Quotes
There are two ways for Washington to respond to the threats engendered by its actions and startling proclamations. One way is to try to alleviate the threats by paying some attention to legitimate grievances, and by agreeing to become a civilized member of a world community, with some respect for world order and its institutions. The other way is to construct even more awesome engines of destruction and domination, so that any perceived challenge, however remote, can be crushed–provoking new and greater challenges. That way poses serious dangers to the people of the US and the world, and may, very possibly, lead to extinction of the species–not an idle speculation.
Noam Chomsky, Deep Concerns, ZNet, 2003
Die Welt des Glücklichen ist eine andere als die des Unglücklichen.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung, London : New York, 1921
Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. […] Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: the unity of knowledge, New York, 1999, pp. 302-303
Como todo poseedor de una biblioteca, Aureliano se sabía culpable de no conocerla hasta el fin.
Jorge Luis Borges, Los teólogos, El Aleph, Madrid, 1949
A new religion would be an odd sort of a thing without a name: accordingly, there ough to be one for it—at least for the professors of it. Utilitarianism […] would be the most propre.
Jeremy Bentham, The works of Jeremy Bentham, Edinburgh, 1838, p. 390
La guerre était due à l’ambition de quelques hommes criminels et à l’ignorance des masses, dont le faux patriotisme se laisse encore exalter par des chimères politiques.
Camille Flammarion, Dieu dans la nature, Paris, 1867
One of the happiest features of possessing a capacious vocabulary is the opportunity to insult your enemies with impunity. While the madding crowd gets mad with exhausted epithets such as “You rotten pig” and “you dirty bum”, you can acerbate, deprecate, derogate, and excoriate your nemesis with a battalion of laser-precise pejoratives. You can brand him or her a grandiloquent popinjay, venal pettifogger, nefarious miscreant, flagitious recidivist, sententious blatherskite, mawkish ditherer, arrant peculator, irascible misanthrope, hubristic narcissist, feckless sycophant, vituperative virago, vapid yahoo, eructative panjandrum, saturnine misanthrope, antediluvian troglodyte, maudlin poetaster, splenetic termagant, pernicious quidnunc, rancorous anchorite, perfidious mountebank, irascible curmudgeon.
Eugene Ehrlich, The highly selective dictionary for the extraordinarily literate, Pymble, NSW, 2003, p. xxiii
To deny inconvenient opinions a hearing is one way the few have of controlling the many. But as Richard Nixon used to say, “That would be the easy way.” The slyer way is to bombard the public with misinformation. During more than half a century of corruption by the printed word in the form “news”—propaganda disguised as fact—I have yet to read a story favorable to another society’s social and political arrangements. Swedes have free health care, better schools than ours, child day-care center for working mothers… but the Swedes are all drunks who commit suicide (even blonde blue-eyed people must pay for such decadent amenities). Lesson? No national health care, no education, etc., because-as William Bennett will tell you as soon as a TV red light switches on-social democracy, much less socialism, is just plain morally evil. Far better to achieve the good things in life honestly, by inheriting money or winning a lottery. The American way.
Gore Vidal, A Corrupt System, in David Donnelly et al. (ed.) Money and Politics, Boston, 1999
Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of the rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find out that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and the maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as the most free and popular.
David Hume and Eugene F. Miller, Essays, moral, political, and literary, Indianapolis, 1742
[William] Godwin saw in government, in law, even in property, and in marriage, only restraints upon liberty and obstacles to progress. Yet Godwin was not, strictly speaking, an anarchist. He transfered the seat of government from thrones and parliament to the reason in the breast of every man. On the power of reason, working freely, to convince all the armed unreason of the world and to subdue all its teeming passion, he rested his boundless confidence in the ‘perfectibility’ of man.
C. H. Herford, The age of Wordsworth, Freeport, N.Y, 1916, pp. 7-8
Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices, but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.
Albert Einstein, quoted in Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, London, 1957
El desaprensivo apoyo de Sarmiento a la destrucción de las formas primitivas de comunidad no significaba, sin embargo, como sostienen sus enemigos, una concepción antidemocrática. Podía despreciar a las masas ignaras, pero dedicaba todos sus esfuerzos a educarlas. Su contrapartida era Rosas, quien adulaba a las masas pero cerraba escuelas para mantenerlas en su estado de ignorancia, sumisas y fáciles de manipular.
Juan José Sebreli, Crítica de las ideas políticas argentinas: los orígenes de la crisis, Buenos Aires, 2002, p. 25
The very words necessary to express the task I have undertaken, show how arduous it is. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the difficulty of the case must lie in the insufficiency or obscurity of the grounds of reason on which my convictions. The difficulty is that which exists in all cases in which there is a mass of feeling to be contended against. So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses instability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, the worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh entrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old.
John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, in J. M. Robson (ed.) The collected works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto, 1963, pp. 259–340, p. 1
Los artistas llamados modernos descubrieron que en la fealdad sin normas estaban a cubierto de críticas. El propósito perseguido no era tan evidente como en quienes buscaban la belleza, y los censores no sabían señalar deficiencias (señalarlas parecía una ingenuidad).
Adolfo Bioy Casares, Descanso de caminantes, Buenos Aires, 2001, p. 241
Somos un país en que a los “conservadores” se los llamó “liberales”, a los liberales “radicales” y a los “conservadores populares” (atávicos, caudillescos, demagógicos) “peronistas”.
Ricardo López Murphy and Oscar Félix Salvadores, Razón o demagogia, Buenos Aires, 2002, p. 216
El peronismo es un dilema que nunca ha dejado de intrigar a los observadores, investigadores, académicos extranjeros, por sus obvias, groseras incongruencias ideológicas y también por su habilidad para retener el apoyo de sucesivas coaliciones de sus no menos incongruentes socios o aliados.
Tomás Abraham, El misterio argentino: entrevistas de Pablo E. Chacón, Buenos Aires, 2003, p. 69
En 1995 una obra de ciencia política alcanzó un eco poco habitual entre las de esa disciplina gracias a un título afortunado—Jihad versus McWorld—que presentaba la resistencia del mundo islámico como la más sistemática e intransigente entre las afrontadas por una globalización que se encamina a reconfigurar el mundo sobre el modelo de los Estados Unidos; ocho años después, la desazón con que se vive el presente debe sin duda mucho al descubrimiento de que ni aun McWorld está inmune de la seducción que puede ejercer la guerra santa.
Tulio Halperín Donghi, Mientras espero la guerra, Clarín, 2003
Al comprenderse la condición genética en su formación y posibilidades, se debe evitar el entorpecimiento de un avance que se dirija a mejorar al hombre y a resolver sus problemas, y desatar las ataduras con visiones conceptuales que obstaculizan la evolución humana hacia lo mejor.
Santos Cifuentes, Elementos de derecho civil: parte general, Buenos Aires, 1992, pp. 105-106
La política se hace a veces en la Argentina con fantasías. A veces se cree que los sueldos dependen de la voluntad del gobernante. Hay gente que me pregunta: “¿qué política de sueldos va a tener usted?” Ninguna. Si eso dependiera de una decisión gubernamental, ¿por qué no duplicarlos, por qué no decuplicarlos?
Ricardo López Murphy, Ricardo López Murphy: publicaciones para LA NACION, 2003, p. 8
The depression stayed with me for over a year; it was like an animal, a well-defined, spatially localizable thing. I would wake up, open my eyes, listen –Is it here or isn’t? No sign of it. Perhaps it’s asleep. Perhaps it will leave me alone today. Carefully, very carefully, I get out of bed. All is quiet. I go to the kitchen, start breakfast. Not a sound. TV -Good Morning America-, David What’s-his-name, a guy I can’t stand. I eat and watch the guests. Slowly the food fills my stomach and gives me strength. Now a quick excursion to the bathroom, and out for my morning walk -and here she is, my faithful depression: “Did you think you could leave without me?”
Paul Feyerabend, Killing time: the autobiography of Paul Feyerabend, Chicago, 1995, p. 147