"Restriction on Freedom is Unavoidable in Industrial Society", paragraph 119
Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)
“It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist, and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”
"Our Universal Civilization" in The New York Times (5 November 1990) https://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/05/opinion/our-universal-civilization.html
Context: The universal civilization has been a long time in the making. It wasn't always universal; it wasn't always as attractive as it is today. The expansion of Europe gave it for at least three centuries a racial taint, which still causes pain. … This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don't imagine my father's Hindu parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist, and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to …" by V.S. Naipaul?
V.S. Naipaul 34
Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Nepalese ancestry 1932–2018Related quotes
David L. Norton
(1930–1995) American philosopher
Source: Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), pp. 9-10
Jay Lemke
(1946) American academic
Source: Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics, 1995, p. 159
Joseph Louis Lagrange
(1736–1813) Italian mathematician and mathematical physicist
As quoted by F. R. Moulton, Introduction to Astronomy (New York, 1906), p. 199.
“Everything can be seen as a system because there is nothing you cannot .”
Carlos Gershenson
(1978) Mexican researcher
Zire Notes (May 2004 - December 2006)
Neil Postman
(1931–2003) American writer and academic
Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)
Context: Adminstrators are another curious consequence of a bureaucracy which has forgotten its reason for being. In schools, adminstrators commonly become myopic as a result of confronting all of the problems the "requirements" generate. Thus they cannot see (or hear) the constituents the system ostensibly exists to serve — the students. The idea that the school should consist of procedures specifically intended to help learners learn strikes many administrators as absurd — and "impractical." …Eichmann, after all, was "just an adminstrator." He was merely "enforcing requirements." The idea of "full time administrators" is palpably a bad one — especially in schools — and we say to hell with it. Most of the "administration" of the school should be a student responsibility. If schools functioned according to the democratic ideals they pay verbal allegience to, the students would long since have played a major role in developing policies and procedures guiding its operation. One of the insidious facts about totalitarianism is its seeming "efficiency." …Democracy — with all of its inefficiency — is still the best system we have so far for enhancing the prospects of our mutual survival. The schools should begin to act as if this were so.
“I cannot ridicule their every idea but in most things my vote is against the education system.”
Laxmi Prasad Devkota
(1909–1959) Nepali poet
शिक्षा (Education)
Herbert Schiller
(1919–2000) American media critic
Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Five, Corporatizing Communication And Culture, p. 132
Carl Friedrich Gauss
(1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist
In a letter to Gerling on June 23, 1846. As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 364
Kevin Kelly
(1952) American author and editor
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995), New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1999)