Читать книгу The Devil's Pleasure Palace - Michael Walsh - Страница 7

Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

—Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

But I can’t listen to music often, it affects the nerves. One wants to say pleasant stupidities and stroke on the head the people who, living in this dirty hell, can create such beauty. And today it is impossible to stroke anyone on the head—they bite off your hand, and it is necessary to beat heads, beat them ruthlessly, although we, ideally, are against any sort of violence against people. Hmmm, the task is diabolically difficult.

—Vladimir Lenin, as recounted by Maxim Gorky in Days with Lenin

Only a humanity to which death has become as indifferent as its members, which has died to itself, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

—Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you . . . Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.

—Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind

It is true that storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it, that it brings about consent and reconciliation with things as they really are, and that we may even trust it to contain eventually by implication that last word which we expect from the “Day of Judgment.”

—Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child—miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic, and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.

—P.J. O’Rourke, Give War a Chance

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight for!

—Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy

The crisis of the West consists in the West’s having become uncertain of its purpose.

—Leo Strauss, The City and Man