Daniel > Daniel's Quotes

“The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but "Can they suffer?”
― Jeremy Bentham (An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Philosophical Classics), The Principles of Morals and Legislation

“Well-being for all is not a dream.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

“If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“Informed public debate becomes impossible when some parties refuse to read the material under dispute. Reading is not just a pastime or a luxury, but a precondition of democratic life, one of the practices that keep debate grounded, focused, and productive.”
― Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

“What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is liveable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some.”
― Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”
― Karl Marx

“In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil.”
― Hannah Arendt

“It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time. To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking. He must create if he can, first and foremost, especially if his creation does not side-step the problems of his time.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“We have to speak up on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves.”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation

“If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation

“When the rich wage war it's the poor who die.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Le diable et le bon dieu

“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre , Nausea

“Experienced professionals? They have dragged out their life in stupor and semi-sleep, they have married hastily, out of impatience, they have made children at random. They have met other men in cafés, at weddings and funerals. Sometimes, caught in the tide, they have struggled against it without understanding what was happening to them. All that has happened around them has eluded them; long, obscure shapes, events from afar, brushed by them rapidly and when they turned to look all had vanished. And then, around forty, they christen their small obstinacies and a few proverbs with the name of experience, they begin to simulate slot machines: put a coin in the left hand slot and you get tales wrapped in silver paper, put a coin in the slot on the right and you get precious bits of advice that stick to your teeth like caramels.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I speak of the Christian religion, and no one need be astonished. The Church in the colonies is the white people's Church, the foreigner's Church. She does not call the native to God's ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor. And as we know, in this matter many are called but few chosen.”
― Frantz Fanon, Concerning Violence

“Belief has nothing to do with truth.”
― Percival Everett, James

“All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

“The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

“Fiat ars – pereat mundus”, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

“There's no worse punishment than worthless, hopeless labor.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“If it were sufficient to love, things would be too easy. The more one loves the stronger the absurd grows.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Blest are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled,
That they are not a pipe for fortune's finger
To sound what stop she please.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Man simply invented God in order not to kill himself. That is the summary of universal history down to this moment.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”
― Julian of Norwich

“how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“In the realm of power, Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty—necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels. This particular true faith, moreover, is more deeply concerned about the soul than it is about the body, to which fact the flesh (and the corpses) of countless infidels bears witness.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“One must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes—I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether—is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time