Dialectics Quotes - Page 2

• A law which excludes all dialectic and all reconciliation; which establishes, consequently, both the flawless unity of knowledge and the uncompromising division of tragic existence; it rules over a world without twilight, which knows no effusion, nor the attenuated cares of lyricism; everything must be either waking or dream, truth or darkness, the light of being or the nothingness of shadow.

  Michel Foucault

  Dream, Twilight, Law

  "Madness and Civilization". Book by Michel Foucault, trans. by R. Howard, 1988.

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• Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

  Anthony Burgess

  Nature, Silly, Intelligent

  Anthony Burgess (1990). “You've had your time: being the second part of the confessions of Anthony Burgess”, Heinemann Educational Books

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• The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.

  Theodor Adorno

  Sibling, Health, Sickness

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.73, Verso

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• Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the Universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Children, People, Common Sense

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

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• I'm an optimist in my heart - I'm a hopeless pollyanna just like my mother - but a pessimist in my head. I think that's the dialectic we all need to be in.

  Bill Ayers

  Mother, Heart, Thinking

  "The Rumpus Long Interview with Bill Ayers". Interview with Scott Hutchins, therumpus.net. February 20, 2009.

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• I have often had cause to feel that my hands are cleverer than my head. That is a crude way of characterizing the dialectics of experimentation. When it is going well, it is like a quiet conversation with Nature. One asks a question and gets an answer, then one asks the next question and gets the next answer. An experiment is a device to make Nature speak intelligibly. After that, one only has to listen.

  George Wald

  Nature, Science, Hands

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• Dialectic logic is there's only love and hate, you either love somebody or you hate them.

  Dennis Hopper

  Hate, Logic, Only Love

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• I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic - if we can call it that - between high and low. Maybe it's because I was not born or brought up in affluence.

  Elena Ferrante

  Affluence, Attention, Conflict

  "Elena Ferrante: 'Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing'". Interview with Deborah Orr, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2016.

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• A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by "progress.

  Anatole Broyard

  Progress, Generations, Culture

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• Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?

  Roland Barthes

  Father, Oedipus, Law

  Roland Barthes (2012). “How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces”, p.190, Columbia University Press

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• The clarity of gender makes possible the human dialectic. Let the lines of balanced tension go slack and the structure dissolves into the ooze of androgyny and narcissism.

  Bill Vaughan

  Men, Lines, Narcissism

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• Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode - a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Roots, Phenomenology, Ears

  "Laws of Media: The New Science". Book by Marshall McLuhan, co-written with Eric McLuhan, p.62, 1988.

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• Now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth...but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Dream, Men, Understanding

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig (Ch. 29), 1974.

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• Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and gives the whole show away. The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Giving, Feelings, Trying

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1988). “In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays”, p.59, Northwestern University Press

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• I can't agree that what we're seeing is a matter of the American bourgeoisie confronting workers everywhere. It's more like the international plutocracy eliminating the American middle class while inadvertently creating a bourgeoisie in India, China, etc. I do agree that Soros's role is paradoxical, but if all billionaires (or even a few more) were like Soros, the dialectic would give us global social democracy PDQ.

  Hendrik Hertzberg

  Creating, Class, Giving

  Source: www.newyorker.com

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• Was not Hypatia the greatest philosopher of Alexandria, and a true martyr to the old values of learning? She was torn to pieces by a mob of incensed Christians not because she was a woman, but because her learning was so profound, her skills at dialectic so extensive that she reduced all who queried her to embarrassed silence. They could not argue with her, so they murdered her.

  Iain Pears

  Christian, Skills, Profound

  Iain Pears (2003). “Dream of Scipio”, p.49, Penguin

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• I never sat down and wrote, but what I do is kind of act as a dramaturge for the piece. I am sitting with the writers. I'm discussing ideas with the writers and concepts. We're debating and having a dialectic where we are taking a lot of different ideas and trying to synthesize them into the right idea. I'm very much a part of that process. That's my job as the director.

  Larry Charles

  Jobs, Ideas, Trying

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• It seems to me that rumors and dreams of justice are part of a dialectic of injustice and dreams of justice will be with us for as long as there's injustice, and that doesn't seem to be in short supply.

  James C. Scott

  Dream, Long, Justice

  "An Interview with James C. Scott | Harry G. West and Celia Plender". Gastronomica Interview, gastronomica.org. March 14, 2017.

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• In some ways I consider myself more Chinese, because I live in San Francisco, which is becoming a predominantly Asian city. I avoid falling into the black-and-white dialectic in which most of America still seems trapped. I have always recognized that, as an American, I am in relationship with other parts of the world; that I have to measure myself against the Pacific, against Asia. Having to think of myself in relationship to that horizon has liberated me from the black-and-white checkerboard.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Fall, Black And White, Thinking

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• I always cringe when a male friend of mine, who's very fixated on women, puts "compatibility" at the top of his list of attributes that he would be looking for in a woman. I would replace compatibility with dialectic.

  James Ellroy

  Males, Would Be, Lists

  Interview by Keith Phipps, www.avclub.com. September 9, 2010.

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• Rhetoric and dialectics can't change what I have learned from observation and experience.

  Paul Getty

  I Have Learned, Observation, Rhetoric

  "As I See it: The Autobiography of J. Paul Getty". Book by Jean Paul Getty, Getty Publications, p. 106, 2003.

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• The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Economic, Economy, States

  John Kenneth Galbraith (1987). “Economics in Perspective: A Critical History”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• They [root causes of terror] come out of a long dialectic of U.S. involvement in the affairs of the Islamic world, the oil-producing world, the Arab world, the Middle East - those areas that are considered to be essential to U.S. interests and security.

  Edward Said

  Islamic, Oil, Roots

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• The Communists do have a god, the Dialectic of History, which guarantees everything that they're going to do and guarantees them victory; that's why they're fanatic.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Victory, Guarantees, Communist

  Source: www.hrc.utexas.edu

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• Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.

  Theodor Adorno

  Mean, Break Through, Coercion

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.38, Univ of California Press

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