“What seems to me to be driving our whole civilization toward the abyss at present is a one-sided conception of liberty, a conception that is purely centrifugal, that would get rid of all outer control and then evade or deny openly the need of achieving inner control.”

Source: "English and the Discipline of Ideas" (1920), p. 66

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "What seems to me to be driving our whole civilization toward the abyss at present is a one-sided conception of liberty,…" by Irving Babbitt?
Irving Babbitt photo
Irving Babbitt 19
American academic and literary criticism 1865–1933

Related quotes

Edward Hopper photo

“The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

1911 - 1940, Notes on Painting - Edward Hopper (1933)

Jiddu Krishnamurti photo
Honoré de Balzac photo
Stella Adler photo
Herbert Marcuse photo
Giuseppe Verdi photo

“I deny that either singers or conductors can "create" or work creatively – this, as I have always said, is a conception that leads to the abyss.”

Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) Italian composer

Io non posso ammettere, né nei cantanti, né nei direttori la facoltà di creare, che come dissi prima, è un principio che conduce all'abisso.
Letter to Giulio Ricordi, April 11, 1871, cited from Franco Abbiati Giuseppe Verdi (Milano: Ricordi, 1959) vol. 3, p. 448; translation from Franz Werfel and Paul Stefan (eds.), Edward Downes (trans.) Verdi: The Man in His Letters (New York: L. B. Fischer, 1942) pp. 301-2.

Aldo Capitini photo
Wolfgang Pauli photo

“What now is the answer to the question as to the bridge between the perception of the senses and the concepts, which is now reduced to the question as to the bridge between the outer perceptions and those inner image-like representations.”

Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) Austrian physicist, Nobel prize winner

Letter to Markus Fierz (1948)
Context: What now is the answer to the question as to the bridge between the perception of the senses and the concepts, which is now reduced to the question as to the bridge between the outer perceptions and those inner image-like representations. It seems to me one has to postulate a cosmic order of nature — outside of our arbitrariness— to which the outer material objects are subjected as are the inner images... The organizing and regulating has to be posited beyond the differentiation of physical and psychical... I am all for it to call this "organizing and regulating" "archetypes." It would then be inadmissible to define these as psychic contents. Rather, the above-mentioned inner pictures (dominants of the collective unconscious, see Jung) are the psychic manifestations of the archetypes, but which would have to produce and condition all nature laws belonging to the world of matter. The nature laws of matter would then be the physical manifestation of the archetypes.

Walter A. Shewhart photo

Related topics