Justin > Justin's Quotes

“Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.”
― Theodor Adorno

“He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty,
nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such
awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu.”
― Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

“The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

“But where danger lurks, the saving powers also grow.”
― Ulrich Beck, German Europe

“Increasingly the individuals who want to live together are, or more precisely are becoming, the legislators of their own way of life, the judges of their own transgressions, the priests who absolve their own sins and the therapists who loosen the bonds of their own past.”
― Ulrich Beck y Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, The Normal Chaos of Love

“But one can see exactly why Dr Ali is so successful - he seems to offer a solution within the individual's grasp: you may not be able to change deadlines and workloads, but you can make yourself more efficient. Ancient wisdoms can be adapted to speed up human beings: this is the kind of individualised response which fits neatly into a neo-liberal market ideology. It draws on Eastern contemplative traditions of yoga and meditation which place the emphasis on individual transformation, and questions the effectiveness of collective political or social activism. Reflexology, aromatherapy, acupuncture, massage - these alternative therapies are all booming as people seek to improve their sense of well-being and vitality. Much of it makes sense - although trips to the Himalayas are hardly within the reach of most workers and the complementary health movement plays an important role in raising people's under standing of their own health and how to look after themselves. But the philosophy of improving ‘personal performance' also plays into the hands of employers' rationale that well-being and coping with stress are the responsibility of the individual employee. It reinforces the tendency for individuals to search for 'biographic solutions to structural contradictions', as the sociologist Ulrich Beck put it: forget the barricades, it's revolution from within that matters. This cultural preoccupation with personal salvation stymies collective reform, and places an onerous burden on the individual. It effectively reinforces the anxieties and insecurities which it offers to assuage.”
― Madeleine Bunting, Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives

“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”
― Ivan Illich

“Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.”
― Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

“To hell with the future. It's a man-eating idol.”
― Ivan Illich

“Whatever you have to say, leave
The roots on, let them
Dangle

And the dirt

Just to make clear
Where they come from.”
― Charles Olson

“A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.”
― Charles Olson

“this
is the abstract, this
is the cold doing, this
is the almost impossible”
― Charles Olson

“A poem is a ‘line’ between any two points in creation.”
― Charles Olson

“This was the first of the St. Augustines. Previous memos had borne messages from Zwingli, Lévi-Strauss, Rilke, Chekhov, Tillich, William Blake, Charles Olson and a Kiowa chief named Satanta. Naturally the person responsible for these messages became known throughout the company as the Mad Memo-Writer. I never referred to him that way because it was much too obvious a name. I called him Trotsky. There was no special reason for choosing Trotsky; it just seemed to fit. I wondered if he was someone I knew. Everybody seemed to think he was probably a small grotesque man who had suffered many disappointments in life, who despised the vast impersonal structure of the network and who was employed in our forwarding department, the traditional repository for all sex offenders, mutants and vegetarians. They said he was most likely a foreigner who lived in a rooming house in Red Hook; he spent his nights reading an eight-volume treatise on abnormal psychology, in small type, and he told his grocer he had been a Talmudic scholar in the old country. This was the consensus and maybe it had a certain logic. But I found more satisfaction in believing that Trotsky was one of our top executives. He made eighty thousand dollars a year and stole paper clips from the office.”
― Don DeLillo, Americana

“Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory. ”
― Don DeLillo, Americana

“She was the one, I decided, who would guide me into the vortex of the cliche.”
― Don DeLillo, Americana

“One must become a book before one can know what is inside it.”
― Don DeLillo, Americana

“I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds.”
― Don DeLillo, Americana

“Here are some people who have written books, telling what they did and why they did those things: John Dean. Henry Kissinger. Adolf Hitler. Caryl Chessman. Jeb Magruder. Napoleon. Talleyrand. Disraeli. Robert Zimmerman, also known as Bob Dylan. Locke. Charlton Heston. Errol Flynn. The Ayatollah Khomeini. Gandhi. Charles Olson. Charles Colson. A Victorian Gentleman. Dr. X. Most people also believe that God has written a Book, or Books, telling what He did and why—at least to a degree—He did those things, and since most of these people also believe that humans were made in the image of God, then He also may be regarded as a person… or, more properly, as a Person. Here are some people who have not written books, telling what they did… and what they saw: The man who buried Hitler. The man who performed the autopsy on John Wilkes Booth. The man who embalmed Elvis Presley. The man who embalmed—badly, most undertakers say—Pope John XXIII. The twoscore undertakers who cleaned up Jonestown, carrying body bags, spearing paper cups with those spikes custodians carry in city parks, waving away the flies.”
― Stephen King, Pet Sematary

“As it is there isn't a single thing isn't an opportunity for some 'alert' person, including practically everybody by the 'greed', that, they are 'alive', therefore. Etc. That, in fact, there are 'conditions'. Gravelly Hill or any sort of situation for improvement, when the Earth was properly regarded as a 'garden tenement messuage orchard and if this is nostalgia let you take a breath of April showers let's us reason how is the dampness in your nasal passage -- but I have had lunch in this 'pasture' (B. Ellery to George Girdler Smith 'gentleman' 1799, for £ 150)
overlooking 'the town'
sitting there like the Memphite lord of
all Creation
...
It is not bad
to be pissed off”
― Charles Olson

“Today, the language of the market penetrates every pore and forces every interpersonal relation into the schema of individual preference.”
― Jürgen Habermas

“Only by externalization, by entering into social relationships, can we develop the interiority of our own person.”
― Jurgen Habermas

“Cicero calls it the most horrendous torture.' So hideous was the act of crucifixion upon a man that he also writes that "the very word `cross' should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen but from his thoughts, his eyes and his ears.”
― Gary R. Habermas, The Case For The Resurrection Of Jesus

“For Habermas, scientism means science’s belief in itself: that is, ‘the conviction that we can no longer understand science as one form of knowledge, but rather must identify knowledge with science’.”
― Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

“Nietzsche conceives the critical consequences of scientific technical progress as overcoming metaphysics. […] The process of enlightenment made possible by the sciences is critical, but the critical dissolution of dogmas produces not liberation but indifference. It is not emancipatory but nihilistic.”
― Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures

“And Habermas: mutual understanding in unrestrained communicative action unfolded by rationality is the omega point of individual and social evolution itself.”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“Jürgen Habermas currently ranks as one of the most influential philosophers in the world. Bridging continental and Anglo-American traditions of thought, he has engaged in debates with thinkers as diverse as Gadamer and Putnam, Foucault and Rawls, Derrida and Brandom. His extensive written work addresses topics stretching from social-political theory to aesthetics, epistemology and language to philosophy of religion, and his ideas have significantly influenced not only philosophy but also political-legal thought, sociology, communication studies, argumentation theory and rhetoric, developmental psychology and theology.”
― Anonymous