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Unreason Quotes

Browse 11 quotes about Unreason.

Unreason Quotes

“Ultimately, confinement did seek to suppress madness, to eliminate from the social order a figure which did not find its place within it; the essence of confinement was not the exorcism of a danger. Confinement merely manifested what madness, in its essence, was: a manifestation of non-being; and by providing this manifestation, confinement thereby suppressed it, since it restored it to its truth as nothingness. Confinement is the practice which corresponds most exactly to madness experienced as unreason, that is, as the empty negativity of reason; by confinement, madness is acknowledged to be nothing.”

ReasonHistoryCivilizationMadnessMedicinePrisonPsychiatrySystemConfinementUnreason
Book:Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
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“There are many of us here. A whole street. That's what it's called--Chernobylskaya. These people worked at the station their whole lives. A lot of them still go there to work on a provisional basis, that's how they work there now, no one lives there anymore. They have bad diseases, they're invalids, but they don't leave their jobs, they're scared to even think of the reactor closing down. Who needs them now anywhere else? Often they die. In an instant. They just drop--someone will be walking, he falls down, goes to sleep, never wakes up. He was carrying flowers for his nurse and his heart stopped. They die, but no one's really asked us. No one's asked what we've been through. What we saw. No one wants to hear about death. About what scares them. But I was telling you about love. About my love... -- Lyudmila, Ignatenko, wife of deceased fireman, Vasily Ignatenko”

Grief And LossDeath Of A Loved OneUnreason
Book:Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
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“The difficulty is that, so long as unreason prevails, a solution of our troubles can only be reached by chance; for while reason, being impersonal, makes universal co-operation possible, unreason, since it represents private passions, makes strife inevitable. It is for this reason that rationality, in the sense of an appeal to a universal and impersonal standard of truth, is of supreme importance to the well-being of the human species.”

ReasonTruthUniversalWell BeingCooperationRationalityHuman SpeciesPassionsUnreasonImpersonal
Book:In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays
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“Nonsense has taken up residence in the heart of public debate and also in the academy. This nonsense is part of the huge fund of unreason on which the plans and schemes of optimists draw for their vitality. Nonsense confiscates meaning. It thereby puts truth and falsehood, reason and unreason, light and darkness on an equal footing. It is a blow cast in defence of intellectual freedom, as the optimists construe it, namely the freedom to believe anything at all, provided you feel better for it.”

BelieveHeartReasonLightTruthFreedomDarknessPlansEqualOptimismDebateMeaningNonsenseFeelingFalsehoodSchemesVitalityAcademyPlanFeelPublicSchemeUnreasonOptimists
Book:The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope
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