Strictly speaking, to criticize positivism is to focus on scientific “activity”. It is no coincidence that it has distanced itself from the concerns of humanity and that it has been so easy for it to conclude a service contract with those in power. (Walter Benjamin)
Unfortunately, we know that there is nothing more contagious than delirium and madness. Truth is established laboriously by reasoned argument, while (…) delirium is communicated like a yawn, like the expression on a face or an atmosphere, like a chord that resonates in response to another. (…) It is frightening to see how delirium remains imprinted in words once it has stamped them with its seal. (J. G. Herder)
I dreamed that I was walking down a narrow alleyway; my clothes and shoes were torn, I looked like a beggar. A dog started barking behind me. I turned around haughtily and scolded him harshly: “Enough! Silence! You dogs only know how to fawn over the powerful and bully the humble!” “Hi! Hi!” he laughed, and continued: “You flatter me, but really on that score, we are far from equaling humans.”
“What!?” I was choking with anger, finding this the ultimate insult.
“I confess my inferiority: I still cannot distinguish copper from silver, nor canvas from brocade; I cannot distinguish a bureaucrat from his constituents, nor the master from the slave, I cannot…”
I fled at full speed. (Lu Xun)
In any case, I hate obituary tributes. It’s a genre as fake as funerals. Most of the time, banality and bad taste triumph in celebrating the moment when the singularity of a being disappears into the common lot. We pretend to mourn it, but there is always someone to sacrifice to this kitsch. Finally, as soon as the specialists get involved, they make it their duty to add a dose of untruths and approximations that are immediately taken for objective data. (Annie Le Brun)
If liberal democracies lack anything that might resemble the Athenian agora, they certainly have no shortage of equivalents of the Roman circuses. (David Graeber)
So the problem is not only the pollution of water, air or food products, it is also the pollution of minds. (Xiaolong Qiu)
It is certainly a shame that human society is facing such burning issues at a time when it has become materially impossible to make the slightest objection to the market discourse; at a time when domination, precisely because it is sheltered by the spectacle of any response to its fragmentary or delusional decisions and justifications, believes that it no longer needs to think; and truly no longer knows how to think. However firm a democrat may be, wouldn’t he prefer to have more intelligent masters chosen for him? (Guy Debord)
In fact, what we today call ‘the market’ – based on institutions such as private property, national currencies, legal acts, credit markets – owes its creation to the state and its coercive powers. All these institutions had to be established and perpetuated by government policies. The market was a creation of the government and has always remained so. (David Graeber)
The question is not whether people are ‘good enough’ for a particular kind of society; rather, it is about developing the kind of social institutions that are most conducive to the expansion of the potentialities we have in terms of intelligence, talent, sociability and freedom. (Paul Goodman)
You never finish beginning to understand. (Anonymous)
Translated by TerKo with the help of a free translation tool.
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