Yquotes.com

 

To realize the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.
--
Part IV, Chapter XX, Section III, pg.243

 

Joseph Schumpeter

» Joseph Schumpeter - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

I think that it is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs.

 

Albert Einstein

 

You deal in the raw material of opinion, and, if my convictions have any validity, opinion ultimately governs the world.

 

(Thomas) Woodrow Wilson

 

It is characteristic of the barbarian … to insist upon seeing a thing “as it is.” The desire testifies that he has nothing in himself with which to spiritualize it; the relation is one of thing to thing without the intercession of the imagination. Impatient of the veiling with which the man of higher type gives the world imaginative meaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarian living amid culture, demands the access of immediacy. Where the former wishes representation, the latter insists upon starkness of materiality, suspecting rightly that forms will mean restraint.

 

Richard Weaver

 

We could not even see Hitler or the destructively daimonic reality he represented. Human beings just couldn't be that cruel in the our civilized twentieth century — the accounts in the papers must be wrong. Our error was that we let our convictions limit our perceptions. We had no place for the daimonic; we believed that the world must somehow fit our convictions, and the whole daimonic dimension was ruled out of our perception. Not to recognize the daimonic itself turns out to be daimonic, it makes us accomplices on the side of the destructive possession.
The denial of the daimonic is, in effect, a self-castration in love and a self-nullification in will. And the denial leads to the perverted forms of aggression we have seen in our day in which the repressed comes back to haunt us.

 

Rollo May

 

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.

 

William Empson