“The word “art” does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.”

“In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

“The oldest definition [of “good”] was this: the noble, the mightier, higher-placed and high-minded held themselves and their actions to be good of the first rank in contradistinction to everything low and low-minded. Noble, in the sense of the class-consciousness of a higher caste, is the primary concept from which develops good in the sense of spiritually aristocratic. The lowly are designated as bad (not evil). Bad does not acquire its unqualified depreciatory meaning till much later. In the mouth of the people it is a laudatory word; the German word schlecht is identical with schlicht”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

“My idea is to bring happiness, respect, vision. poetry, surrealism and magic [to design]. We have to replace beauty, which is a cultural concept, with goodness, which is a humanist concept.”

Philippe Starck (1949) French architect and industrial designer

“With the concept of reincarnation, being offered more chances to repent, we will eventually destroy the idea of heaven and hell.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“And so the arbitrary union of three incommensurate, mutually disconnected concepts became the basis of a bewildering theory… [by which] one of the lowest renderings of art, art for mere pleasure — against which all of the master teachers warned — was idealized as the ultimate in art.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

“The economic concept of value does not occur in antiquity.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

“[A]ll our symbols have the same purpose; words are merely the symbols we use most commonly. The function of words in human thought is to stand for things which are not present to the senses, and allow the mind to manipulate them—things, concepts, ideas, everything that does not have a physical reality in front of us now.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

“Theories usually result from the precipitate reasoning of an impatient mind which would like to be rid of phenomena and replaces them with images, concepts, indeed often with mere words.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

“Whereas the particular conception of ideology designates only a part of the opponent's assertions as ideologies — and this only with reference to their content, the total conception calls into question the opponent's total Weltanschauung (including his conceptual apparatus), and attempts to understand these concepts as an outgrowth of the collective life of which he partakes.”

Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) Hungarian sociologist