Quotes I Like From Books I Like

The culture of illusion thrives by robbing us of the intellectual and linguistic tools to separate illusion from truth. It reduces us to the level and dependency of children. It impoverishes language.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. [...] In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

The fame of celebrities, wrote Mills, disguises those who possess true power: corporations and the oligarchic elite. Magical thinking is the currency not only of celebrity culture, but also of totalitarian culture. [...] The fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to keep us from fighting back.

Celebrity culture encourages everyone to think of themselves as potential celebrities, as possessing unique if unacknowledged gifts. [...] Faith in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important than reality. Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned as an impediment to success, a form of negativity. [...] All of us, by tapping into our inner reserves of personal will and undiscovered talent, by visualizing what we want, can achieve, and deserve to achieve, happiness, fame, and success. This relentless message cuts across ideological lines. This mantra has seeped into every aspect of our lives. We are all entitled to everything.

We cannot discover who we are through introspection, but only by emptying ourselves out in the sense of being wholeheartedly engaged--being at stake, being at risk--in what we do and how we are recognized by others.

Actual free labor is not a matter of being free from constraints, but of being able to identify with the constraints to which you subject yourself.

To lead a free life it is not sufficient that we are exempt from direct coercion and allowed to make choices. To lead a free life we must be able to recognize ourselves in what we do, to see our practical activities as expressions of our own commitments. [...] Freedom requires the ability to participate in decisions regarding the form of life we are leading and not just the liberty to make choices.

Men like to keep women under their power by force. A clever woman can help a man to forget what he is, and both of them are the better for it. Unless he wakes of a sudden one morning in a cold sweat and remembers, the truth of himself sinking in and spreading its damage outwards like a bullet. No. I would rather be a woman. We understand our abjection before God, because we understand our abjection before man. And we get to laugh behind their backs.

As long as we measure our social wealth in terms of labor time, technological development is bound to intensify exploitative methods for extracting relative surplus value from workers. Due to increased technological efficiency in the process of production, workers either become unemployed and part of an army of surplus labor whose presence can be used to keep down wages (as tends to happen in the Western world today), or they become subjected to extremely cruel working conditions that are designed to extract as much surplus value as possible from their labor (as tends to happen in the parts of the world where we now locate most of our manufacturing).

The expanding commodification of natural resources and life-activities is not optional but necessary for capitalism to sustain itself. If we are committed to capitalism, we are committed to commodifying more and more aspects of our lives.

Under capitalism, all questions of what we need, what we want, and what is durable, must be subordinated to the question of what is profitable.

Speaking economically, we produce more lifetime than we need to "spend" on keeping ourselves alive. This is why we have free time, but it is also why we can be exploited...in the social form of wage labor, which converts our surplus of lifetime into surplus value for the sake of profit and the growth of capital.

Spiritual freedom has always been the implicit condition of leading a life, but the modern idea of freedom makes it explicit. By the lights of a modern conception of freedom, we should not be defined once and for all by a given social role (family, profession, religion, nationality, ethnicity, gender). Rather, we should be free to transform the normative conception of ourselves and our institutions should reflect that freedom.

The activity of trying to be myself...is the minimal form of my personhood. As long as I lead my life in any way at all, I am trying to have integrity, even if I fail. [...] When I fail to be the person I am trying to be...I am not simply negated but the subject of the negative experience of failing to be myself.

I wonder if this is what all women eventually come to know - a choice each comes to make between obscuring her true self in exchange for the false regard of a good man, or allowing herself the freedom to be as she truly is and settling for a brute who couldn't care less if she is as broken, as coarse, as hopeless as he.

Every time you care for someone who may be lost or leave you behind, every time you devote yourself to a cause whose fate is uncertain, you perform an act of secular faith. Through your passion, you apprehend that death is constitutive of life and yet you do not renounce your commitment to living on. You do not give in to death but seek to prolong the life of what you love. You see that death is senseless and yet you seek to make sense of life.

Accordingly, the more you devote yourself to something...the more you put yourself in peril. By committing yourself to a person, a political struggle, or a way of life, you become dependent on something whose continued existence is objectively uncertain. Yet Kierkegaard maintains that it is only through such an existential commitment that you can become a self.