Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician
Interview with Michael Moore in the movie Sicko (2007).
2000s
“Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.”
Last update June 3, 2021. History
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Do you have more details about the quote "Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hope…" by Richard Yates?
Richard Yates24
Novelist, short story writer 1926–1992Related quotes
“I am not fighting a hopeless fight. People who have fought in real fights don't, as a rule.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist
Patrick Dalroy in The Flying Inn (1914), p 295
“People do strange things sometimes, when they feel hopeless.”
Danielle Steel (1947) American author of romance novels
“Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica
Source: In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays
Peter Gabriel (1950) English singer-songwriter, record producer and humanitarian
Mercy Street
Song lyrics, So (1986)
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
Source: 1920s, Sceptical Essays (1928), Ch. 17: Some Prospects: Cheerful and Otherwise
Karl Marx book The German Ideology
Vol. I, Part 1, [The Materialist Conception of History].
The German Ideology (1845/46)
Context: Where speculation ends — in real life — there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement — the real depiction — of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the present.
