“One of the strangest disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies and the sense of scarcity felt by the ostensibly richer societies of today.”
Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), pp. 14-15.
Context: One of the strangest disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies and the sense of scarcity felt by the ostensibly richer societies of today. Charles Péguy has referred to modern man’s feeling of “slow economic strangulation,” his sense of never having enough to meet the requirement which his pattern of life imposes on him. Standards of consumption which he cannot meet, and which he does not need to meet, come virtually in the guise of duties.
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Richard M. Weaver 110
American scholar 1910–1963Related quotes
Source: 2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011), Chapter 5, p. 115
“A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.”
“He felt that sense of being necessary which is the burden and reward of parenthood.”
Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 8 (p. 248)
pp. 325, Chapter 10: Katrina https://books.google.com/books?id=iUJTvsUGWOcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=decision+points&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAGoVChMImu6s8_WEyAIVjNkeCh1oFgyY#v=onepage&q=kanye&f=false
2010s, 2010, Decision Points (November 2010)
Context: Kanye West told a prime-time T. V. audience, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Jesse Jackson later compared the New Orleans Convention Center to the "hull of a slave ship". A member of the Congressional Black Caucus claimed that if the storm victims had been "white, middle-class Americans" they would have received more help. Five years later, I can barely write those words without feeling disgusted. I am deeply insulted by the suggestion that we allowed American citizens to suffer because they were black. As I told the press at the time, "The storm didn't discriminate, and neither will we. When those coast guard choppers, many of whom were first on the scene, were pulling people off roofs, they didn't check the color of a person's skin." The more I thought about it, the angrier I felt. I was raised to believe that racism was one of the greatest evils in society. I admired dad's courage when he defied near-universal opposition from his constituents to vote for the Open Housing Bill of 1968. I was proud to have earned more black votes than any Republican governor in Texas history. I had appointed African Americans to top government positions, including the first black woman national security adviser and the first two black secretaries of state. It broke my heart to see minority children shuffled through the school system, so I had based my signature domestic policy initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, on ending the soft bigotry of low expectations. I had launched a $15 billion program to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa. As part of the response to Katrina, my administration worked with Congress to provided historically black colleges and universities in the Gulf Coast with more than $400 million in loans to restore their campuses and renew their recruiting efforts.
‘Human beings never submit to human beings.’ Even slaves practice their mean retaliations. Human beings cannot conceive of any mean retaliations. Human beings cannot conceive of any means of survival except of a single then-and-there contest. They speak of duty to one’s country and such like things, but the object of their effort is invariably the individual, and, even once the individual’s needs have been met, again the individual comes in. The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This is how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror of the illusion of the ocean called the world. I learned to behave rather aggressively, without the endless anxious worrying I knew before, responding as it were to the needs of the moment.
Third Notebook: Part One
No Longer Human
“The law is in a sense the consolidated public opinion of society.”
Defence of Criminals: A Criticism of Morality (1889)
“That which is felt without the intermediary of any sense whatsoever is in its essence affectivity.”
Original: (fr) Ce qui se sent sans que ce soit par l'intermédiaire d'un sens est dans son essence affectivité.
Source: Books on Phenomenology of Life, The Essence of Manifestation (1963)
Michel Henry, L'Essence de la manifestation, PUF, 1963, t. 2, § 52, p. 577
Source: The World We Want (2000), Chapter 4, Spaces And Dreams, p. 171