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Dialectics Quotes

“We must draw up a plan for the formation of such a corps with several million people taking up the study of dialectical materialism and historical materialism, the theoretical basis of Marxism, and combating all shades of idealism and mechanical materialism. At present there are many cadres doing theoretical work, but there is still no corps of theoretical workers, much less a powerful one. Without such a corps, the cause of the entire Party, the socialist industrialization and socialist transformation of our country, the modernization of our national defence and our research in atomic energy cannot move along or succeed. I therefore recommend that you comrades read philosophy.”

PhilosophySocialismCommunismMarxismMaoDialecticsDialectical Materialism
Book:Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung: Volume V
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“When we say of things that they are finite, we understand thereby that they not only have a determinateness, that their quality is not only a reality and an intrinsic determination, that finite things are not merely limited . . . but that on the contrary, non-being constitutes their nature and being. Finite things are, but their relation to themselves is that they are negatively self-related and this very relation drives them beyond their being. They are, but the truth of this being is their destruction. The finite not only alters, as anything does, but it ceases to be, and it is not merely a possibility that it ceases to be, as though it could be that it might not cease. No, the nature of the being of finite things is that they have within them the seeds of their own destruction; the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.”

PhilosophyBecomingLogicBeingOntologyHegelDialecticsDialectic
Book:Science of Logic
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“Chris’ second letter was less noble. She started off by rhapsodizing once again about Dick’s face: “I started looking at your face that night in the restaurant—oh wow, isn’t that like the first line in the Ramones song, ‘Needles & Pins’? ‘I saw your face/It was the face I loved/And I knew’—and I got the same feeling from it that I get every-time I hear that song, and when you called my heart was pounding and then I thought that maybe we could do something together, something that is to adolescent romance what the Ramone’s cover of the song is to the original. The Ramones give ‘Needles & Pins’ the possibility of irony, but the irony doesn’t undercut the song’s emotion, it makes it stronger and more true. Søren Kierkegaard called this “the Third Remove.” In his book ‘The Crisis In The Life Of An Actress’, he claims no actress can play 14-year-old Juliette until she’s at least 32. Because acting’s art, and art involves reaching through some distance. Playing the vibrations between here and there and then and now. And don’t you think reality is best attained through dialectics? PS, Your face is mobile, craggy, beautiful…”

ArtDistanceDialectics
Book:I Love Dick
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“One of the curious things about our educational system, I would note, is that the better trained you are in a discipline, the less used to dialectical method you're likely to be. In fact, young children are very dialectical; they see everything in motion, in contradictions and transformations. We have to put an immense effort into training kids out of being good dialecticians. Marx wants to recover the intuitive power of the dialectical method and put it to work in understanding how everything is in process, everything is in motion. He doesn't simply talk about labor; he talks about the labor process. Capital is not a thing, but rather a process that exists only in motion. When circulation stops, value disappears and the whole system comes tumbling down.”

ProcessCapitalismLaborValueContradictionLabourCapitalMotionHarveyDialecticsMarx
Book:A Companion to Marx's Capital, Volume 1
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“Roots matter by not even one jot, and though there are lessons we can draw from them, we cannot let them determine us or even define us, just define and frame how it is we are to escape ourselves to remake ourselves. We are not prisoners of the past. We can all reinvent ourselves, build ourselves anew. We are a New Humanity, a Higher Humanity, the Bright Humanity of the future”

PastLife LessonsLearningJourneyFuturePrisonerRebirthDialectics
Book:The Stairway to Consciousness: The Birth of Self-Awareness from Unconscious Archetypes
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“It was a long evolutionary course which the human mind had to traverse, to pass from the belief in a physico-magical power comprised in the Word to a realization of its spiritual power. Indeed, it is the Word, it is language, that really reveals to man that world which is closer to him than any world of natural objects and touches his weal and woe more directly than physical nature. For it is language that makes his existence in a community possible; and only in society, in relation to a "Thee", can his subjectivity assert itself as a "Me.”

LanguageSocietyDialectics
Book:Language and Myth
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“It is not that a whole is more than the sum of its parts, but that the parts themselves are redefined and re-created in the process of their interaction. So the reductionist sociobiologists argue that individual human limitations place constraints on society, but, in fact, social organization is the negation of individual limitations.”

Philosophy Of ScienceDialecticsReductionismSocial OrganizationHolismSociobiologyThe IndividualThe Corpse In The Elevator
Author:Richard Lewontin
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“The entirety of Marxism from top to bottom was established by means of the dialectical materialist method. In literally any work of Marx and Engels it is therefore both possible and necessary to study the logic of their thinking and the theory of knowledge which they consciously employed – dialectics. This must be studied not only in their writings, but in the real logic of the political struggle which they conducted throughout their entire lives. For dialectics is the logic not only of research, and not only of the unity of scientific works; it is also a logic of real causes which comes to life and enters into battle, finding realisation in whatever are the truly real causes changing the face of the surrounding world.”

MarxismDialecticsMarxEngels
Author:Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov
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“We are all part of a God factory. Gods are what come off the production line at the end of an eons-long, protracted, dialectical process designed to overcome every possible obstacle, trial, setback, difficulty and ordeal. You need to be a God to survive the dialectic. It takes you to hell and forces you to confront the Devil. The Devil is you. The Devil is your Shadow. Only Devils can become Gods. That is the law of the dialectic.”

GodInspirationMotivationReligionDevilShadowAdversityChallengeDialecticsBest Of All Possible Worlds
Book:The Stairway to Consciousness: The Birth of Self-Awareness from Unconscious Archetypes
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“Spitzfindgikeiten des bloßen Begriffs waren die Gestehungkosten für die Entdeckung der Dialektik, Aristotelisch-Hegelsche Teleologie ging der Tendenz, Augustinisches Sabbatreich dem Reich der Freiheit vorauf. Und nicht zuletzt, ganz zuletzt geht die Aristotelische Deckung des δυνάμει ὄν, des In-Möglichkeit-Seins mit der Materie als tragender Materie jeder utopischen Substraterweiterung der Materie vorher; ob auch der Aristotelische Materie-Begriff in großer Philosophie rückwärts wie großen Teils auf vorwärts oft vereinsamt blieb.”

PhilosophyMaterialismIdealismDialecticsPotencyAristotleTendencyHegelian DialecticNew Materialism
Book:Gesamtausgabe der Werke.: Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz: Band 7: Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz
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“But having developed productive forces to a tremendous extent, capitalism has become enmeshed in contradictions which it is unable to solve. By producing larger and larger quantities of commodities, and reducing their prices, capitalism intensifies competition, ruins the mass of small and medium private owners, converts them into proletarians and reduces their purchasing power, with the result that it becomes impossible to dispose of the commodities produced. On the other hand, by expanding production and concentrating millions of workers in huge mills and factories, capitalism lends the process of production a social character and thus undermines its own foundation, inasmuch as the social character of the process of production demands the social ownership of the means of production; yet the means of production remain private capitalist property, which is incompatible with the social character of the process of production. These irreconcilable contradictions between the character of the productive forces and the relations of production make themselves felt in periodical crises of overproduction, when the capitalists, finding no effective demand for their goods owing to the ruin of the mass of the population which they themselves have brought about, are compelled to burn products, destroy manufactured goods, suspend production, and destroy productive forces at a time when millions of people are forced to suffer unemployment and starvation, not because there are not enough goods, but because there is an overproduction of goods.”

CommunismSoviet UnionDialecticsUssrStalinHistorical MaterialismMarxism LeninismHistorical Science
Book:Dialectical and Historical Materialism
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“The contradiction between the individual and the social, between the private and the universal, which bourgeois philosophy is unable to do away with, despite all its efforts, is the very basis of life in bourgeois society as a society of commodity-producers. This contradiction is embodied in the actual interrelations of people who cannot regard their private endeavors as social aspirations except in the absurd and mystified form of the value of commodities.”

IndividualismMarxismCritiqueDialecticsHistorical MaterialismDialectical MaterialismCommodity FetishismCommodity ProductionBourgeois Philosophy
Book:The General Theory of Law and Marxism
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“Imperialism is not the creation of any one or of any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognizable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will.”

WarCapitalismImperialismMarxismDialecticsHistorical Materialism
Book:The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy
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“We thus have three levels of antagonism: the Two are never two, the One is never one, the Nothing is never nothing. Sinthome—the signifier of the barred Other—registers the antagonism of the Two, their non-relationship. The object a registers the antagonism of the One, its inability to be one. $ registers the antagonism of Nothing, its inability to be the Void at peace with itself, to annul all struggles. The position of Wisdom is that the Void brings ultimate peace, a state in which all differences are obliterated; the position of dialectical materialism is that there is no peace even in the Void.”

PhilosophyStruggleDialecticsLacan
Book:Absolute Recoil: Towards A New Foundation Of Dialectical Materialism
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“The universe is driven by a very simple force – symmetry. The universe goes from perfect symmetry to broken symmetry and back to perfect symmetry again. It does this forever. We can put it in other terms: God becomes non-God (alienated from God) and then God again, following an immense, cosmic dialectical process through which he becomes conscious of who and what he is. We are all agents of God’s rediscovery. We are all becoming God.”

GodSymmetryEntropyDialecticsAsymmetryPanentheismPanlogosZero Entropy
Book:Free Will and Will to Power
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“As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.”

LifeReligionEvilEducationChristianityStudyAtheismReturnEnlightenmentEthicsIslamIntellectThoughtProphecyJudaismExileOld TestamentAssimilationPlagiarism18th CenturyDialecticsMonotheismFree ThoughtAntisemitismRitualsVoltaireGermansRabbisMessianismIsaiah BerlinProhibitionsChabad MessianismHaskalahMenachem Mendel SchneersonMoses MendelssohnRebbes
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“I hold the view that the World Spirit has given the times the order to advance; such an order is obeyed; this being strides forward like an armored, firmly closed phalanx, irresistibly and as imperceptibly as the sun moves, through thick and thin; it is flanked by innumerable light troops for and against it; most of them have no idea of what is at stake, and only get knocked on over the head, as if by an invisible hand. All the hesitant fibbing and sophisticated shadow boxing in the world is of no help against it; it can only reach about as high as the shoelaces of this colossus and smear a bit of mud or shoe polish on them, but it cannot loosen them, much less remove the divine shoes with the elastic soles or the seven-league boots, if the colossus puts them on. The safest game (both inwardly and outwardly) is, I dare say, to keep one's eye on the advancing giant.”

SpiritWorld HistoryDialectics
Author:Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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“The true dialectic of revolutions, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority to revolutionary tactics, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority — that is the way the road runs.”

RevolutionSocialismCommunismMarxismDialecticsSocial RevolutionOpportunismDialectical MaterialismParliamentary Cretinism
Book:The Russian Revolution,: And Leninism or Marxism?
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“Anger, surprisingly, often follows social hierarchies. Many people easily express anger toward those who are less powerful—a waiter, a child, a junior employee—but suppress it when mistreated by someone more powerful, such as a boss, police officer, or a government body.”

Critical ThinkingAnger ManagementDialecticsLogical Reasoning
Book:Critical Thinking Unchained: From Formal Logic to Dialectics of Emancipation
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“Anger is a natural emotion. It arises when we perceive something unjust, unfair, or threatening. There is nothing inherently wrong in feeling angry. Emotions are part of being human. The real problem arises when we express anger impulsively—especially when it targets another person.”

Critical ThinkingLogical ThinkingDialecticsDialectical MaterialismLogical Reasoning
Book:Critical Thinking Unchained: From Formal Logic to Dialectics of Emancipation
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“When questions arise of possible harmful effects of pesticides, the defenders of the products always try to narrow the scope of the inquiry to their most immediate, direct and measurable consequences and then downplay them, The critics of pesticides, on the other hand, urge that the ecosystem is strongly interconnected, highly variable and vulnerable. Thus debates around environmental impact become debates on the philosophy of nature: are things readily isolated or richly interacting? Is the average behavior of chemicals and organisms an adequate basis for decision making or must we be concerned with the unevenness of the world? Shall we "be realists" and stick to measurable costs and benefits, or shall we concern ourselves with all kinds of consequences of what we do? Gradually we see a confrontation of the world views of mechanistic reductionism and of dialectical materialism.”

BiologyMaterialismEcologyIdealismMarxismDialecticsReductionismDialectical MaterialismSystems Biology
Book:The Dialectical Biologist
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“The realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking. Thus, dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening. Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. "It bears its end within itself and unfolds it-as Hegel already noticed-by cunning. With the destabilizing of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.”

PhilosophyHistoryDreamsRevolutionSpeculationDialectics
Book:The Arcades Project
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“Americans are cultured from their earliest years to be either one-sided douloi or one-sided banausoi, i.e. either they cannot think abstractively/conceptually/orchestrally or else they can only think abstractively. Thinking in a truly rational dialectic between intuition and intellect is just beyond the reach of our nation of emotionalist helots. What prevails among us truly has to be called not thinking but "thinking," a pathetic surrogate for actual thinking for the benefit of existentially or modally crippled mentalities.”

ThinkingYearsNationsBenefitsIntuitionIntellectRationalMentalityPatheticCrippledOne SidedDialecticsSurrogates
Author:Kenny Smith
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“There's a dark side to each and every human soul. We wish we were Obi-Wan Kenobi, and for the most part we are, but there's a little Darth Vader in all of us. Thing is, this ain't no either or proposition. We're talking about dialectics, the good and the bad merging into us. You can run but you can't hide. My experience? Face the darkness, stare it down. Own it. As brother Nietzsche said, being human is a complicated gig. Give that old dark night of the soul a hug! Howl the eternal yes!”

GivingHumansLittlesSaidSoulRunningFacesNightWishSidesDarkTalkingDarknessBrotherEternalComplicatedStaringHugBeing HumanPropositionsExposureHuman SoulGigsDark SideHowlDark NightDialecticsEither OrMergingDark Night Of The SoulVaderObi Wan Kenobi
Author:Stuart Stevens
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“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. it is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely toleration, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within the interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters”

WorldWayWellsDoeDifferentDifferencesCreativityCreativeOur LivesEqualFunctionMereToleranceDenialFundSparksNew WaysAdvocatingCharterSustenanceTolerationDialecticsPolarity
Author:Audre Lorde
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“Philosophers are not honest enough in their work, although they make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic...; while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of "inspiration" most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact.”

IfsHeartKindHas BeensMadeRealSelfReasonEnoughPhilosophyFactsProblemInspirationDesireOpinionHonestColdDevelopmentPureBottomPhilosopherNoiseAbstractAssumptionTouchedVirtuousSelf DevelopmentTruthfulnessHunchesDialecticsUnconcernedNot Honest
Author:Friedrich Nietzsche
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“Modern man, seeking a middle position in the evaluation of sense impression and thought, can, following Plato , interpret the process of understanding nature as a correspondence, that is, a coming into congruence of pre-existing images of the human psyche with external objects and their behaviour. Modern man, of course, unlike Plato , looks on the pre-existent original images also as not invariable, but as relative to the development of a conscious point of view, so that the word "dialectic" which Plato is fond of using may be applied to the process of development of human knowledge.”

MenHumansLooksMayCoursesProcessUnderstandingViewsModernMiddlePositionObjectsDevelopmentConsciousOriginalsSeekingFollowingPoint Of ViewImpressionRelativeBehaviourPlatoEvaluationModern ManCorrespondenceHuman KnowledgeDialecticsHuman PsycheCongruenceUnderstanding Nature
Author:Wolfgang Pauli
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“A law which excludes all dialectic and all reconciliation; which establishes, consequently, both the flawless unity of knowledge and the uncompromising division of tragic existence; it rules over a world without twilight, which knows no effusion, nor the attenuated cares of lyricism; everything must be either waking or dream, truth or darkness, the light of being or the nothingness of shadow.”

KnowsWorldDreamLightCareLawExistenceDarknessShadowUnityTragicDivisionWakingTwilightNothingnessReconciliationFlawlessUncompromisingDialectics
Author:Michel Foucault
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“Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the Universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know.”

PeopleKnowsChildrenMadeTurnsUniverseParentCommonQualityLogicBasesResponseAncientMythCommon SenseApplicationRhetoricRationalityGreeceDialecticsAncient GreecePrehistoricGenerator
Author:Robert M. Pirsig
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