The upper class is opposed to the lower class, i.e., it is ‘closed’ to the outside world insofar as it ‘excludes or restricts admission or attaches conditions to it’. It denies the lower class access to the ‘monopolized opportunities’ granted to it by positive law, ‘opportunities for the satisfaction of internal or external interests’. When appropriated, these opportunities are called ‘rights’, and when appropriated hereditarily, they are called ‘property’. In other words, the concept of domination includes not only legal inequality, but also economic exploitation based on ‘monopolized’ property rights.
Category: Quotes
Erwin Schrödinger
A purely intellectual worldview entirely without mysticism is absurd.
Erwin Schrödinger
The reason why our feeling, perceiving, and thinking self appears nowhere in our scientific worldview can easily be expressed in five words: It is itself this worldview. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained within it as a part.
Erwin Schrödinger
Consciousness, by its very nature, exists only in the singular. I would like to say: the total number of all “consciousnesses” is always merely “one.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
If one sees a handful of powerful and rich people at the pinnacle of opulence and fortune, while the crowd below grovels in obscurity and wretchedness, it is because the former valued the things they enjoy only because others are deprived of them and even without changing their condition, they would cease to rejoice if the people ceased to suffer.
Gérard de Nerval
We live, say well-informed people, in a century of disbelief and skepticism. Yet there is no shortage of gods or prophets.
Frank Oppenheimer
The state, by its very origin and by its very nature, is, in its earliest stages of existence, almost entirely a social institution imposed by a victorious group of people upon a vanquished group of people with the sole purpose of regulating the rule of the former over the latter and securing it against internal rebellions. And this rule had no other ultimate intention than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors.
Matt Kahn
Most people do not see their beliefs. Instead, their beliefs tell them what they see. This is the simple difference between clarity and confusion.
Theodor Fontane
She now beholds a thousand lights;
The angel faces, pure and bright,
Stand faithful at her side.
She lifts the flag of victory high
On golden fields that grace the sky,
And walks where stars reside.
(Translated with Copilot AI)
Alfred Whitehead
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato.