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Progressives Quotes

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Progressives Quotes

“Confronted with the horror of a period in which man, whom he wanted to magnify, has been persistently degraded in the name of certain principles that surrealism adopted, Breton felt constrained to propose, provisionally, a return to traditional morality. That represents a hesitation perhaps. But it is the hesitation of nihilism and the real progress of rebellion. After all, when he could not give himself the morality and the values of whose necessity he was clearly aware, we know very well that Breton chose love.”

LoveProgressivesAndré Breton
Book:The Rebel
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“One of the most outstanding conclusions of some postmodernists is that all of reality is socially constructed. They have even taken issue with the conclusions of Newton and Einstein, on the basis that the privilege of those scientists is obvious in their equations and, as old white guys, their biases inherently prevented them from knowing anything real of the world.”

GenderLgbtqPostmodernismSafe SpaceCancel CultureProgressives1984Trigger WarningParasitic Ideology
Book:A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
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“Humor is the mechanism by which we sort out the gray area of what can and can't be said. A humorless society, community, or group of friends likely has large problemas lurking just beneath the surface.”

HumorComedyGenderLgbtqPostmodernismSafe SpaceCancel CultureProgressives1984Trigger Warning
Book:A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
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“Over the last 25 years, the major popular movements that have had significant impact on the general society and have changed it, that have had a major civilizing effect – the feminist movement, the environmental movement, and so on – these are mostly developments of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Their roots might be in the activism of the ‘60s, but the movements themselves developed and extended later. The same is true of the changes in respect for other cultures, rights of oppressed people, and so on. These are quite significant changes. If you compare the United States now to what it was, say, 35 years ago, the changes are quite dramatic. These are changes in popular consciousness that are quite deeply embedded.”

ChangeProgressives
Author:Noam Chomsky
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“We (the left) have to be used to being a minority—a small minority—for some time to come. The odd thing is that the right even when it is in power, likes to think of itself as an embattled minority against this elite that somehow runs everything. Whereas the left, even when it has no power at all, likes to imagine it somehow represents the majority of people. These are mirror-image delusions. It is important to stick to principles, even when some of them may be unpopular now for one reason or another. For example, there has been a tendency for some progressives to look at the power of the right, and say, “Well, all we can focus on is economic justice issues, because other things, whether they are abortion rights or drug law reform, will be less popular and more divisive”. And I think that is wrong approach. There are certain core things we stand for, and these include both economic justice and civil liberties, which you can’t back away from.”

Progressives
Author:Barbara Ehrenreich
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“Progressivism is a spectrum; it’s not an ideology following one leader saying one thing. It’s many people who have very wildly diverging opinions about many things. But, as progressives, if we could commit to a general frame of reference that we are about improving the quality of life for a lot more people, we’re about helping working and middle-class people, and we’re about taking care of poor people, we could really make some inroads in political power in this country. But, if we choose to be purists, if we choose to be arguing for a consensus we will never reach, for agreement on every point, it’s never going to happen.”

Progressives
Author:Urvashi Vaid
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“Whatever mainstream Western liberalism is--and I have no useful definition of it beyond something at its core transactional, centered on the magnanimous, enlightened image of the self and the dissonant belief that empathizing with the plight of the faraway oppressed is compatible with benefiting from the systems that oppress them--it subscribes to this calculus.”

OppressionLiberalismOppressedProgressivismProgressivesLiberalsSystems Of OppressionWestern Liberalism
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“While actually intersex individuals are real and incredibly rare, and actually transgendered people are also real and very rare, much of modern "gender ideology" is dangerous and contagious, and many of the interventions (hormonal, surgical) are not reversible.”

EqualityGenderLgbtqProgressivesDerridaDeconstructionismRadical Left
Book:A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
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“I know them, the American men (and women) of the left. Talking to them always makes me feel like the worst kind of dissident, a right-wing freak (or a Republican, at best), even if I consider myself an honest social democrat. For every mild criticism of life in the system I have been living under for the last forty years they look at me suspiciously, as if I were a CIA agent... But one can hardly blame them. It is not the knowledge about communism they lack - I am pretty sure they know all about it - it's the experience of living under such conditions. So, while I am speaking for 'within' the system itself, they are explaining it to me from without. I do not want to claim that you have to be a hen to lay an egg, only that a certain disagreement between two starting points is normal. But they don't go for that; they need to be right.”

CommunismLeftistsProgressivesCommunists
Book:How We Survived Communism & Even Laughed
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