“The single idea that resounds on every page of this book is the idea of the infinity of the human spirit, in the individual as well as in humanity. It is a view of the wonderful and terrible disproportion of that spirit to everything that would contain and diminish it, of its awakening to its own nature through its confrontation with the reality of constraint and the prospect of death, of its terror before the indifference and vastness of the nature around it, of its discovery that what it most shares with the whole of the universe is its ruination by time, of its subsequent recognition that time is the core of reality if anything is, of its enslavement to orders of society and culture that belittle it, of its need to create a world, a human world, in which it can be and become itself even if to do so it must nevertheless rebel against every dogma, every custom, and every empire, and of its power to realize this seemingly impossible and paradoxical program by identifying, in each intellectual and political situation, the next steps.”
Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 26-7
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Roberto Mangabeira Unger 94
Brazilian philosopher and politician 1947Related quotes

“Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.”

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 317

“Russia [...] will awaken in the spirit of its greatest thinker, in the spirit of Dostoevsky.”
1920s
Original: (de) Rußland ... einst im Geiste seines größten Denkers, im Geiste Dostojewskis erwachen wird.
National Socialist Letters (Nationalsozialistische Briefe), “National Socialism or Bolshevism”, (November 15, 1925), quoted in: Ralph Georg Reuth, Goebbels, Piper, 2nd ed., Munich, 1991, p. 96. ISBN 3-492-03183-8.

Source: The Limits of State Action (1792), Ch. 16

Source: The City of God and the True God as its Head (In Royce’s “The Conception of God: a Philosophical Discussion Concerning the Nature of the Divine Idea as a Demonstrable Reality”), p.90-1

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Modern Science and Pantheism, p.77

Source: A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard (1911), p. 16.