Andrew

“It is somehow satisfying to our will to power to think that ‘we’ make the world, that reality itself is but a social construct, alterable at will and subject to future changes as 'we’ see fit. Equally, it seems offensive that there should be an independent reality of brute facts – blind, uncomprehending, indifferent, and utterly unaffected by our concerns. And all of this is part of the general atmosphere that makes antirealist versions of 'poststructuralism’ such as deconstruction seem intellectually acceptable, even exciting. But once you state the claims and arguments of the antirealists out in the open, naked and undisguised, they tend to look fairly ridiculous.”
― John Rogers Searle, The Construction of Social Reality

“As soon as you feel yourself against me you have ceased to understand my position and consequently my arguments! You have to be the victim of the same passion!”
― Nietzsche

“For if we will think of it, no Time need have gone to ruin, could it have found a man great enough, a man wise and good enough: wisdom to discern truly what the Time wanted, valor to lead it on the right road thither; these are the salvation of any Time. But I liken common languid Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling down into ever worse distress towards final ruin;—all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own... In all epochs of the world's history, we shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable savior of his epoch;—the lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt. The History of the World, I said already, was the Biography of Great Men”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“R.G.: The more people think that they are realizing the Utopias dreamed up by their desire – in other words, the more they embrace ideologies of liberation – the more they will in fact be working to reinforce the competitive world that is stifling them. But they do not realize their mistake; and continue to systematically confuse the type of external obstacle represented by the prohibition and the internal obstacle formed by the mimetic partner...
At the very moment the last prohibitions are being forgotten, there are still a number of intellectuals who continue to refer to them as if they were more and more crippling...
G.L.: You are going to get yourself branded as a dreadful reactionary again.
R.G.: That would not be at all fair. I do find it absurd that people should greet with a fanfare the liberation of a desire that is not being constrained by anyone. But I find it even more absurd to hear people calling for a return to constraints, which is impossible. From the moment cultural forms begin to dissolve, any attempt to reconstitute them artificially can only result in the most appalling tyranny.”
― René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World