The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, i...s at the same time its ruling intellectual force. No more painters, no more scribblers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more royalists, no more radicals, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more communists, no more proletariat, no more democrats, no more republicans, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more arms, no more police, no more nations, an end at last to all this stupidity, nothing left, nothing at all, nothing, nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I feel that the task of criticizing my poetry is best left to others (i.e. critics) and would much rather have it take place after... I am dead. If at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and tur...n him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Computer science only indicates the retrospective omnipotence of our technologies. In other words, an infinite capacity to process... data (but only data--i.e. the already given) and in no sense a new vision. With that science, we are entering an era of exhaustivity, which is also an era of exhaustion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Have at last written another [play, i.e., Endgame].... Rather difficult and elliptic, mostly depending on the power of the text to... claw, more inhuman than "Godot."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Predictions usually deal with events--who will win an election, whether or not a country will go to war, the specification of a ne...w invention; they center on decisions. Yet such predictions, while possible, cannot be formalized, i.e. made subject to rules. The prediction of events is inherently difficult. Events are the intersect of social vectors (interests, forces, pressures, and the like). While one can to some extent assess the strength of these vectors individually, one would need a "social physics" to predict the exact crosspoints where decisions and forces combine.... Forecasting is possible where there are regularities and recurrences of phenomena (these are rare), of where there are persisting trends whose direction, if not exact trajectory, can be plotted with statistical time-series or be formulated as historical tendencies. Necessarily, therefore, one deals with probabili ties and an array of possible projections. But the limitations of forecasting are also evident. The further one reaches ahead in time with a set of forecasts, the greater the margin for error, since the fan of the projections widens.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That I am a poet in an age where the "unintellectual" (i.e., almost everybody) think of poetry as something they didn't like when ...they were at school, and the intellectual think it something the masses should be excluded from, is sad for me. This age has far too much reverence for poetry and too little respect--for by the same token it is very difficult indeed to earn a living from poetry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, b...ut universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i.e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An action is an aim of the subject, and it is his agency too which executes this aim: unless the subject were in this way even in ...the most disinterested action, i.e. unless he had an interest in it, there would be no action at all.... Impulse and passion are the very life- blood of all action: they are needed if the agent is really to be in his aim and the execution thereof. The morality concerns the content of the aim, which as such is the universal, an inactive thing, that finds it actualizing in the agent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full- blown liberty, there is nothing like it in... its uncontrollable strength, just because it is the very essence of mind, and that as its very actuality. Whole continents, Africa and the East, have never had this Idea, and are without it still. The Greeks and Romans, Plato and Aristotle, even the Stoics, did not have it. On the contrary, they saw that it is only by birth or by strength of character, education, or philosophy that the human being is actually free. It was through Christianity that this Idea came into the world. According to Christianity, the individual as such has an infinite value as the object and aim of divine love, destined as mind to live in absolute relationship with God himself, and have God's mind dwelling in him: i.e. man is implicitly destined to supreme freedom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »