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Famous Aurelian Craiutu Quotes

“There are no meaningless moments or deeds in history,' [Tomasz] Burek wrote in an influential text ('On the Razor's Edge') published in 1968, 'history happens at every moment, [and] is determined in every gesture of every individual life. This sense that we live ... on the razor's edge, totally and ruthlessly, believing that everything about us is always the result of human choice and the drive to humanity within each person - this is not theology or historical determinism but a realistic approach.”

ChanceHistoryFateInfluenceConscienceHumanismPersonal ResponsibilityHistorical Determinism
Book:Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes
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“The person of dialogue attempts to transform the enemy into an opponent and the opponent into a partner. An opponent is for him one who presents challenge, who wants and asks to be understood. The person of dialogue believes that dialogue is the only way to be understood by others. So he makes an effort to look at the world through his opponent's viewpoint, to 'change hats with him' and to 'step into his shoes.' ... He does not shy away from defending his own arguments and is not afraid of the truth, but, invariably, he puts respect for human dignity first. ... Each partner accept that the dignity of the other is of immensurable value. This presupposes the ability to strike a compromise, whenever possible, the readiness to admit that one is not is possession of the sole and complete [truth], and the willingness to accept somebody else's reasoning and to change one's own attitudes. (Quoted from Adam Michnik, In Search of Lost Meaning.)”

HumilityHumanismDialogueCompromiseModeration
Book:Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes
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“With regard to religious belief, [Adam] Michnik admitted that 'only those forms of religious belief that are "anti-values," that lead to fanaticism and intolerance, are objectionable' and should therefore be opposed. 'I would nevertheless be afraid to live in a world without conservative institutions and values,' he confessed, speaking like a true moderate. 'A world devoid of tradition would be nonsensical and anarchic. The human world should be constructed from a permanent conflict between conservatism and contestation; if either is absent from a society, pluralism is destroyed.”

ReligionFaithHumanismDialogueModerationConservatismPluralism
Book:Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes
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“As [Isaiah] Berlin wrote to George Kennan in 1951, 'What we violently reject is ... the very idea that there are circumstances in which one has a right to get at, and shape the characters and souls of other men for purposes which these men, if they realized what we were doing, might reject.' The respect for individual liberty goes hand in hand with the recognition of human dignity as a fundamental principle and is incompatible with treating human beings as sheer material to be conditioned and shaped at will.”

LibertyHumanismModerationMarxismTotalitarianismAuthoritarianismPolitical TheoryUtopianism
Book:Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes
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