Book detail: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This book is a compilation of essays that delve into historical events, political ideologies, and moral considerations from the years 1934 to 1943. The essays are likely to offer insights into the social and political climate of that era.
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“The struggle between the opponents and defenders of capitalism is a struggle between innovators who do not know what innovation to make and conservatives who do not know what to conserve.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad , the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“The necessity for power is obvious, because life cannot be lived without order; but the allocation of power is arbitrary because all men are alike, or very nearly. Yet power must not seem to be arbitrarily allocated, because it will not then be recognized as power. Therefore prestige, which is illusion, is of the very essence of power.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“If a young girl is being forced into a brothel she will not talk about her rights. In such a situation the word would sound ludicrously inadequate.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“Justice consists in seeing that no harm is done to men. Whenever a man cries inwardly: 'Why am I being hurt?' harm is being done to him. He is often mistaken when he tries to define the harm, and why and by whom it is being inflicted on him. But the cry itself is infallible.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“Everything which originates from pure love is lit with the radiance of beauty.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“It is not enough that France should be regarded as a country which enjoys the remains of a freedom acquired long ago. If she is still to count in the world--and if she does not intend to, she may as well perish--she must be seen by her own citizens and by all men as an ever-flowing source of liberty. There must not be a single genuine lover of freedom in the whole world who can have a valid reason for hating France.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“A mind enclosed in language is in prison.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“It is not the cause for which men took up arms that makes a victory more just or less, it is the order that is established when arms have been laid down.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“If you say to someone who has ears to hear: "What you are doing to me is not just," you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like, "I have the right..." or "you have no right to..." They evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality, they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved. These things are essentially anonymous.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“The real stumbling-block of totalitarian regimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought; it is men's inability to stand the physical and nervous strain of a permanent state of excitement, except during a few years of their youth.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“A modern factory reaches perhaps almost the limit of horror. Everybody in it is constantly harassed and kept on edge by the interference of extraneous wills while the soul is left in cold desolate misery. What man needs is silence and warmth; what he is given is an icy pandemonium. Physical labor may be painful, but it is not degrading as such. It is not art; it is not science; it is something else, possessing an exactly equal value with art and science, for it provides an equal opportunity to reach the impersonal stage of attention.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not do so; and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings
“When a man's life is destroyed or damaged by some wound or privation of soul or body, which is due to other men's actions or negligence, it is not only his sensibility that suffers but also his aspiration toward the good. Therefore there has been sacrilege towards that which is sacred in him.”
Source: Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings