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Quote by Iris Murdoch

Work

The Black Prince

The book follows the life and adventures of a young prince during the 14th century. more

Author

Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch was an Irish-Canadian philosopher and author, born on July 15, 1919, in Dublin, Ireland, and passed away on February 8, 1999. She is celebrated for her philosophical novels that intertwine moral and ethical dilemmas with complex narratives. Murdoch's work has left a lasting impact on the literary world, particularly in the latter half of the 20th century. more

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“The psychology of the naturalistic drama, in which the characters are interpreted as social phenomena, has its origin in this urge which the spectator feels to identify himself with his social compeers. Now, however much objective truth there may be in such an interpretation of the characters in a play, it leads, when raised to the status of an exclusive principle, to a falsification of the facts. The assumption that men and women are merely social beings results in just as arbitrary a picture of experience as the view according to which every person is a unique and incomparable individual. Both conceptions lead to a stylization and romanticizing of reality. On the other hand, however, there is no doubt that the conception of man held in any particular epoch is socially conditioned and that the choice as to whether man is portrayed in the main as an autonomous personality or as the representative of a class depends in every age on the social approach and political aims of those who happen to be the upholders of culture. When a public wishes to see social origins and class characteristics emphasized in the human portraiture, that is always a sign that that society has become class-conscious, no matter whether the public in question is aristocratic or middle-class. In this context the question whether the aristocrat is only an aristocrat and the bourgeois only a bourgeois is absolutely unimportant.”

ArtLiteratureDramaNaturalismSelf IdentityClass Consciousness
Book:The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism
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“I am not speaking here of the theory of the class struggle — I am speaking of the fact as the workers know it. Hundreds and thousands of workers are class-conscious without ever having heard of Marx and without coming in contact with the doctrine as such. They are class-conscious because their struggles for existence and their desire to escape from oppression and monotony, find constant opposition.”

SocialismClass StruggleClass Consciousness
Book:The Labor Movement : Its Conservative Functions and Social Consequences / (1921) [Leather Bound]
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“Guitars (except when played in "classical"—that is, archaic—style) are low [status] by nature, and that is why they were so often employed as tools of intentional class degradation by young people in the 1960s and '70s. The guitar was the perfect instrument for the purpose of signaling these young people's flight from the upper-middle and middle classes, associated as it is with Gypsies, cowhands, and other personnel without inherited or often even earned money and without fixed residence.”

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Book:Class: A Guide Through the American Status System
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“That's one of the reasons why, say, Canada, a very similar country, has a health care system and we don't. In Canada, the unions struggled for health care for the country. In the United States, they struggled for health care for themselves. So if you're an autoworker here in the United States, you had a pretty god health care and pension system. Union workers won health care for themselves in a compact with the corporations. They thought it was a deal. What they couldn't see was that it's a suicide pact. If the corporation decides the compact is over, then it's over. Meanwhile, the rest of the country didn't get health care. So now the United States has a completely dysfunctional health care system, while Canada has one that more or less works. That's a relation of different cultural values and institutional structures in two very similar countries. So yes, the working class did continue to develop and grow here, but with class collaboration, that is, in a compact with the corporations.”

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Book:Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire
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“The road to Hell is paved with evildoers, they'd tell us. And the evildoers were those who had bad thoughts. We always wanted to be good. We believed that to be good was to bow one's head, not to protest, not to demand anything, not to get angry. No one had clarified these things for us. On the contrary, we were always being offered a celestial paradise. The reward for being good. To respect one's neighbor was really to respect the landowner. And to respect the landowner was to conform to his whimsey. If there were no beans to eat after working on the plantation, it was because the landowner couldn't manage, the landowner was suffering losses. If there were no hammocks to sleep in, it was because the harvest had not left the landowner enough time to provide them. And there we were without food, waiting for the afternoon or the evening to go home to eat, a whole day without eating; or we'd go to sleep under the pepetos trees in the coffee fields. We used to confuse goodness with resignation.”

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Book:One Day of Life
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“I cannot let things remain as they are, because then I would not be free. If I cease to act because I fear the future, then I create a worse enslavement for myself. That much I know. While my people are not free, I am not free. If the freedom and justice I seek loose destruction upon the earth, then I accept that responsibility, but it seems to me that the real responsibility must be borne by those who keep me from my freedom. I must act!”

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“Until the individual has won this freedom by heroic effort in philosophical thinking he does not fully belong to himself, and his mental tortures are the shameful tribute he pays to external necessity that stands opposed to him. But as soon as this individual throws off the yoke of this painful and shameful restriction he is born for a new, full and hitherto never experienced life; and his free actions become the conscious and free expression of necessity. Then he will become a great social force; and then nothing can, and nothing will, prevent him from Bursting on cunning falsehood Like a storm of wrath divine…”

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Book:The Role of the Individual in History
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