Respectable Quotes - page 9
A computer that issues a rate demand for nil dollars and nil cents (and a notice to appear in court if you do not pay immediately) is not a maverick machine. It is a respectable and badly programmed computer... Mavericks are machines that embody theoretical principles or technical inventions which deviate from the mainstream of computer development, but are nevertheless of value.
Gordon Pask
Ideology critique, having become respectable, imitates surgical procedure: ... The opponent is cut open in front of everyone, until the mechanism of his error is laid bare. ... Ideology critique is now interested not in winning over the vivisected opponent but in focusing on the "corpse,” the critical extract of its ideas. ... Those who previously did not want to engage in enlightenment will want to do so even less now that they have been dissected and exposed by the opponent.
Peter Sloterdijk
Since the eighteenth century, enlighteners have concerned themselves-as defenders of "true morality,” whatever that may be-with the morality of those who rule. ... The moralism in the bourgeois sense of decency put aristocratically refined immoralism into the position of the politically accused. ... But bourgeois thinking all too naively assumes it is possible to subordinate political power to moral concepts. It does not anticipate that one day, when it has itself come to power, it will end up in the same ambivalence. It has not yet realized that it is only a small step from taking moral offense to respectable hypocrisy.
Peter Sloterdijk
Aristotle's enthusiasm for the preservation of social distinction and his emphasis on the social position of the "high-souled” man remind us that even in his favored politeia, with as many respectable and steady men of the middle class admitted to political participation as is possible, Aristotle hankered after the rule of true, that is, natural aristocrats. If that attitude is not unknown two and a half millennia later, his unconcern with those left out of this vision of the world-women, ordinary working people, foreigners, slaves-is happily rather less common. But we shall not see much sympathy for ordinary lives and ordinary happiness for many centuries yet, certainly not in the work of Cicero.
Alan Ryan
