“He must approach the subject critically, alert for contradictions, pedantry and vagueness.”

Talk at an Enlarged Central Work Conference (30 January 1962)
1960s
Original: (zh-CN) 批评和自我批评是一种方法，是解决人民内部矛盾的方法，而且是唯一的方法。

Interview with Fiji Live, 22 August 2005

On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
Original: (zh-CN) 在一九四二年，我们曾经把解决人民内部矛盾的这种民主的方法，具体化为一个公式，叫做“团结——批评——团结”。讲详细一点，就是从团结的愿望出发，经过批评或者斗争使矛盾得到解决，从而在新的基础上达到新的团结。按照我们的经验，这是解决人民内部矛盾的一个正确的方法。

Preface (Scribner edition, 1872) <!-- New York, Scribner p xx -->
Chips from a German Workshop (1866)
Context: He must be a man of little faith, who would fear to subject his own religion to the same critical tests to which the historian subjects all other religions. We need not surely crave a tender or merciful treatment for that faith which we hold to be the only true one. We should rather challenge it for the severest tests and trials, as the sailor would for the good ship to which he trusts his own life, and the lives of those who are dear to him. In the Science of Religion, we can decline no comparisons, nor claim any immunities for Christianity, as little as the missionary can, when wrestling with the subtle Brahmin, or the fanatical Mussulman, or the plain speaking Zulu.

Source: A Theology of Liberation (1971), p. 11

Source: Continuity and Rupture:Philosophy in the Maoist Terrain (2016), Chapter one

The Art of Magic (1891)
Context: No one regards the magician today as other than an ordinary man gifted with no extraordinary powers. The spectators come, not to be impressed with awe, but fully aware that his causes and effects are natural. They come rather as a guessing committee, to spy out the methods with which he mystifies. Hundreds of eyes are upon him. Men with more knowledge of the sciences than he come to trip and expose him, and to baffle their scrutiny is the study of his life. Long years of training and exercise alone will not make a magician. … There must be some natural aptitude for the art; it must be born in a man, and can never be acquired by rule. He must be alert both in body and in mind; cool and calculating to the movement of a muscle under all circumstances; a close student of men and human nature. To these qualifications he must add the rather incongruous quality of a mind turning on contradictions. With a scientific cause he must produce a seemingly opposite effect to that warranted by order and system.
I know of no life requiring such a series of opposite qualities as the magician's. And after the exercise of all these qualities I have named, resulting in the production of the most startling and novel results, the magician has not the satisfaction, like other men, of the enjoyment of his own product. He must be prepared to see it copied by others, or after a short time discovered by the public.

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 73

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), pp. 27-28