Paul Berman > Quotes

“People who keep their feelings to themselves tend not to know, after a while, what their feelings are.”
― Paul Berman

“If you do not have the possibility of abandoning your religion, you do not enjoy the possibility of freely embracing it, either.”
― Paul Berman

“Marxism is supposed to be a social science designed to see through hypocrisies and denial, but Marxism ended up as a kind of earplug, guaranteed to deafen its disciples.”
― Paul Berman

“Trump knows how to be the loser’s idea of a winner.”
― Paul Berman

“The fashion for French philosophers in the American universities has always been a fashion for the wrong philosophers.”
― Paul Berman

“The story of Louis Bonaparte was the occasion for Marx’s remark about history taking place twice, the first time as tragedy (Napoleon), the second time as farce (the nephew). Marx wanted to draw from these events a lesson about the class struggle, but I think that he stumbled on a different and eternal truth, which has to do with the place of theater—of tragedy and farce, theatrical genres—in political life. Reality TV, in Trump’s version of it, is our modern farce. There are people who demand their daily farce: This was Marx’s unwitting discovery. They insist on being entertained. About the realities of their own political situation, those people may understand nothing. They understand a personal reality, though. They want to sit in the audience and laugh and cry. Especially they want to shake their fists at villains. They want to boo and hiss. They want to tremble in loathing. If someone comes out on stage who is capable of making them do so, they will clap. It is pathetic.”
― Paul Berman

“the Western enablers of Islamism refuse to distinguish between Islamism and the faith; what’s more, they portray Islamism as mainstream rather than as the fringe it has always been, and they portray all opposition to Islamism as an attack on Islam. As a consequence, today there is more willingness to criticize Islamism in Kurdistan and in Arab and Muslim countries than in the West. These”
― Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals