Source: Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1535), Chapter 2, Verse 19
The Universe in the Light of Modern Physics (1931)
“The function of man is to live, not to exist.”
Variant: The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.
Kotaro Suzumura, An interview with Paul Samuelson: welfare economics,“old” and “new”, and social choice theory (2005)
New millennium
“The once-seen does not exist yet. The always seen no longer exists.”
J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 64
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)
“Misdeeds that are repented no longer exist.”
Reverend Sigurður
Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part III: Fire in Copenhagen
Preface to the Third Edition (August 1942)
The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)
Context: In the strictly Marxist sense, there is not even in Soviet Russia a state socialism but a state capitalism. According to Marx, the social condition "capitalism" does not consist in the existence of individual capitalists, but in the existence of the specific "capitalist mode of production", that is, in the production of exchange values instead of use values, in wage work of the masses and in the production of surplus value, which is appropriated by the state or the private owners, and not by the society of working people. In this strictly Marxist sense, the capitalistic system continues to exist in Russia. And it will continue to exist as long as the masses of people continue to lack responsibility and to crave authority.
“Their existence is sin, their existence is a crime against the holy laws of life.”
about the Jews
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts) (1899)
"Are Shelters the Answer?", in The New York Times Magazine (26 November 1961), p. 125
1960s
Source: Law and Authority (1886), I
Context: In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it. … In short, a law everywhere and for everything! A law about fashions, a law about mad dogs, a law about virtue, a law to put a stop to all the vices and all the evils which result from human indolence and cowardice.
We are so perverted by an education which from infancy seeks to kill in us the spirit of revolt, and to develop that of submission to authority; we are so perverted by this existence under the ferrule of a law, which regulates every event in life — our birth, our education, our development, our love, our friendship — that, if this state of things continues, we shall lose all initiative, all habit of thinking for ourselves. Our society seems no longer able to understand that it is possible to exist otherwise than under the reign of law, elaborated by a representative government and administered by a handful of rulers. And even when it has gone so far as to emancipate itself from the thralldom, its first care has been to reconstitute it immediately. "The Year I of Liberty" has never lasted more than a day, for after proclaiming it men put themselves the very next morning under the yoke of law and authority.
