“And in the present we are all irremediably the products of our background, our training, our personality and social role, and the structured pressures within which we operate.”
Wallerstein (1974) The modern world system capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world economy in the sixteenth century. New York: Academic Press.
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Immanuel Wallerstein 6
economic historian 1930–2019Related quotes
Speech at Queens College, City University of New York (March 12, 1975). "The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage", ch. 5, Our Blood (1976).
Source: 1960s, Authority, Goals and Prestige in a General Hospital, 1960, p. 2
Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 142
Source: The Conflict of the Individual and the Mass in the Modern World (1932), p. 29
Day of Affirmation Address (1966)
Context: The help and the leadership of South Africa or of the United States cannot be accepted if we, within our own country or in our relationships with others, deny individual integrity, human dignity, and the common humanity of man. If we would lead outside our borders, if we would help those who need our assistance, if we would meet our responsibilities to mankind, we must first, all of us, demolish the borders which history has erected between men within our own nations — barriers of race and religion, social class and ignorance.
Our answer is the world's hope; it is to rely on youth. The cruelties and the obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans. It cannot be moved by those who cling to a present which is already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement and danger which comes with even the most peaceful progress. This world demands the qualities of youth: not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.
Source: 1970s, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, 1970, p. 2
Source: How to Argue and Win Every Time (1995), Ch. 6 : The Power of Prejudice : Examining the Garment, Bleaching the Stain, p. 74
“We actually create our own universe because we are all operating with our own private languages.”
Psychedelic Society (1984)
Context: The psychedelics are a red-hot social issue, ethical issue, whatever the term for it is, and it is precisely because they are a deconditioning agents: they will cast doubt in you if you are a Hasidic rabbi, a Marxist anthropologist, or an altar boy, because their business is to dissolve belief systems, and they do this very well and then they leave you with the raw datum of experience, what William James called in infants 'the blooming, buzzing experience.' And out of that you reconstruct the world, and you need to understand that it is a dialog where your decisions, the projection of your grammar onto the intellectual space in front of you, is going to gel into the mode of being. We actually create our own universe because we are all operating with our own private languages.