Current Quotes - page 21
Marxism is a revolutionary worldview that must always struggle for new revelations. Marxism must abhor nothing so much as the possibility that it becomes congealed in its current form. It is at its best when butting heads in self-criticism, and in historical thunder and lightning, it retains its strength.
Rosa Luxemburg
I arrived in France, and found myself up against the legend which was current in left-wing Parisian salons: the Jews had always lived in perfect harmony with the Arabs. I was almost congratulated for having been born in such a land where racial discrimination and xenophobia were unknown. It made me laugh.
Albert Memmi
Now, I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term "replacement," if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World. But they become hysterical because that's what's happening, actually.
Tucker Carlson
I realize we are not going to resolve all of our political debates over the best ways to reduce inequality and increase upward mobility this year, or next year, or in the next five years. But it is important that we have a serious debate about these issues. For the longer that current trends are allowed to continue, the more it will feed the cynicism and fear that many Americans are feeling right now -- that they'll never be able to repay the debt they took on to go to college, they'll never be able to save enough to retire, they'll never see their own children land a good job that supports a family.
Barack Obama
We can continue down our current path, in which the gears of this great democracy grind to a halt and our children accept a life of lower expectations; where politics is a zero-sum game where a few do very well while struggling families of every race fight over a shrinking economic pie -- that's one path. Or we can have the courage to change.
Barack Obama
In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - that these things are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.
Barack Obama
Throughout its history, Israel has been anxious to make peace with its Arab neighbors. If successful, the current peace process is a potential opportunity for Israel to increase its security, normalize relations with its neighbors, and create a more stable and prosperous Middle East. Resolution of the conflict depends on direct negotiations between the parties based on mutual respect and recognition. The United States' commitment to Israel must continue so Israel can negotiate with its former and current adversaries from a position of strength... Israel can take risks for peace only because of unwavering American support.
Barack Obama
Because in the end, the threat to our democracy doesn't just come from Donald Trump or the current batch of Republicans in Congress or the Koch Brothers and their lobbyists, or too much compromise from Democrats, or Russian hacking. The biggest threat to our democracy is indifference. The biggest threat to our democracy is cynicism – a cynicism that's led too many people to turn away from politics and stay home on election day. To all the young people who are here today, there are now more eligible voters in your generation than in any other, which means your generation now has more power than anybody to change things. If you want it, you can make sure America gets out of its current funk. If you actually care about it, you have the power to make sure we seize a brighter future. But to exercise that clout, to exercise that power, you have to show up.
Barack Obama
But I do believe that there are basic values that we all share. And one of those values is that countries work best when everybody has a voice that can be respected, and that the press is able to report on what is happening in current affairs, and people can organize politically peacefully to try to bring about change, and that there's transparency and accountability. And when you look at which countries have done best in terms of development, typically over time, those countries that have some accountability and some measure of personal freedom tend to do better. And those countries that don't, have more problems.
Barack Obama
Christianity has functioned for the normative self-understanding of modernity as more than a mere precursor or a catalyst. Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an antonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights, and democracy, is the direct heir to the judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in the light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.
Jürgen Habermas
Predictably, under democratic conditions the tendency of every monopoly - to increase prices and decrease quality - will be only more pronounced. Instead of a prince who regards the country as his private property, a temporary caretaker is put in charge of the country. He does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his and his proteges' advantage. He owns its current use - usufruct - but not its capital stock. This will not eliminate exploitation. To the contrary, it will make exploitation less calculating and carried out with little or no regard to the capital stock, i. e., short-sighted. Moreover, the perversion of justice will proceed even faster now. Instead of protecting pre-existing private property rights, democratic government becomes a machine for the redistribution of existing property rights in the name of illusory `social security.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
When a man has a passion for a woman, and when that passion is of such a nature that he regards her with reverent admiration as an image of purity, none the less, in the unconscious, his desires turn towards bodily fulfillment, none the less the goal of physical possession is prefigured in the deepest recesses of his imagination. But when the passion is confined to the realm of the spirit, and, in that realm, is a man's passion for a man, how can it seek fulfillment? Unrestingly, the fancy wanders over the honored form, flaming up again and again to fresh ecstasy, but never finding repose in a last surrender. It flows on without pause in a current that can never empty the reservoir from which it comes. This passion is insatiable, as the spirit invariably is.
Stefan Zweig
Many times I had spoken about "mental bipolarity" and proved that our affects are bipolar. Desire and disgust, love and hate, will-to-power and will-to-submission, are composed of negative and positive parts like the current of electricity. My contention was that any human affect has its own counterpart. Later Bleuler described this fact as "ambivalence," a term that was accepted by everybody, whereas previously they had laughed at my discovery, and given me the nickname "Stekel with his Bipolarity."
Wilhelm Stekel
As we find ourselves in jobless economies, societies in which small minorities consume while the masses starve, we find ourselves forced to rethink the rationale of our current globalization and to ponder the Gandhian alternative.
At a time when Freud was liberating sex, Gandhi was reining it in; when Marx was pitting worker against capitalist, Gandhi was reconciling them; when the dominant European thought had dropped God and soul out of the social reckoning, he was centralizing society in God and soul; at a time when the colonized had ceased to think and control, he dared to think and control; and when the ideologies of the colonized had virtually disappeared, he revived them and empowered them with a potency that liberated and redeemed.
Nelson Mandela
Vladimir Voevodsky and his collaborators have provided us with a very interesting candidate-category of motives: a category (of sheaves relative to an extraordinarily fine Grothendieck-style topology on the category of schemes) which in some intuitive sense "softens algebraic geometry” so as to allow for a good notion of homotopy in an algebro-geometric setup and is sufficiently directly connected to concrete algebraic geometry to have already yielded some extraordinary applications. The quest for a full theory of motives is a potent driving force in complex analysis, algebraic geometry, automorphic representation theory, the study of L functions, and arithmetic. It will continue to be so throughout the current century.
Barry Mazur
The so-called free market does not provide consumers with proper information, because the social and environmental costs of production are not part of the current economic models. ...an ecological tax reform would be strictly revenue neutral, shifting the tax burden from income taxes to "eco-taxes." ...the taxes would be added to existing products, forms of energy, services, and materials, so that prices would better reflect true costs.
Fritjof Capra
In biology the Cartesian view of living organisms as machines, constructed from separate parts, still provides the dominant conceptual framework. Although Descartes' simple mechanistic biology could not be carried very far and had to be modified considerably during the subsequent three hundred years, the belief that all aspects of living organisms can be understood by reducing them to their smallest constituents, and by studying the mechanisms through which these interact, lies at the very basis of most contemporary biological thinking. This passage from a current textbook on modern biology is a clear expression of the reductionist credo: 'One of the acid tests of understanding an object is the ability to put it together from its component parts. Ultimately, molecular biologists will attempt to subject their understanding of cell structure and function to this sort of test by trying to synthesize a cell.
Fritjof Capra
