Anders Hellström > Anders's Quotes

“A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?”
― Frederick Engels

“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary”
― Karl Marx

“Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
― Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

“I am not a political man and I have no political convictions. I am an individual and a believer in liberty. That is all the politics I have.”
― Charlie Chaplin

“Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.”
― Immanuel Kant

“Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.”
― Herbert Marcuse

“All truth is simple... is that not doubly a lie?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“Do. Or do not. There is no try.”
― Yoda

“Methodological naturalism is concerned not with claims about what exists but with methods of learning what nature is. It is the idea that all scientific endeavors, hypotheses, and events are to be explained and tested by reference to natural causes and events. This second sense of naturalism seeks to provide a framework within which to conduct the scientific study of the laws of nature. Methodological naturalism is a way of acquiring knowledge. It is a distinct system of thought concerned with a cognitive approach to reality, and is thus a philosophy of knowledge.”
― Wikipedia - Methodological naturalism

“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery.
None but ourselves can free our minds.”
― Bob Marley

“Individual men and even entire peoples give little thought to the fact that while each according to this own ways pursues his own ends—often at cross purposes with each other—they unconsciously proceed toward an unknown natural end, as if following a guiding thread; and they work to promote an end they would set little store by, even if they were aware of it.”
― Immanuel Kant , Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

“It is entirely possible to build the elements of the new system molecularly within the old. In the cooperatives, the credit unions, the peer-networks, the unmanaged enterprises and the parallel, subcultural economies, these elements already exist”
― Paul Mason

“An authoritative command must … be distinguished from a persuasive argument. When I am commanded to do something, I may choose to comply even though I am not being threatened, because I am brought to believe that it is something which I ought to do. If that is the case, then I am not, strictly speaking, obeying a command, but rather acknowledging the force or rightness of a prescription. … But the person himself [sic] has no authority—or, to be more precise, my complying with his command does not constitute an acknowledgment on my part of any such authority.”
― Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism

“The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”
― Robert Lifton

“When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.”
― Hannah Arendt

“Kant comes to identify the institution of property with freedom because he sees it in a fundamental sense as an extension of the self. An object which is, he argues, my property belongs solely and exclusively to myself, and it is my right to consume or use it in whatever way I please. Indeed, so strongly does the individual feel about his ownership, Kant thinks, that if somebody takes it without his consent they harm the individual just as much as though they had injured his body. From this point of view, the individual has every justification in feeling as upset about the theft of a favourite book as he has about a bruised knee. To threaten the individual’s property, in the sense of its being an extension of the self, prejudices not only his feeling of well-being but also his very existence.”
― Howard Williams

“The abolition of the external State must be preceded by the decay of the notions which breathe life and vigour into that clumsy monster: in other words, it is only when the people learn to value liberty, and to understand the truths of the anarchistic philosophy, that the question of practically abolishing the State looms up and acquires significance.”
― Victor Yarros

“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates

“If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Yeah, because I'm extremely romantic here. You know what is my fear? This postmodern, permissive, pragmatic etiquette towards sex. It's horrible. They claim sex is healthy; it's good for the heart, for blood circulation, it relaxes you. They even go into how kissing is also good because it develops the muscles here – this is horrible, my God! It's no longer that absolute passion. I like this idea of sex as part of love, you know: 'I'm ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever.' There is something nice, transcendent, about it. I remain incurably romantic.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology

“I did teach a class here [at the University of Cincinnati] and all of the grading was pure bluff...I even told students at the New School for example… if you don’t give me any of your shitty papers, you get an A. If you give me a paper I may read it and not like it and you can get a lower grade.[ He received no papers that semester]”
― Slavoj Žižek

“O Lord, if there is a Lord, save my soul, if I have a soul...
”
― Ernest Renan

“You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Postmodernism, the school of "thought" that proclaimed "There are no truths, only interpretations" has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for "conversations" in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.”
― Daniel Dennett

“This man, although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally culpable, because he is the enemy of our existing institutions. [Case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti 1916-1927]”
― Judge Webster Thayer

“You fight them by writing letters and making phone calls so you don’t have to fight them with fists. You fight them with fists so you don’t have to fight them with knives. You fight them with knives so you don’t have to fight them with guns. You fight them with guns so you don’t have to fight them with tanks.”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“The method of this great philosopher [Kant] can serve as a pointer to the satisfying solution to our problem. Of course we don’t have to slavishly adhere to Kant's form, but we must match his method to the nature of our own subject [socialism], displaying the same critical spirit. Our critique must be direct against both a scepticism that undermines all theoretical thought, and a dogmatism that relies on ready-made formulas”
― Eduard Bernstein

“Don't forget, I am above the law [to Michael Hutchence]”
― Bob Geldof