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Reactionary Quotes

Browse 23 quotes about Reactionary.

Reactionary Quotes

“We are tossed about by external causes in many ways, and like waves driven by contrary winds, we waver and are unconscious of the issue and our fate.' We think we are most ourselves when we are most passionate, whereas it is then we are most passive, caught in some ancestral torrent of impulse or feeling, and swept on to a precipitate reaction which meets only part of the situation because without thought only part of a situation can be perceived.”

PhilosophyPassionEmotionInstinctImpulseFeelingDriveSpinozaUrgeReactionaryAtavism
Book:The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers
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“It is life, not the individual, that is conscienceless. The essential, therefore, is to understand the time for which one is born. He who does not sense and understand its most secret forces, who does not feel in himself something cognate that drives him forward on a path neither hedged nor defined by concepts, who believes in the surface, public opinion, large phrases and ideals of the day — he is not of the stature for its events. He is in their power, not they in his. Look not back to the past for measuring-rods! Still less sideways for some system or other! There are times, like our own present and the Gracchan age, in which there are two most deadly kinds of idealism, the reactionary and the democratic. The one believes in the reversibility of history, the other in a teleology of history. But it makes no difference to the inevitable failure with which both burden a nation over whose destiny they have power, whether it is to a memory or to a concept that they sacrifice it. The genuine statesman is incarnate history, its directedness expressed as individual will and its organic logic as character.”

DestinyMemoryReactionaryTeleologyOrganic Logic
Book:The decline of the West
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“Nostalgia is an excessive sentimentality for the past, for home. It is associated with a yearning to return to a happy and safe period in your life. The word comes from nóstos, meaning “homecoming”, and álgos, meaning “pain” or “ache”. It’s all about the “good old days”, and “the good times”. Conservatism revolves around nostalgia. All right wingers are nostalgic, and suffer from future shock and future fear. Science is about extreme nostalgia for the material atoms of the ancient Greeks. Materialism is entirely dead in the era of quantum mechanics, yet scientists go on believing in matter anyway. They are highly conservative individuals unwilling to contemplate leaving the home materialism has provided for them. The last thing they want is to end up in the Unknown Land of Mind, where thought, not matter, is core reality. That would ruin everything for the scientific materialists and empiricists.”

ScienceChangeConservativeNostalgiaResistanceMaterialismParadigmRight WingHomesickReactionary
Book:Extra Scientiam Nulla Salus: How Science Undermines Reason
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“When you are constantly reacting to having been wronged (or perhaps to what you may regard as a wrong); when you are always giving in by practically living to defend, retaliating one time after another, again and again, you then spend double that time trying to prove the whole story: because to third parties, you will frequently appear to be on the attack, and therefore potentially receiving attacks once more - henceforth an unending pattern of misunderstood retaliations.”

Wasting TimeMisunderstoodReactingMove OnRetaliationDefensiveWasting LifeReactionaryMisunderstood FightsDefending Yourself
Author:Criss Jami
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“This is one of many expressions which, colourless and even meaningless at first, have been developed into recognized terms of abuse by sloppy writers, prejudiced thinkers and powerful evangelists. The ordinary reasonable man has been trained to shudder away from a 'reactionary' as he does from a 'vested interest', though he may have no clear notion of the nature of either. "What is a Reactionary?”

PoliticsReactionaryEpithets
Book:More Uncommon Law
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“The vision of the Progressive has often been but to walk forward while facing backward; the business of the Reactionary, but that of walking backward while facing forward; henceforth the fallout is oftentimes, and obviously enough, but the formulation and the construction of obstacles in life and hurdles on-site, as long as there are cliffs on edge.”

PoliticsFearConservativeProgressiveBackwardsCliffsLiberalReactionaryHurdlesForwards
Book:Healology
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“The last French Bourbon to reign, Charles X, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI and of his brief successor, Louis XVIII, displayed a recurring type of folly best described as the Humpty-Dumpty type: that is to say, the effort to reinstate a fallen and shattered structure, turning back history. In the process, called reaction or counter-revolution, the reactionary right is bent on restoring the privileges and property of the old regime and somehow retrieving a strength it did not have before.”

HistoryFollyConservatismGuillotineHumpty DumptyReactionaryCounter RevolutionCharles XAhistorical Triumphalism
Book:The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
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“The oligarchs are not philosophers; they pay people to be philosophers for them, and so the regnant ideology of the terminal phase of the American Empire is a mish-mash of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Foucault, as stitched together by Hollywood directors like Guillermo del Toro, (whose name translates into English as “of the bull”) and Bryan Singer for mass consumption. What they share is Nietzsche’s penchant for the transvaluation of all values (die Umwertung aller Werte) which entails role reversal as well.”

PhilosophyPoliticsPolitical PhilosophyReactionaryOligarchs
Author:E. Michael Jones
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“Those who had fought for what they called the revolution maintained a great pride: the pride of being on the correct side of the front lines. Ten or twelve years later (around the time of our story) the front lines began to melt away, and with them the correct side. No wonder the former supporters of the revolution feel cheated and are quick to seek substitute fronts; thanks to religion they can (in their role as atheists struggling against believers) stand again on the correct side and retain their habitual and precious sense of their own superiority. But to tell the truth, the substitute front was also useful to others, and it will perhaps not be too premature to disclose that Alice was one of them. Just as the directress wanted to be on the correct side, Alice wanted to be on the opposite side. During the revolution they had nationalized her papa's shop, and Alice hated those who had done this to him. But how should she show her hatred? Perhaps by taking a knife and avenging her father? But this sort of thing is not the custom in Bohemia. Alice had a better means for expressing her opposition: she began to believe in God.”

GodAtheismRevolutionCommunismCzechReactionaryPicking SidesFront LinesGroup Behavior
Book:Laughable Loves
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