal como este tipo de literatura tiende a confundir las proposiciones de hecho con definiciones, así también tiende a confundir las proposiciones de hecho con juicios de valor.

Notas sobre derecho y lenguaje, Buenos Aires, 1965, p. 3

[S]he found—what has been sometimes found before—that an event to which she had looked forward with impatient desire did not, in taking place, bring all the satisfaction she had promised herself. It was consequently necessary to name some other period for the commencement of actual felicity; to have some other point on which her wishes and hopes might be fixed, and by again enjoying the pleasure of anticipation, console herself for the present, and prepare for another disappointment.

Jane Austen and David M. Shapard, The annotated Pride and prejudice, Delmar, NY, 1813, p. 42

There was always, in the past, a limit to […] hatred. Letters would be signed with the writer’s address. Or if not, they would be so ill-written as to be illegible. Not any more. In 26 years in the Middle East, I have never read so many vile and intimidating messages addressed to me. Many now demand my death. And last week, the Hollywood actor John Malkovich did just that, telling me the Cambridge Union that he would like to shoot me.

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair (eds.), The politics of anti-Semitism, Petrolia, Calif. : Oakland, Calif, 2003, p. 59

MartinWalking through any town or village in Britain on a summer evening when the windows are open one can see the bluish sheen of the television screen in almost any house. It is therefore easily possible, if o n e knows which programmes are at that moment being broadcast o n the three available channels, to know what are the only three possible contents at that moment occupy- ing the minds of the people inside the houses in that street. In times past an- other person’s thoughts were one of the greatest of mysteries. Today, during television peak hours in one of the more highly developed countries, the contents of a very high proportion of other people’s minds have become highly predictable.

Indeed, if we regard the continuous stream of thought and emotion which constitutes a human being’s conscious mental processes as the most private sphere of his individuality, we might express the effect of this mass communications medium by saying that for a given number of hours a day—in the United Kingdom between two and two and a half hours—twentieth- century man switches his mind from private to collective consciousness. It is a staggering and, in the literal sense of the word, awful thought.

Martin Esslin, Television: mass demand and quality, Impact of science on society, vol. 20, no. 3, 1970, pp. 207–218, pp. 207–218

Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.

William Wordsworth, Hart-Leap Well, 1800

[C]ertainly [people do not opt out of the system] because they’re smarter than other people. Maybe it’s courage, being willing to face the possibility that your life so far has been a waste of time. Maybe it’s faith in the idea that truth—however frightening it might seem—will always bring benefits.

David Pryce-Jones, The afternoon sun, New York, 1986

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

The Frederick Douglass papers. Vol. 3: Ser. 1, Speeches, debates, and interviews 1855 - 63, New Haven, 1985

In politics, as in life generally, men frequently forfeit their autonomy. There are a number of causes for this fact, and also a number of arguments which have been offered to justify it. Most men, as we have already noted, feel so strongly the force of tradition or bureaucracy that they accept unthinkingly the claims to authority which are made by their nominal rulers. It is the rare individual in the history of the race who rises even to the level of questioning the right of his masters to command and the duty of himself and his fellows to obey.

Robert Paul Wolff, In defense of anarchism, Berkeley, 1998, p. 16

[Q]uien pretenda avanzar en el estudio de la filosofía deberá perfeccionar sin descanso sus conocimientos generales: se ha dicho con razón que “quien sólo sabe filosofía, ni siquiera filosofía sabe”.

Wilson Herrera Romero, Introducción. El para qué de la enseñanza de la filosofía, Actualidad y defensa de la filosofía, 1953, pp. XI–XXVII, p. 61

I find it ironic that vivisectors, and others who exploit animals, call people like me irrational or emotional and then they hold themselves up as rational. They’re not rational. They’re, in fact, defending a world view that is part and parcel of virgin births and holy spirits and all that stuff. Which is fine if they want to believe that. But they hold up the basis of their views as scientific. It’s not scientific at all. It’s based totally on religious views.

Gary Francione and Kate Kempton, Do animals have rights?, Do animals have rights?

In one, and the most obvious, way, direct utilitarianism is the paradigm of utilitarianism—it seems, in its blunt insistence on maximizing utility and its refusal to fall back on rules and so forth, of all utilitarian doctrines the most faithful to the spirit of utilitarianism, and to its demand for rational, decidable, empirically based, and unmysterious set of values.

Bernard Williams, A critique of utilitarianism, in J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: for and against, Cambridge, 1973, pp. 77–150, p. 19

Como no he encontrado en el ejercicio de mi profesión razonamientos lógicos ni menos aún verificaciones empíricas del Derecho, me hallo en tren—bajo sugerencia de Hume—de arrojar sin conmiseración mi diploma a la hoguera, por no contener otra cosa que sofística e ilusión.

Enrique Marí, Home - La Nueva Ciencia, 1973

No es por casualidad que la mayoría de los economistas neoclásicos son profesores, y que en cambio los expertos en administración no usan la economía neoclásica y se inclinan frecuentemente por la escuela institucionalista, la que preconiza la intervención redistribuidora, moderadora y reguladora del Estado.

Mario Bunge, Elogio de la curiosidad, Buenos Aires, 1998, pp. 75-76

Men were made for higher things, one can’t help wanting to say, even though one knows that men weren’t made for anything, but are the product of natural selection.

J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: for and against, Cambridge, 1973, p. 19