Curtis White: Most

Curtis White is American academic. Explore interesting quotes on most.

Curtis White: 34 quotes0 likes

“The Imagination has always called for a return to the truest fundamentalism contained in the question "What does it mean to be a human being?" Needless to say, this is a question that deserves the deepest and most patient development. It will have to suffice for the present to say that our reigning social reality forbids— structurally, politically, violently— the broad posing of this question.”

"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"

“Similar though Marx and Thoreau may be in their accounts of the consequences of living in a society defined by money, their suggestions for how to respond to it are poles apart. Forget the Party. Forget the revolution. Forget the general strike. Forget the proletariat as an abstract class of human interest. Thoreau's revolution begins not with discovering comrades to be yoked together in solidarity but with the embrace of solitude. For Thoreau, Marx's first and fatal error was the creation of the aggregate identity of the proletariat. Error was substituted for error. The anonymity and futility of the worker were replaced by the anonymity and futility of the revolutionary. A revolution conducted by people who have only a group identity can only replace one monolith of power with another, one misery with another, perpetuating the cycle of domination and oppression. In solitude, the individual becomes most human, which is to say most spiritual.”

"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"

“As Simone Weil— perhaps the strangest and most unlikely Thoreauvian solitary, outcast, and transcendentalist of all— wrote, echoing Thoreau's sense of awareness: "The authentic and pure values— truth, beauty, and goodness— in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object." Or, more tersely yet: "Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer."
It is perhaps the saddest, most hopeless thing we can say about our culture that it is a culture of distraction. "Attention deficit" is a cultural disorder, a debasement of spirit, before it is an ailment in our children to be treated with Ritalin.”

"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"

“Although the '60s counterculture has been much maligned and discredited, it attempted to provide what we still desperately need: a spirited culture of refusal, a counter-life to the reigning corporate culture of death. We don't need to return to that counterculture, but we do need to take up its challenge again. If the work we do produces mostly bad, ugly, and destructive things, those things in turn will tend to re-create us in their image. We need to turn to good, useful, and beautiful work. We need to ask, as Thoreau and Ruskin did, What are the life-giving things? Such important questions are answered for us in the present by the corporate state, while we are left with the most trivial decisions: what programs to watch on TV and what model car to buy.”

"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"

“What the earliest utopians—Montaigne, Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella—understood was that they fought not for a place but for a new set of ideas through which to recognize what would count as Real: Equality, not hierarchical authority. Individual dignity, not slavish subservience. Our preeminent problem is that we recognize the Real in what is most deadly: a culture of duty to legalities that are, finally, cruel and destructive. We need to work inventively—as Christ did, as Thoreau did—in the spirit of disobedience for the purpose of refusing the social order into which we happen to have been born and putting in its place a culture of life-giving things.”

"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"

“The ethereal is gained by simply doing one thing, consciously. "I made no haste in my work, but rather made the most of it," said Thoreau. What is divine is simply being attentive to what you are doing in the moment you are doing it, assuming that that thing is not merely stupid”

i.e., anything you have to do to receive money
"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"