Quotes about analysis
page 9

Koenraad Elst photo
Norbert Elias photo
J. Howard Moore photo
James Forman photo
Carl Sagan photo

“The search for patterns without critical analysis, and rigid skepticism without a search for patterns, are the antipodes of incomplete science. The effective pursuit of knowledge requires both functions.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Dragons of Eden (1977), Chapter 7, “Lovers and Madmen” (p. 192)

Roy Jenkins photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“That is the meaning of love. In the final analysis, love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

[“Loving Your Enemies,” Sermon Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, King, Jr., Martin Luther, 1957-11-17, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/loving-your-enemies-sermon-delivered-dexter-avenue-baptist-church, http://www.webcitation.org/6x5ROMlxu, 2018-02-08]
1950s, Loving Your Enemies (November 1957)

Immanuel Kant photo
Vikram Sarabhai photo
Narendra Modi photo
Oswald Spengler photo
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel photo

“Universal History exhibits the gradation in the development of that principle whose substantial purport is the consciousness of Freedom. The analysis of the successive grades, in their abstract form, belongs to Logic; in their concrete aspect to the Philosophy of Spirit.”

Here it is sufficient to state that the first step in the process presents that immersion of Spirit in Nature which has been already referred to ; the second shows it as advancing to the consciousness of its freedom. But this initial separation from Nature is imperfect and partial, since it is derived immediately from the merely natural state, is consequently related to it, and is still encumbered with it as an essentially connected element. The third step is the elevation of the soul from this still limited and special form of freedom to its pure universal form ; that state in which the spiritual essence attains the consciousness and feeling of itself. These grades are the ground-principles of the general process; but how each of them on the other hand involves within itself a process of formation, constituting the links in a dialectic of transition, to particularise this must be preserved for the sequel. Here we have only to indicate that Spirit begins with a germ of infinite possibility, but only possibility, containing its substantial existence in an undeveloped form, as the object and goal which it reaches only in its resultant full reality. In actual existence Progress appears as an advancing from the imperfect to the more perfect; but the former must not be understood abstractly as only the imperfect, but as something which involves the very opposite of itself the so-called perfect as a germ or impulse. So reflectively, at least possibility points to something destined to become actual; the Aristotelian δύναμιςis https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B4%CF%8D%CE%BD%CE%B1%CE%BC%CE%B9%CF%82 also potentia, power and might. Thus the Imperfect, as involving its opposite, is a contradiction, which certainly exists, but which is continually annulled and solved; the instinctive movement the inherent impulse in the life of the soul to break through the rind of mere nature, sensuousness, and that which is alien to it, and to attain to the light of consciousness, i. e. to itself.
Lectures on the History of History Vol 1 p. 58-59 John Sibree translation (1857), 1914
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1

Carl Djerassi photo
Anthony Kennedy photo
Baruch Spinoza photo
Baruch Spinoza photo
Baruch Spinoza photo
Johann Gottlieb Fichte photo
Alexandra Kollontai photo

“I am still far from being the type of the positively new women who take their experience as females with a relative lightness and, one could say, with an enviable superficiality, whose feelings and mental energies are directed upon all other things in life but sentimental love feelings. After all I still belong to the generation of women who grew up at a turning point in history. Love with its many disappointments, with its tragedies and eternal demands for perfect happiness still played a very great role in my life. An all-too-great role! It was an expenditure of precious time and energy, fruitless and, in the final analysis, utterly worthless. We, the women of the past generation, did not yet understand how to be free. The whole thing was an absolutely incredible squandering of our mental energy, a diminution of our labor power which was dissipated in barren emotional experiences. It is certainly true that we, myself as well as many other activists, militants and working women contemporaries, were able to understand that love was not the main goal of our life and that we knew how to place work at its center. Nevertheless we would have been able to create and achieve much more had our energies not been fragmentized in the eternal struggle with our egos and with our feelings for another. It was, in fact, an eternal defensive war against the intervention of the male into our ego, a struggle revolving around the problem-complex: work or marriage and love? We, the older generation, did not yet understand, as most men do and as young women are learning today, that work and the longing for love can be harmoniously combined so that work remains as the main goal of existence. Our mistake was that each time we succumbed to the belief that we had finally found the one and only in the man we loved, the person with whom we believed we could blend our soul, one who was ready fully to recognize us as a spiritual-physical force. But over and over again things turned out differently, since the man always tried to impose his ego upon us and adapt us fully to his purposes. Thus despite everything the inevitable inner rebellion ensued, over and over again since love became a fetter. We felt enslaved and tried to loosen the love-bond. And after the eternally recurring struggle with the beloved man, we finally tore ourselves away and rushed toward freedom. Thereupon we were again alone, unhappy, lonesome, but free–free to pursue our beloved, chosen ideal …work. Fortunately young people, the present generation, no longer have to go through this kind of struggle which is absolutely unnecessary to human society. Their abilities, their work-energy will be reserved for their creative activity. Thus the existence of barriers will become a spur.”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

Jacques Lacan photo

“It is on this step that depends the fact that one can call upon the subject to re-enter himself in the unconscious—for, after all, it is important to know who one is calling. It is not the soul, either mortal or immortal, which has been with us for so long, nor some shade, some double, some phantom, nor even some supposed psycho-spherical shell, the locus of the defences and other such simplified notions. It is the subject who is called— there is only he, therefore, who can be chosen. There may be, as in the parable, many called and few chosen, but there will certainly not be any others except those who are called. In order to understand the Freudian concepts, one must set out on the basis that it is the subject who is called—the subject of Cartesian origin. This basis gives its true function to what, in analysis, is called recollection or remembering. Recollection is not Platonic reminiscence —it is not the return of a form, an imprint, a eidos of beauty and good, a supreme truth, coming to us from the beyond. It is something that comes to us from the structural necessities, something humble, born at the level of the lowest encounters and of all the talking crowd that precedes us, at the level of the structure of the signifier, of the languages spoken in a stuttering, stumbling way, but which cannot elude constraints whose echoes, model, style can be found, curiously enough, in contemporary mathematics.”

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist

Of the Network of Signifiers
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis (1978)

Jayant Narlikar photo
Russell L. Ackoff photo
Robert Aumann photo
Camille Paglia photo
Joseph Weizenbaum photo
Dana Arnold photo

“If style is anything more than formal analysis or a description of the ornamentation of a building it must surely offer or represent a specific set of ideals from the moment of its production.”

Dana Arnold (1961) Middlessex uni prof

Source: Reading Architectural History (2002), Ch. 3 : On classical ground : Histories of style

Marilyn Ferguson photo

“We can never know whether our analysis and our methods are wrong, except sometimes with hindsight. Our movements are stronger when they employ diverse methods and analyses and these different positions criticize one another.”

Peter Gelderloos (1982) American anarchist

Introduction: Nonviolence has lost the debate
"The Failure of Nonviolence" (2013) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-the-failure-of-nonviolence

Abdullah Öcalan photo

“Without an analysis of women's status in the hierarchical system and the conditions under which she was enslaved, neither the state nor the class-based system that it rests upon can be understood.”

Abdullah Öcalan (1949) Founder of the PKK

Source: The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan (2017), Liberating Life: Women's Revolution, p. 69

Michel Henry photo
Robert Boyle photo
Robert Sheckley photo

“I know better than to say “that’s absurd” to someone trained in Freudian analysis, because such a therapist will simply interpret such an assertion as confirmation of whatever is proposed.”

Robyn Dawes (1936–2010) American psychologist

Source: Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudo-Scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally (2001), Chapter 9, “Sexual Abuse Hysteria” (p. 158)

“Unfortunately, good stories are so compelling to us when we take the role of psychologist or social analyst that we do not realize that at best they constitute just a starting point for analysis.”

Robyn Dawes (1936–2010) American psychologist

Source: Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudo-Scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally (2001), Chapter 7, “Good Stories” (p. 138)

Frank Lloyd Wright photo