The structures of society and culture are fighting turned to stone; they are what comes into existence so long and insofar as we interrupt our practical and ideological struggles over the organization of life in society. When the fighting escalates again, the structures dissolve into the collective action and imagination from which they arose. When we fashion structures design to invite their own reconstruction, we make them into both superior instruments of our power and more faithful reflections of our humanity.
Roberto Mangabeira UngerRelated topics
action arise collective comes culture design dissolve existence faithful fashion fighting humanity imagination interrupt invite life organization power practical reconstruction society stone superiorRelated quotes
Iraqi fighters on the front lines, You courageous officers and soldiers who have been fighting valiantly and efficiently - you have restored the glories of your great Iraq. You have proved that you are the true descendants of those great fighters throughout the ages. You have given the most remarkable example of Arab military power, of which the Arab nation is in need today and tomorrow in its struggle to maintain its existence and integrity, and to restore its usurped rights and territories.
Saddam Hussein
The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Institutionalized desublimation thus appears to be an aspect of the "conquest of transcendence” achieved by the one-dimensional society. Just as this society tends to reduce, and even absorb opposition (the qualitative difference!) in the realm of politics and higher culture, so it does in the instinctual sphere. The result is the atrophy of the mental organs for grasping the contradictions and the alternatives and, in the one remaining dimension of technological rationality, the Happy Consciousness comes to prevail.
Herbert Marcuse
Of the various executive abilities, no one excited more anxious concern than that of placing the interests of our fellow-citizens in the hands of honest men, with understanding sufficient for their stations. No duty is at the same time more difficult to fulfil. The knowledge of character possessed by a single individual is of necessity limited. To seek out the best through the whole Union, we must resort to the information which from the best of men, acting disinterestedly and with the purest motives, is sometimes incorrect.
Thomas Jefferson
If every day a man takes orders in silence from an incompetent superior, if every day he solemnly performs ritual acts which he privately finds ridiculous, if he unhesitatingly gives answers to questionnaires which are contrary to his real opinions and is prepared to deny his own self in public, if he sees no difficulty in feigning sympathy or even affection where, in fact, he feels only indifference or aversion, it still does not mean that he has entirely lost the use of one of the basic human senses, namely, the sense of humiliation.
Václav Havel
