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Today we decide about metaphysics and about even more elevated things at philosophy conferences. For everything that is to be done these days we must first have a meeting, and here is how it works: people come together, constantly come together, and they all wait for one another to turn up so that the others will tell them how it is, and if it doesn’t get said, never mind, everyone has had their say. It may very well be that all the talkers who are having their say have understood little of the matter in question, but still we believe that if we accumulate all that misunderstanding something like understanding will leap forth at the end of the day. Thus there are people today who travel from one meeting to the next and who are sustained by the confidence that something is really happening, that they’ve actually done something; whereas, at bottom, they’ve merely ducked out of work, seeking in chatter a place to build a nest for their helplessness—a helplessness, it is true, that they will never understand.
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Gesamtausgabe, 20:376, as translated by David Farrell Krell in Portraits of American Continental Philosophers (1999), p. 101

 

Martin Heidegger

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Just before twenty-first March, 1953, seven days before, I stopped working on myself. A moment comes when you see the whole futility of effort. You have done all that you can do and nothing is happening. You have done all that is humanly possible. Then what else can you do? In sheer helplessness one drops all search. And the day the search stopped, the day I was not seeking for something, the day I was not expecting something to happen, it started happening. A new energy arose — out of nowhere. It was not coming from any source. It was coming from nowhere and everywhere. It was in the trees and in the rocks and the sky and the sun and the air — it was everywhere. And I was seeking so hard, and I was thinking it is very far away. And it was so near and so close.

 

Osho

 

Look what's happening here. While there was two days left for the elections, it was announced that he (Levon Ter-Petrossian) was already the chosen president. And with this, he has inserted himself into this barricade, which coming out from this situation is truly very difficult. And what steps remain for Levon Ter-Petrossian? Collect his supporters, announce that the elections are falsified, and with different means, maintain this concept in the city...which is happening...which is happening right now. This, first of all, is disgraceful, disrespectful behavior to those very people. First of all, to his very followers. When one person sinks, and tries to pull with him his supporters. Overall, it appears as though this person has been bad for the nation and is an even greater danger today for his very environment. Instead of trying to help those people come out of that state of frustration, he further instigates the people and sinks them deeper, making things harder to come out of this situation...the process of coming out of this situation. Of course now, the government cannot continuously allow this constant unlawful activity. Today is the sixth day these unlawful rallies are taking place. Until when? The police force was required to find a means, even today, and I was very patient...trying to allow these rallies to die down, not sharpen the impact...hoping that finally, these arguments would end and the people will stop, and I assume six days is enough for these actions to halt. Let us wait a little...but...I am repeating, even this patience has an end. Since measures can be taken to go against the people furthermore, the power exists, the ability and means exists, and I simply repeat, we understand that this is a tangled chaotic situation in that area. You know, when you look at the images (of the rallies), you get the idea that in the city, there is a very inappropriate and unwise charade being put on, a very poor stage show is coming alive.

 

Robert Kocharyan

 

To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realized as being true, that is called propaganda. In the beginning there is the understanding, this understanding uses propaganda as a tool to find those men, that shall turn understanding into politics. Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things than I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. Those are found in other circumstances, I find them when thinking at my desk, but not in the meeting hall.

 

Joseph Goebbels

 

Sartre, whose underground activities had never amounted to anything except a secret meeting on Wednesday to decide whether there should be another meeting the following Tuesday, not only claimed the status of Resistance veteran but called down vengeance on people whose behaviour had not really been all that much more reprehensible than his own.

 

Clive James

 

Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death's face. The mind is then strung up to a pitch it can stand for only a short time; but each new dawn introduces the same necessity; and days piled on days make years. On each one of these days the soul suffers violence. Regularly, each morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way. Thus war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its own "war aims." It effaces the very notion of war's being brought to an end. Consequently, nobody does anything to bring this end about. In the presence of an armed enemy, what hand can relinquish its weapon? The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward. The mind is completely absorbed in doing itself violence. Always in human life, whether war or slavery is in question, intolerable sufferings continue, as it were, by the force of their own specific gravity, and so look to the outsider as though they deprived the sufferer of the resources which might serve to extricate him. [p.181]

 

Simone Weil