Dialectics Quotes

“Was not Hypatia the greatest philosopher of Alexandria, and a true martyr to the old values of learning? She was torn to pieces by a mob of incensed Christians not because she was a woman, but because her learning was so profound, her skills at dialectic so extensive that she reduced all who queried her to embarrassed silence. They could not argue with her, so they murdered her.”
― Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio

“As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“It should be added that, in general, it is the character of every metaphysical and theological argument to seek to explain one absurdity by another.”
― Michael Bakunin, Unknown Book 9062488

“There's only two types of people in the world: the ones that entertain, and the ones that observe.”
― Britney Spears

“What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Don't that make your bosom plim?”
― Thomas Hardy

“But having developed productive forces to a tremendous extent, capitalism has become enmeshed in contradictions which it is unable to solve. By producing larger and larger quantities of commodities, and reducing their prices, capitalism intensifies competition, ruins the mass of small and medium private owners, converts them into proletarians and reduces their purchasing power, with the result that it becomes impossible to dispose of the commodities produced. On the other hand, by expanding production and concentrating millions of workers in huge mills and factories, capitalism lends the process of production a social character and thus undermines its own foundation, inasmuch as the social character of the process of production demands the social ownership of the means of production; yet the means of production remain private capitalist property, which is incompatible with the social character of the process of production. These irreconcilable contradictions between the character of the productive forces and the relations of production make themselves felt in periodical crises of overproduction, when the capitalists, finding no effective demand for their goods owing to the ruin of the mass of the population which they themselves have brought about, are compelled to burn products, destroy manufactured goods, suspend production, and destroy productive forces at a time when millions of people are forced to suffer unemployment and starvation, not because there are not enough goods, but because there is an overproduction of goods.”
― Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism

“dialectics, as a veteran communist explained . . . 'is the art and technique of always landing on your feet.”
― Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century

“Man is that night, that empty Nothingness, which contains everything in its undivided simplicity: the wealth of an infinite number of representations, of images, not one of which comes precisely to mind, or which [moreover] are not [there] insofar as they are really present. It is the night, the interiority - or - the intimacy of Nature which exists here: [the] pure personal-Ego. In phantasmagorical representations it is night on all sides: here suddenly surges up a blood spattered head; there, another, white, apparition; and they disappear just as abruptly. That is the night that one perceives if one looks a man in the eyes; then one is delving into a night which becomes terrible; it is the night of the world which then presents itself to us.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“The universe is driven by a very simple force – symmetry. The universe goes from perfect symmetry to broken symmetry and back to perfect symmetry again. It does this forever. We can put it in other terms: God becomes non-God (alienated from God) and then God again, following an immense, cosmic dialectical process through which he becomes conscious of who and what he is. We are all agents of God’s rediscovery. We are all becoming God.”
― Mike Hockney, Free Will and Will to Power

“The point is that Marxism and Anarchism are built up on entirely different principles, in spite of the fact that both come into the arena of the struggle under the flag of Socialism. The cornerstone of Anarchism is the individual, whose emancipation, according to its tenets, is the principal condition for the emancipation of the masses, the collective body. According to the tenets of Anarchism, the emancipation of the masses is impossible until the individual is emancipated. Accordingly, its slogan is: 'Everything for the individual.' The cornerstone of Marxism, however, is the masses, whose emancipation, according to its tenets, is the principal condition for the emancipation of the individual. That is to say, according to the tenets of Marxism, the emancipation of the individual is impossible until the masses are emancipated. Accordingly, its slogan is: 'Everything for the masses.”
― Joseph Stalin, Anarchism or Socialism?

“When we say of things that they are finite, we understand thereby that they not only have a determinateness, that their quality is not only a reality and an intrinsic determination, that finite things are not merely limited . . . but that on the contrary, non-being constitutes their nature and being. Finite things are, but their relation to themselves is that they are negatively self-related and this very relation drives them beyond their being. They are, but the truth of this being is their destruction. The finite not only alters, as anything does, but it ceases to be, and it is not merely a possibility that it ceases to be, as though it could be that it might not cease. No, the nature of the being of finite things is that they have within them the seeds of their own destruction; the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic

“We must draw up a plan for the formation of such a corps with several million people taking up the study of dialectical materialism and historical materialism, the theoretical basis of Marxism, and combating all shades of idealism and mechanical materialism. At present there are many cadres doing theoretical work, but there is still no corps of theoretical workers, much less a powerful one. Without such a corps, the cause of the entire Party, the socialist industrialization and socialist transformation of our country, the modernization of our national defence and our research in atomic energy cannot move along or succeed. I therefore recommend that you comrades read philosophy.”
― Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung: Volume V

“Whether in science or the arts, if we look for the source of an achievement we can observe that what a man does either repeats or refutes what someone else has done — repeats it in other tones, refines or amplifies or simplifies it, loads or overloads it with meaning; or else rebuts, overturns, destroys, and denies it, but thereby assumes it and has invisibly used it. Opposites are born from opposites.”
― Paul Valéry

“life, beginning from a non-developed unity has run through the circle towards perfect unity. The world and the possibility of separation stood over against the non-developed unity. While evolving, reflection had always produced more opposites so as to reunify them by satisfying impulses until it has set the Whole of man in opposition to itself, until love transcends reflection in total inobjectivity, until it deprives the opposite of all foreignness, until it discovers life itself without anything missing to it.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“The challenge lies in escaping the triangle of social democracy, anarchism, and Leninism, and moving on to something “higher” (read, other) rather than declaring two of them dead and idolizing the third.”
― Gabriel Kuhn

“Extinction has long since become a part of our lives.”
― Hayao Miyazaki, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind: The Complete Series

“Philosophy shows that the Idea advances to an infinite antithesis; that, viz. between the Idea in its free, universal form in which it exists for itself and the contrasted form of abstract introversion, reflection on itself, which is formal existence−for−self, personality, formal freedom, such as belongs to Spirit only.”
― Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedric 1770-1831, The Philosophy of History

“What does it really matter?’ is a line we like to associate with bourgeois callousness, but it is the line most likely to make the individual aware, without dread, of the insignificance of his existence. The inhuman part of it, the ability to keep one’s distance as a spectator and to rise above things, is in the final analysis the human part, the very part resisted by its ideologists.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

“People made and had to make their history unconsciously as long as the motive forces of historical development worked behind their backs, independently of their consciousness. Once those forces have been discovered, once the laws by which they work have been studied, people will be able to take them in their own hands and submit them to their own reason. The service rendered by Marx consists in having discovered those forces and made a rigorous scientific study of their working. Modern dialectical materialism, which, in the opinion of philistines, must turn man into an automaton, in actual fact opens for the first time in history the road to the kingdom of freedom and conscious activity. But it is possible to enter that kingdom only by means of a radical change in the present social activity.”
― Georgi Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works Volume I

“... all that is finite is such that cancels itself, is transmuted into its opposite. This transition is effected with the aid of the nature inherent in every phenomenon, which contains forces that engender its opposite.”
― Georgi Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works: Volume II

“Spitzfindgikeiten des bloßen Begriffs waren die Gestehungkosten für die Entdeckung der Dialektik, Aristotelisch-Hegelsche Teleologie ging der Tendenz, Augustinisches Sabbatreich dem Reich der Freiheit vorauf. Und nicht zuletzt, ganz zuletzt geht die Aristotelische Deckung des δυνάμει ὄν, des In-Möglichkeit-Seins mit der Materie als tragender Materie jeder utopischen Substraterweiterung der Materie vorher; ob auch der Aristotelische Materie-Begriff in großer Philosophie rückwärts wie großen Teils auf vorwärts oft vereinsamt blieb.”
― Ernst Bloch, Gesamtausgabe der Werke.: Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz: Band 7: Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz

“Detached from the transcendental-logical context and transferred to the level of the individual, the results of productive imagination, in the sense of the capacity to differentiate, are not a priori necessary, because they are not the product of a synthesis of categorical form and pure manifold. The consequence of this contingency, however, is an increase in critical power to confront the predetermined categories with their untruth. The faculty of differentiation as a faculty of the concrete individual separates the fate of the individual in his dialectical entanglement with the universal. Because the individual is mediated through supra-individual moments, without which he would cease to be an individual, he is not only contingent. Without a moment of reflection, through which the individual articulates his condition and realizes himself, he would be incapable of asserting himself against the universal: his individuality would be entirely undetermined.”
― Angela Y. Davis

“Biologically and economically, the doctrine of the harmony of interests was only tenable if you left out of account the interest of the weak who must be driven to the wall, or called in the next world to redress the balance of the present.”
― Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations

“The notions of subjective and objective have been completely reversed. Objective means the non-controversial aspect of things, their unquestioned impression, the façade made up of classified data, that is, the subjective; and they call subjective anything which breaches that façade, engages the specific experience of a matter, casts of all ready-made judgments and substitutes relatedness to the object for the majority consensus of those who do not even look at it, let alone think about it — that is, the objective.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“It was a long evolutionary course which the human mind had to traverse, to pass from the belief in a physico-magical power comprised in the Word to a realization of its spiritual power. Indeed, it is the Word, it is language, that really reveals to man that world which is closer to him than any world of natural objects and touches his weal and woe more directly than physical nature. For it is language that makes his existence in a community possible; and only in society, in relation to a "Thee", can his subjectivity assert itself as a "Me.”
― Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth

“The realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking. Thus, dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening. Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. "It bears its end within itself and unfolds it-as Hegel already noticed-by cunning. With the destabilizing of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“It is not that a whole is more than the sum of its parts, but that the parts themselves are redefined and re-created in the process of their interaction. So the reductionist sociobiologists argue that individual human limitations place constraints on society, but, in fact, social organization is the negation of individual limitations.”
― Richard Lewontin

“Chris’ second letter was less noble. She started off by rhapsodizing once again about Dick’s face: “I started looking at your face that night in the restaurant—oh wow, isn’t that like the first line in the Ramones song, ‘Needles & Pins’? ‘I saw your face/It was the face I loved/And I knew’—and I got the same feeling from it that I get every-time I hear that song, and when you called my heart was pounding and then I thought that maybe we could do something together, something that is to adolescent romance what the Ramone’s cover of the song is to the original. The Ramones give ‘Needles & Pins’ the possibility of irony, but the irony doesn’t undercut the song’s emotion, it makes it stronger and more true. Søren Kierkegaard called this “the Third Remove.” In his book ‘The Crisis In The Life Of An Actress’, he claims no actress can play 14-year-old Juliette until she’s at least 32. Because acting’s art, and art involves reaching through some distance. Playing the vibrations between here and there and then and now. And don’t you think reality is best attained through dialectics? PS, Your face is mobile, craggy, beautiful…”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick