Radicalism Quotes - Page 3

• I was born into a working class Irish Catholic family at the brutal bottom of the Great Depression. I suppose this early imprinting and conditioning made me a life-long radical. My education was mostly scientific, majoring in electrical engineering and applied math. Those imprints made me a life-long rationalist. I have become increasingly skeptical about, or detached from, the assumption that radicalism and rationalism are the only correct perspectives with which to view life, but they remain my favorite perspectives.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Math, Views, Engineering

  Source: theanarchistlibrary.org

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• Aestheticism and radicalism must lead us to jettison reason, and to replace it by a desperate hope for political miracles. This irrational attitude which springs from intoxication with dreams of a beautiful world is what I call Romanticism. It may seek its heavenly city in the past or in the future; it may preach 'back to nature' or 'forward to a world of love and beauty'; but its appeal is always to our emotions rather than to reason. Even with the best intentions of making heaven on earth it only succeeds in making it a hell - that hell which man alone prepares for his fellow-men.

  Karl Popper

  Beautiful, Dream, Attitude

  Karl Raimund Popper (1950). “The Open Society and Its Enemies”

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• You sometimes find something good in the lunatic fringe. In fact, we have got as part of our social and economic government today a whole lot of things which in my boyhood were considered lunatic fringe, and yet they are now part of everyday life.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Government, Everyday, Today

  Roosevelt, Franklin D. (1950). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: F.D. Roosevelt, 1944-1945, Volume 13”, p.147, Best Books on

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• The flag of racialism which has been hoisted in Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered 25 years ago over Dachau and Belsen.

  Tony Benn

  Years, Looks, Dachau

  "Onslaught on Powell by Wedgwood Benn". "The Times" Newspaper, June 4, 1970.

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• Conservatism defends those coercive arrangements which a still-lingering savageness makes requisite. Radicalism endeavours to realize a state more in harmony with the character of the ideal man.

  Herbert Spencer

  Character, Men, Realizing

  Herbert Spencer (1851). “Social Statics: Or, the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed”, p.469

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• It's the artist's duty to have an artist's life, somehow to obtain time and freedom and then to muster the desire and discipline to make good work out of the life, whether that goodness is in the world's aesthetics, its radicalism, its candor, its singularity, or its universality.

  Stephanie Mills

  Responsibility, Artist, Discipline

  Stephanie Mills (2003). “Epicurean Simplicity”, p.132, Island Press

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