The traveler to the United States will do well ... to prepare himself for the class-consciousness of the natives. This differs fro...m the already familiar English version in being more extreme and based more firmly on the conviction that the class to which the speaker belongs is inherently superior to all others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As thinkers, mankind has ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the seco...nd on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final and say, The senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealists on the power of Thought and Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Marxist combination of materialism and determinism is fatally anti-humanistic. It denies a consciousness, a mind, that is inde...pendent of material conditions and class relations. It denies a will and volition that are capable of shaping the course of history. It denies an individuality that is not reducible to class. It denies both the idea and the reality of freedom, a freedom that is something more than the "bourgeois" freedom to buy and sell. It denies a morality that transcends class interests. And it denies the spirituality of man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consci...ousness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government.... That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of gov't as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by gov't. Somewhere in between and in gradations is the group that has the sense that gov't exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We fatuously hoped that we might pluck from the human tragedy itself a consciousness of a common destiny which should bring its ow...n healing, that we might extract from life's very misfortunes a power of cooperation which should be effective against them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of... course, on memory).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we imagine what it is like to be a languageless creature, we start, naturally, from our own experience, and most of what then... springs to mind has to be adjusted (mainly downward). The sort of consciousness such animals enjoy is dramatically truncated, compared to ours. A bat, for instance, not only can't wonder whether it's Friday; it can't even wonder whether it's a bat; there is no role for wondering to play in its cognitive structure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My consciousness-raising group is still going on. Every Monday night it meets, somewhere in Greenwich Village, and it drinks a lot... of red wine and eats a lot of cheese. A friend of mine who is in it tells me that at the last meeting, each of the women took her turn to explain, in considerable detail, what she was planning to stuff her Thanksgiving turkey with. I no longer go to the group.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »