The Road to Prelims | Some Side Note & Quotes

Although I am not speeding down the road, I have racked up some serious mileage over the last week. As we travel this road together, I would like to provide some interesting and thought inspiring quotes that have sped up my thinking.

“This narrow focus on economic incentives ignores all the other reasons that individuals have for developing new ideas…. A society that makes money the exclusive motivating force in all spheres of activity cuts itself off from what have historically been vital streams of human activity.” 

- Fred Block. 1990. Postindustrial Possibilities: A Critique of Economic Discourse. Berkely: University of California Press.

- Zygmunt Bauman. 2012. liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

- Jurgen Habermas. 2001. The Postnational Constellation.

“Things have come to pass where lying sounds like truth, truth like lying…. The confounding of truth and lies, making it almost impossible to maintain a distinction, and a labor of Sisyphus to hold onto the simplest pieces of knowledge, … [marks] the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power.”

Theodor Adorno. 1945. Minimia Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life

“For Hobson and Hobsbawn, then, imperialism is toxic: it compromises the state’s ability to govern at home, drains the treasury, fuels racism and militarized versions of nationalism, and enriched a class of political and economic usurpers at the cost of the ‘common good.’”

- Stephen J. Hartnett and Laura Anne Stengrim. Globalization and Empire.

“The crimes, therefore, that his nation or one of its units commits cannot be indifferent to him. He shares the guilt as he shares the satisfaction in the generous deeds and worthy products of nation or army. Even if he did not consciously will them and was unable to prevent them, he cannot wholly escape responsibility for collective deeds.”

— J. Glen Gray Quoted in Walzer, Michael. 2006. Just and Unjust Wars.

Blogging toward prelims,

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