Negation Quotes - page 4
Here we are at the antipode of automatism [invention from Surrealism] and mechanism, and no less distant from the cunning way of reason. In the action of the machine, in which everything is repeated and predetermined, accident is an abrupt negation.... [the] excess of ink flowing capriciously in thin black rivulets.... this line deflected by a sudden jar, this drop of water diluting a contour – all these are the sudden invasion of the unexpected in a world where it has a right to its proper place.
Robert Motherwell
[ Picasso is guilty of] having dragged French painting into the most dismal 'impasse' and of having led it into in describable confusion. From 1900 – 1930, he led it towards negation, impotence and death. All alone with himself Picasso is impotence made man. Nature havinf denied him a real character, all his intelligence and malice have been employed to fabricate a personality.
Maurice de Vlaminck
The State, therefore, is the most flagrant, the most cynical, and the most complete negation of humanity. It shatters the universal solidarity of all men on the earth, and brings some of them into association only for the purpose of destroying, conquering, and enslaving all the rest.
Mikhail Bakunin
Counter to the avalanche of messages from our culture, I recognize celibacy not as negation but as a joyous turning inward. "Inebriate of air am I, / And debauchee of dew,” wrote Emily Dickinson, most promiscuous of celibates. "Opulence in asceticism,” Marianne Moore wrote, a phrase that celebrates the solitary life even as it provides a sound bite for saving the planet.
Fenton Johnson
Man is a free agent, not in many things but in all things, subject, of course, to the requirements of the Natural and the Moral Law. In fact, Man is so free that he can even defy and disobey his Creator. Man's freedom is however conditioned by rules of safety, morality etc., which counsel him that he may not do certain things. This is not however, a negation of Freedom.
Peter de Noronha
The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without authority, there could not be worse violence than that of authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution. "To establish Anarchy." "Anarchy will be instituted."
Leo Tolstoy
Of course, every revolution repudiates what went on before and considers itself a conscious break with the past; it is only posterity that sees, or imagines it sees, the historical continuity. Fascism, however, goes much further in its negation of the past than any earlier political movement, because it makes this negation its main platform. What is even more important, it denies simultaneously ideas and tendencies which are in themselves antithetic.
Peter Drucker
"It cannot be said that we are lacking in faith. Even the simple fact of our life is of a faith-value that can never be exhausted.” "You suggest there is some faith-value in this? One cannot not-live, after all.” "It is precisely in this ‘Cannot, after all' that the mad strength of faith lies; it is in this negation that it takes on form.”
There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. Don't even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can't do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.
Franz Kafka
The world of today has achieved much, but for all its declared love for humanity, it has based itself far more on hatred and violence than on the virtues that make one human. War is the negation of truth and humanity. War may be unavoidable sometimes, but its progeny are terrible to contemplate. Not mere killing, for man must die, but the deliberate and persistent propagation of hatred and falsehood, which gradually become the normal habits of the people. It is dangerous and harmful to be guided in our life's course by hatreds and aversions, for they are wasteful of energy and limit and twist the mind and prevent it from perceiving truth.
Jawaharlal Nehru
