Radical Quotes - Page 15

• Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Thinking, Hands, Years

  "Mapping Ideology" by Slavoj Žižek, p.1, 1994.

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• Invariably will you find perseverance exemplified as the radical principle in every truly great character. It facilitates, perfects, and consolidates the execution of the plan conceived, and renders profitable its results when attained. By continuing to advance steadily in the same way, light constantly increases, obstacles disappear, efficient habits are confirmed, experience is acquired, the use of the best means is reduced to easy action, and success becomes more sure.

  Elias Lyman Magoon

  Perseverance, Character, Mean

  Elias Lyman Magoon (1849). “Proverbs for the people: or, Illustrations of practical godliness drawn from the Book of wisdom”, p.186

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• Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.

  Charles Stross

  Running, Technology, Rights

  Charles Stross (2010). “Accelerando”, p.49, Hachette UK

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• When we use the term pig, for example, we are referring to the people who systematically violate the peoples' constitutional rights - whether they be monopoly capitalists or police. The term is now being adopted by radicals, hippies, and minority peoples. Even the workers, when the pigs supported strike-breakers like they did as Union Oil where 100 local police came in a cracked strikers' heads, began to call them by their true name.

  Bobby Seale

  Hippie, Rights, Pigs

  The Guardian Interview, February 1970.

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• In the potential of absurdity, hiding in the disparate combination of the various different subjects which in themselves are nothing but daily items equally in the exclusive representation of a normal item taken out of their usual context, is by far the most radical - in its effect comparable to a Japanese Zen koan - paradox to be witnessed, which modern art has produced, one of the most forceful impulses that generated from it.

  Antoni Tapies

  Art, Taken, Usual

  "Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 - 2003" by Antoni Tapies, Kunsthalle Emden, edited by Achim Sommer, Altana, (p. 28), 2004.

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• You can't please everyone, especially if you're doing very radical things at the vanguard of cooking. That's life; it's a polemic I've lived with since I started cooking.

  Ferran Adria

  Cooking, Vanguard, Polemics

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• More than one branch of the avant-garde, claiming to break with the bourgeois vision and mode of production, remains tied to it in spite of its denials and ex-communications. We are far from having overcome bourgeois thought or practices, despite the socialist "intermission" between the Russian revolution and the collapse of the Berlin wall. The avant-garde has lost its radical nature. On the other hand, "bourgeois theatre" is sometimes subtle enough to flirt with the avant-garde or to make "intelligent boulevard theatre.

  Patrice Pavis

  Wall, Communication, Flirting

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• I don't need to be a radical to think that who a dragon is counts more than birth or wealth," Selendra said, with what dignity she could."Why, that's the very definition of a radical," he retorted.

  Jo Walton

  Thinking, Dragons, Needs

  Jo Walton (2013). “Tooth and Claw”, p.137, Hachette UK

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• Shannon's most radical insight was that meaning was irrelevant.

  William Poundstone

  Shannon, Insight, Irrelevant

  "Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street". Book by William Poundstone, 2005.

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• The public's continuing ambivalence about cultural matters is all the more striking given that the political conversation on these issues has for 30 years been dominated by an aggressive, radical right-wing insurgency that has achieved an influence far out of proportion to its numbers. Its potent secret weapon has been the guilt and anxiety about desire that inform the character of Americans regardless of ideology; appealing to those largely unconscious emotions, the right has disarmed, intimidated, paralyzed its opposition.

  Ellen Willis

  Character, Years, Wings

  "Escape from Freedom". "Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination", Vol 1, No 2, 2006.

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• Stirner's political praxis is quixotic. It accepts the established hierarchies of constraint as given. ... Not liable to any radical change, they constitute part of the theatre housing the individual's action. ... The egoist uses the elements of the social structure as props in his self-expressive act.

  John Carroll

  Self, Political, Theatre

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• I went to a school that was founded on a lot of very radical ideals of how education should be changed. But what's happening to schools like that sort of all over the country is in economic pressure they're becoming more and more preparatory because that's what people will really pay the money for private schooling for now.

  Ezra Miller

  Country, School, People

  The Cinema Source, September 08, 2011.

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• Though [Charles Guignebert] could not accept either the Christ myth theory, which held that no historical Jesus existed, or the Dutch Radical denial that Paul authored any of the epistles, Guignebert took both quite seriously.

  Robert M. Price

  Jesus, Historical, Denial

  "The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief". Book by Tom Flynn, 2007.

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• The belief that it is useless to employ partial and palliative means against radical evils, because they only remedy them in part, is an article of faith never preached unsuccessfully by meanness to simplicity, but it is none the less absurd.

  Theodor Mommsen

  Mean, Evil, Simplicity

  "The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2" by Theodor Mommsen, translated by W.P.Dickson, 1866.

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• All things, all circumstances that occur outside ourselves, on the stage of this world, are exclusively the reflection of what we carry within. With good reason then, we can solemnly declare that the 'exterior is the reflection of the interior.' When someone changes internally and if that change is radical, then circumstances, life and the external also change.

  Samael Aun Weor

  Reflection, World, Reason

  Samael Aun Weor (2013). “Treatise of Revolutionary Psychology: The Gnostic Method of Real Spiritual Awakening”, p.9, Glorian Publishing

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• It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possess neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has depth and can be radical.

  Hannah Arendt

  Roots, Evil, Frustrated

  Hannah Arendt (2000). “The Portable Hannah Arendt”, Penguin Group USA

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• ...love rather than fear...this radical philosophy is coming from me, an avowed misanthrope...surely there is hope for us all.

  Bill Hicks

  Philosophy, Misanthrope, There Is Hope

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• There are reports that leaders from ISIS and al-Qaida met at a farm house in Syria last week, and agreed to work together against their common enemies. That story again: Two radical terrorist groups managed to do what two American political parties cannot.

  Jimmy Fallon

  Party, Isis, Two

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• Radical Christians are not people who wear Christian t-shirts. Radical Christians are those who bear fruit of the Holy Spirit...A little boy, Andrew, a Muslim shot him five times through the stomach and left him on a sidewalk simply because he said, 'I am so afraid, but I can not deny Jesus Christ! Please don't kill me! But I will not deny Him!' He died in a pool of blood, and you talk about being a radical Christian because you wear a t-shirt!

  Paul Washer

  Christian, Jesus, Boys

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• Tantra involves radical change, a change in states of awareness.

  Frederick Lenz

  Philosophy, Radical Change, Awareness

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• Be radical! The reason you feel so miserable is because you put spirituality in a form. You boxed it, franchised it. You decided spirituality was a certain way but then you got stuck in the way.

  Frederick Lenz

  Philosophy, Way, Spirituality

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• For women to be supplying the soldiery with banners, flannel shirts and other material comforts was, superficially, all of a piece with their ministrations to their menfolk at home. Such contributions to the war effort were socially acceptable because they could be seen as an extension into the military sphere of the traditional female virtues of charity, nurture and needlework. Yet in reality what the women were doing represented the thin end of a far more radical wedge. Consciously or not, these female patriots were staking out a civic role for themselves. And many of them relished it.

  Linda Colley

  Military, War, Home

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• In classical oil painting, there seemed to be a radical turn to seeing things as the camera sees them, with that technological modification. I began to have a tremendous problem with all of this.

  Henry Flynt

  Artist, Oil, Cameras

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• Radicals, on the other hand, want to advance from the jungle of laissez-faire capitalism to a world worthy of the name of human civilization. They hope for a future where the means of economic production will be owned by all of the people instead of just a comparative handful. They feel that this minority control of production facilities is injurious to the large masses of people not only because of economic monopolies but because the political power inherent in this form of centralized economy does not augur for an ever expanding democratic way of life.

  Saul Alinsky

  Mean, Hands, Civilization

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• Louis Kelso of San Francisco, a lawyer-economist, has for years felt that he has a radical answer to the problem.

  William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Years, San Francisco, Answers

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