José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses
Chap. VIII: The Masses Intervene In Everything, And Why Their Intervention Is Solely By Violence
The Revolt of the Masses (1929)
Chap. VIII: The Masses Intervene In Everything, And Why Their Intervention Is Solely By Violence
The Revolt of the Masses (1929)
José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses
Chap. VIII: The Masses Intervene In Everything, And Why Their Intervention Is Solely By Violence
The Revolt of the Masses (1929)
“In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.”
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist
A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), p. 172
Context: Those who advocate the return to a gold standard do not always appreciate along what different lines our actual practice has been drifting. If we restore the gold standard, are we to return also to the pre-war conceptions of bank-rate, allowing the tides of gold to play what tricks they like with the internal price-level, and abandoning the attempt to moderate the disastrous influence of the credit-cycle on the stability of prices and employment? Or are we to continue and develop the experimental innovations of our present policy, ignoring the "bank ration" and, if necessary, allowing unmoved a piling up of gold reserves far beyond our requirements or their depletion far below them? In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.
“The true barbarian is he who thinks every thing barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.”
William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer
No. 333
Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823)
Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist
Original: Votre œil bleu du nord regardait attentivement les tableaux pendus aux murs. J’eus comme le pressentiment d’une révolte : tout un choc entre votre civilisation et ma barbarie. Civilisation dont vous souffrez. Barbarie qui est pour moi un rajeunissement.
Source: 1890s - 1910s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 105: quote from his letter to August Strindberg (5 May 1895)
“Altruism is a barbarism. Love is the word.”
John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 170
Ludwig von Mises book Human Action
The Gold Standard http://mises.org/daily/4153 - LvMI, excerpt from chapter 17 of Human Action <br class="br">Human Action (1949)
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer
The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: Liberty is the condition of progress. Without Liberty, there remains only barbarism. Without Liberty, there can be no civilization.
If another man has not the right to think, you have not even the right to think that he thinks wrong. If every man has not the right to think, the people of New Jersey had no right to make a statute, or to adopt a constitution — no jury has the right to render a verdict, and no court to pass its sentence.
In other words, without liberty of thought, no human being has the right to form a judgment. It is impossible that there should be such a thing as real religion without liberty. Without liberty there can be no such thing as conscience, no such word as justice. All human actions — all good, all bad — have for a foundation the idea of human liberty, and without Liberty there can be no vice, and there can be no virtue.
Without Liberty there can be no worship, no blasphemy — no love, no hatred, no justice, no progress.
Take the word Liberty from human speech and all the other words become poor, withered, meaningless sounds — but with that word realized — with that word understood, the world becomes a paradise.
Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist
Frankfurt Book Fair speech (2003)
Context: All modern wars, even when their aims are the traditional ones, such as territorial aggrandizement or the acquisition of scarce resources, are cast as clashes of civilizations — culture wars — with each side claiming the high ground, and characterizing the other as barbaric. The enemy is invariably a threat to "our way of life," an infidel, a desecrator, a polluter, a defiler of higher or better values. The current war against the very real threat posed by militant Islamic fundamentalism is a particularly clear example.
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic
Introduction
The Culture of Cities (1938)
Context: Nothing is permanent: certainly not the frozen images of barbarous power with which fascism now confronts us. Those images may easily be smashed by an external shock, cracked as ignominiously as the fallen Dagon, the massive idol of the heathen; or they may be melted, eventually, by the internal warmth of normal men and women. Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal. As life becomes insurgent once more in our civilization, conquering the reckless thrust of barbarism, the culture of cities will be both instrument and goal.