Source: Social Justice in Islam (1953), p. 132
“When an active individual of sound common sense perceives the sordid state of the world, desire to change it becomes the guiding principle by which he organizes given facts and shapes them into a theory. The methods and categories as well as the transformation of the theory can be understood only in connection with his taking of sides. This, in turn, discloses both his sound common sense and the character of the world. Right thinking depends as much on right willing as right willing on right thinking.”
Source: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 162.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Max Horkheimer 61
German philosopher and sociologist 1895–1973Related quotes
Anti-Dühring http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/quotes/index.htm (1878)
Statement to Polaroid Corporation employes (25 June 1958), as quoted in Insisting on the Impossible : The Life of Edwin Land (1998) by Victor K. McElheny, p. 189
“Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense…”
The Fabric of Reality (1997)
Context: : These have often been attributed to Thomas Jefferson, but also to Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, and many others; Lord Denning in The Road to Justice (1988) states that the phrase originated in a statement of Irish orator John Philpot Curran in 1790: "It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance."
4 Burr. Part IV., 2379.
Dissenting in Millar v Taylor (1769)
Part III : Recantation, Ch. XI Compensation
A Perplexed Philosopher (1892)
Context: The primary error of the advocates of land nationalization is in their confusion of equal rights with joint rights, and in their consequent failure to realize the nature and meaning of economic rent… In truth the right to the use of land is not a joint or common right, but an equal right; the joint or common right is to rent, in the economic sense of the term. Therefore it is not necessary for the state to take land, it is only necessary for it to take rent. This taking by the commonalty of what is of common right, would of itself secure equality in what is of equal right — for since the holding of land could be profitable only to the user, there would be no inducement for any one to hold land that he could not adequately use, and monopolization being ended no one who wanted to use land would have any difficulty in finding it.
Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 24 (p. 220)