Dialectic Quotes

He grasped at a prescient feeling, akin to the dialectic of dreams, that this reunion could never come to pass, yet somehow
it most definitely would. ~ Kenzaburo Oe

As I witness and participate in our visionary efforts to revitalize Detroit and contrast them with the multibillion dollars' worth of megaprojects advanced by politicians and developed that involve casinos, giant stadiums, gentrification, and the Super Bowl, I am saddened by their shortsightedness. At the same time I rejoice in the energy being unleashed in the community by our human-scale programs that involve bringing the country back into the city and removing the walls between schools and communities, between generations, and between ethnic groups. And I am confident just as in the early twentieth century people came from around the world to marvel at the mass production lines pioneered by Henry Ford, in the twenty-first century they will be coming to marvel at the thriving neighborhoods that are the fruit of our visionary programs. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

Then you will make a law that they shall have such an education as will enable them to attain the greatest skill in asking and answering questions? Yes, he said, you and I together will make it. Dialectic, then, as you will agree, is the coping-stone of the sciences, and is set over them; no other science can be placed higher - the nature of knowledge can no further go? I agree, he said. But to whom we ~ Plato

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. it is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely toleration, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within the interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters ~ Audre Lorde

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. ~ Octavio Paz

The clarity of gender makes possible the human dialectic. Let the lines of balanced tension go slack and the structure dissolves into the ooze of androgyny and narcissism. ~ Bill Vaughan

According to Howard, "this dialectic between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, between the individual and the tribe, was to pervade, and to a large extent shape, the history of Europe throughout the nineteenth century, and of the world the century after that."109 ~ Steven Pinker

In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society - the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. ~ Karl Marx

They [root causes of terror] come out of a long dialectic of U.S. involvement in the affairs of the Islamic world, the oil-producing world, the Arab world, the Middle East - those areas that are considered to be essential to U.S. interests and security. ~ Edward Said

It is thus evident that Rhetoric does not deal with any one definite class of subjects, but, like Dialectic, [is of general application]; also, that it is useful; and further, that its function is not so much to persuade, as to find out in each case the existing means of persuasion. ~ Aristotle.

The first beginning and its inceptuality The first beginning is the act of beginning in the sense of the disconcealing of disconcealment, but thus the emergence into the constancy of disconcealment in unconcealedness, but thus the appearing forth of the latter in the act of appearing, but thus the pressing forth of appearing as appearance, but thus the subjugation of unconcealedness, but thus the relinquishment of the inceptuality of the beginning, but thus the abandonment of the beginning to the advancement, but thus the commencement of the truth of being as the beingness of beings, but thus the priority of beings themselves as that which in the proper sense is present prior to presence. There is no "dialectic" here at all, neither that of being nor even that of the thinking about being. Essentially occurring here is the beginning of the first beginning and nothing besides this act of beginning. Recollection into this is already appropriation. ~ Martin Heidegger

Dialectic is the art of intellectual fencing; and it is only when we so regard it that we can erect it into a branch of knowledge. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

This meaning-argument is of a very different kind from the arguments I have been speaking about so far. The premise entails the conclusion all right, but it is so astoundingly false that it defies criticism, at first, by the simple method of taking the reader's breath away. This was a method which the neo-Hegelian idealists later perfected: reasoning from a sudden and violent solecism. Say or imply, for example, that in English "value" means the same as "individuality." You can be miles down the track of your argument before they get their breath back.
This method is not only physiologically but ethologically sound. Of course it should never be used first. You need first to earn the respect of your readers, by some good reasoning, penetrating observations, or the like: then apply the violent solecism. Tell them, for example, that when we say of something that it is a prime number, we mean that it was born out of wedlock. You cannot go wrong this way. Decent philosophers will be so disconcerted by this, that they will never do the one thing they should do: simply say, "That is NOT what 'prime number' means!" Instead, they will always begin … [by] casting about for an excuse for someone's saying what you said, or a half-excuse, or a one-eighth excuse; nor is there any danger that they will search in vain. ~ David Stove

The dialectic of antiquity tended towards leadership (the great individual and the masses
the free man and the slaves); so far the dialectic of Christendom tends towards representation (the majority sees itself in its representative and is set free by the consciousness that it is the majority which is represented, in a sort of self-consciousness); the dialectic of the present age tends towards equality, and its most logical
though mistaken
fulfilment is levelling, as the negative unity of the negative reciprocity of all individuals. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

The power of impulses which haunt our phantasies, of imaginary modes of being which ignite the poetic word, and of the all-embracing, that most powerful something which menaces us so long as we feel unloved, in all these registers and perhaps in others as well, the dialectic of power and form takes place, which insures that language only captures the foam on the surface of life. ~ Paul Ricoeur

The word dialectic (in dialectical behavior therapy) means to balance and compare two things that appear very different or even contradictory. In dialectical behavior therapy, the balance is between change and acceptance (Linehan, 1993a). You need to change the behaviors in your life that are creating more suffering for yourself and others while simultaneously also accepting yourself the way you are. This might sound contradictory, but it's a key part of this treatment. Dialectical behavior therapy depends on acceptance and change, not acceptance or change. ~ Matthew McKay

It seems to me that this dialectic, this ambiguity, this contradiction of the clichés of our mental life and the images of lived life is really the subject of all my films. ~ Agnes Varda

In its rational form [dialectic] is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary. ~ Karl Marx

Get to the Point: Vampire Contributions in Western Architecture. Fangs and Balances: Vampire Politicians in History. To Drink or Not to Drink: A Vampire Dialectic. Blood Sausage, Blood Stew, Blood Orange: Food for All Seasons. And the awfully named Plasmatlas, which contained maps of important vampire locales. ~ Chloe Neill

Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; and science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,
I call it Dialectic,
which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is strange how interiors reflect their dark turbulent past, how in their stillness bygone history tries to be reenacted, how the same situations repeat themselves with infinite variations, turned upside down and inside out by fruitless dialectic of wallpapers and hangings. ~ Bruno Schulz

Verbal virtuosities or the gratuitous expense of time or money that is presupposed by material or symbolic appropriation of works of art, or even, at the second power, the self-imposed constraints and restrictions which make up the "asceticism of the privileged" (as Marx said of Seneca) and the refusal of the facile which is the basis of all "pure" aesthetics, are so many repetition of that variant of the master-slave dialectic through which the possessors affirm their possession of their possessions. In so doing, they distance themselves still further from the dispossessed, who, not content with being slaves to necessity in all its forms, are suspected of being possessed by the desire for possession, and so potentially possessed by the possessions they do not, or do not yet, possess. ~ Pierre Bourdieu

Hegel did not deceive himself about the revolutionary character of his dialectic, and was even afraid that his Philosophy of Right would be banned. Nor was the Prussian state entirely easy in its mind for all its idealization. Proudly leaning on its police truncheon, it did not want to have its reality justified merely by its reason. Even the dull-witted King saw the serpent lurking beneath the rose: when a distant rumor of his state philosopher's teachings reached him he asked suspiciously: but what if I don't dot the I's or cross the T's? The Prussian bureaucracy meanwhile was grateful for the laurel wreath that had been so generously plaited for it, especially since the strict Hegelians clarified their master's obscure words for the understanding of the common subjects, and one of them wrote a history of Prussian law and the Prussian state, where the Prussian state was proved to be a gigantic harp strung in God's garden to lead the universal anthem. Despite its sinister secrets Hegel's philosophy was declared to be the Prussian state philosophy, surely one of the wittiest ironies of world history. Hegel had brought together the rich culture of German Idealism in one mighty system, he had led all the springs and streams of our classical age into one bed, where they now froze in the icy air of reaction. but the rash fools who imagined they were safely hidden behind this mass of ice, who presumptuously rejoiced who bold attackers fell from its steep and slippery slopes, littl ~ Franz Mehring

Let us summarize these three points more concisely:

(a) The rejection of art as a mere emotional, individualistic, and romantic affair.
(b) "Objective" work, undertaken with the silent hope that the end product will nevertheless eventually be regarded as a work of art.
(c) Consciously goal-directed work in architecture, which will have a concise artistic effect on the basis of well-preparated objective-scientific criteria.

Such an architecture will actively raise the general standard of living. This represents the dialectic of our development process, which purports to arrive at the affirmative by negation - a process similar to melting down old iron and forging it into new steel. ~ El Lissitzky

towards more engaged analyses that appreciate sport's protean, dialectic nature as a site of everyday domination and resistance; a space of joy and creativity and routine mechanized existence. ~ Michael Bxe9rubxe9

At the first stage of his dialectic, Hegel affirms that in so far as death is the common ground of man and
animal, it is by accepting death and even by inviting it that the former differentiates himself from the
latter. At the heart of this primordial struggle for recognition, man is thus identified with violent death.
The mystic slogan "Die and become what you are" is taken up once more by Hegel. But "Become what
you are" gives place to "Become what you so far are not." This primitive and passionate desire for
recognition, which is confused with the will to exist, can be satisfied only by a recognition gradually
extended until it embraces everyone. In that everyone wants equally much to be recognized by everyone,
the fight for life will cease only with the recognition of all by all, which will mark the termination of
history. The existence that Hegelian consciousness seeks to obtain is born in the hard-won glory of
collective approval. ~ Albert Camus

Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive. ~ Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer

No knowledge, however thorough and extensive, no brilliance and perspicuity, no dialectic sophistication, will preserve us from the commmonness of thought and will. It is truly not the merit of the school if we do not come out selfish. ~ Max Stirner

Classical education was based on the seven liberal arts or sciences: grammar, the formal structures of language; rhetoric, composition and presentation of argument; dialectic, formal logic; arithmetic; geometry; music; astronomy.14 For centuries, the classics dominated the very idea of being educated and attempts at reform were resisted. ~ Ken Robinson

Americans are cultured from their earliest years to be either one-sided douloi or one-sided banausoi, i.e. either they cannot think abstractively/conceptually/orchestrally or else they can only think abstractively. Thinking in a truly rational dialectic between intuition and intellect is just beyond the reach of our nation of emotionalist helots. What prevails among us truly has to be called not thinking but "thinking," a pathetic surrogate for actual thinking for the benefit of existentially or modally crippled mentalities. ~ Kenny Smith

Dialectic concepts can permit the existence of UFOs and other life-forms... Even if these reports of flying saucers are fantasies, as is possible that the majority may be, many of them, their historical basis is correct… the scientific capacity of human beings is determined by their social organisation... The answers to these mysteries would lie in a study of Marxism." From Les Soucoupes Volantes (Flying Saucers) ~ Juan R. Posadas

Was not Hypatia the greatest philosopher of Alexandria, and a true martyr to the old values of learning? She was torn to pieces by a mob of incensed Christians not because she was a woman, but because her learning was so profound, her skills at dialectic so extensive that she reduced all who queried her to embarrassed silence. They could not argue with her, so they murdered her. ~ Iain Pears

Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the Universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

The dialectic case of the 'things we do', the 'things we have done' and the 'things we are going to do' has been haunting present and earlier generations. For ages people have been confronted with the soul-searching question how should I interpret the past and how do I move forward. Linguistic sayings, which were inherited from century to century, gave us a good deal of remarkable advice and moral guidance in this field : " Do what is right and let come what come may ", " Do well and fear not ", " Do well and dread no shame ".
Erik Pevernagie, Never looking back again ~ Erik Pevernagie

Logic is the science not of external forms of thought, but of the laws of development "of all material, natural and spiritual things", i.e., of the development of the entire concrete content of the world and of its cognition, i.e., the sum-total, the conclusion of the History of knowledge of the world. ~ Vladimir Lenin

Outright destruction of rebellious ships or habitats - pour encouragez les autres - of course remains an option for the controlling power, but all the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar dialectic of dissent which - simply stated - dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seems often to baffle the military and political mind. ~ Iain Banks

The acceleration of contemporary life also plays a role in this lack of being. The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination. ~ Byung-Chul Han

Therefore the Sophists, with courageous sauciness, pronounce the reassuring words, "Don't be bluffed!" and diffuse the rationalistic doctrine, "Use your understanding, your wit, your mind, against everything; it is by having a good and well-drilled understanding that one gets through the world best, provides for himself the best lot, the pleasantest life." Thus they recognize in mind man's true weapon against the world. This is why they lay such stress on dialectic skill, command of language, the art of disputation, etc. They announce that mind is to be used against everything; but they are still far removed from the holiness of the Spirit, for to them it is a means, aweapon, as trickery and defiance serve children for the same purpose; their mind is the unbribable understanding. ~ Max Stirner

There are two ways of attempting to deal with the appalling difficulties of choice on the higher ethical levels (Truth/beauty/goodness; family/country, war/peace, principles/persons.. ): (1) one can attempt to justify a one-sided choice, and this is what philosophies of value and religions attempt to do through reason and faith (feeling,) respectively. But this always founders or is never safe from foundering. (2) Or the dialectic can be squarely faced in the fact that no one-sided solution of it is ever justifiable by reason or by faith. And here enters the question not of acceptance or refusal, nor of affirmation or denial, but of letting-go. The letting-go, however, is limited, in life at least (and without taking death into account) by the boundary of ability to let go. ~ Nanamoli Thera

Testimony demands to be interpreted because of the dialectic of meaning and event that traverses it. ~ Paul Ricoeur

I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic - if we can call it that - between high and low. Maybe it's because I was not born or brought up in affluence. ~ Elena Ferrante

Engaging in Socratic question-and-answer dialectic is the key and indispensable means by which to sustain this commitment to care for one's own soul. ~ John M. Cooper

Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. ~ Audre Lorde

I preferred the weapons of dialectic to all the other teachings of philosophy, and armed with these, I chose the conflicts of disputation rather than the trophies of war. ~ Peter Abelard

Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art . ~ Robert Smithson

In a sense, those critics who claim we are not working a fifteen-hour week because we have chosen consumerism over leisure are not entirely off the mark. They just got the mechanics wrong. We're not working harder because we're spending all our time manufacturing PlayStations and serving each other sushi. Industry is being increasingly robotized, and the real service sector remains flat at roughly 20 percent of overall employment. Instead, it is because we have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and, at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of--as Kathi Weeks has so concisely put it--"a life," and that, in turns means that furtive consumer pleasures are the only ones we have time to afford. ~ David Graeber

Neighborship is a universal dialectic phenomenon. Good neighborship has a contingent status since it may procure either balance, trust and peace of mind or entail limits, barriers, and fences that can be a protection or conjure up feelings of exclusion, creating inhibitions and frustrations.( "Beware of the neighbor" ) ~ Erik Pevernagie

You are twenty. You are not dead, although you were dead. The girl who died. And was resurrected. Children. Witches. Magic. Symbols. Remember the illogic of the fantasy. The strange tableau in the closet behind the bathroom: the feast, the beast, and the jelly-bean. Recall, remember: please do not die again. Let there be continuity at least - a core of consistency - even if your philosophy must be always a moving dynamic dialectic. The thesis is the easy time, the happy time. The antithesis threatens annihilation. The synthesis is the consummate problem. ~ Sylvia Plath

The mark of the modern world is the imagination of its profiteers and the counter-assertiveness of the oppressed. Exploitation and the refusal to accept exploitation as either inevitable or just constitute the continuing antinomy of the modern era, joined together in a dialectic which has far from reached its climax in the twentieth century. ~ Immanuel Wallerstein

Faith is not uprooted by dialectic proof; it must already be deeply shaken by other causes to be unable to withstand the shock of argument. ~ Emile Durkheim

I'm always looking at the dialectic between the truth we believe exists outside ourselves and the truth we invent for ourselves. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

[Philosophers] are not honest enough in their work, although they make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic ... ; while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of "inspiration" most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

To trace the development of mind from earliest times ... requires ... not a categorical concept, but a functional one ... The most promising operational principle for this purpose is the principle of individuation.[p. 310]" "[yet she also says:] ... we have no physical model of this endless rhythm of individuation and involvement, we do have its image in the world of art, most purely in dance; ... this dialectic of vital continuity ... [p. 355] ~ Susanne K. Langer

It stops wandering about the world of sense and settles down in the world of intellect, and there it occupies itself, casting off falsehood and feeding the soul in what Plato calls 'the plain of truth,' using his method of division to distinguish the Forms, and to determine the essential nature of each thing, and to find the primary kinds, and weaving together by the intellect all that issues from these primary kinds, till it has traversed the whole intelligible world; then it resolves again the structure of that world into its parts, and comes back to its starting-point; and then, keeping quiet (for it is quiet in so far as it is present There) it busies itself no more, but contemplates, having arrived at unity. (Ennead I.3.4) ~ A.H. Armstrong

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

Whenever I have doubt, I often use epistemological methods or dialectic methods to come to a rational conclusion. ~ Debasish Mridha

The link between peace and stability on the one hand, and social and economic growth on the other, is dialectic. Peace, poverty, and backwardness cannot mix in one region. ~ King Hussein I

Only by remembering to say 'no' will the women of 21st century regain their voice and remember their power. 'No' is the most important word in a woman's dialectic arsenal, and it is the one word that our employers, our leaders, and quite often, the men in our lives would do anything to prevent us from saying. No, we will not serve. No, we will not settle for the dirty work, the low-paid work, the unpaid work. No, we will not stay late at the office, look after the kids, sort out the shopping. We refuse to fit the enormity of our passion, our creativity, and our potential into the rigid physical prison laid down for us since we were small children. No. We refuse. We will not buy your clothes and shoes and surgical solutions. No, we will not be beautiful; we will not be good. Most of all, we refuse to be beautiful and good. ~ Laurie Penny

The problem is that history is not a dialectic progression but a biome, a swamp where ideas chase each other around and wallow and where drupelets of their larvae cluster and then hatch to devour siblings. ~ Eugene Lim

Now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth ... but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

This was a sometimes attractive and sometimes frustrating wrinkle of the dialectic, she'd found: everything turned out to be the superstructure of some other thing. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

The very agony
of death experienced in the humiliation of the entire being lifts the slave to the level of human totality. He
knows, henceforth, that this totality exists; now it only remains for him to conquer it through a long series
of struggles against nature and against the masters. History identifies itself, therefore, with the history of
endeavor and rebellion. It is hardly astonishing that Marxism-Leninism derived from this dialectic the
contemporary ideal of the soldier worker. ~ Albert Camus

What one should add here is that self-consciousness is itself unconscious: we are not aware of the point of our self-consciousness. If ever there was a critic of the fetishizing effect of fascinating and dazzling "leitmotifs", it is Adorno: in his devastating analysis of Wagner, he tries to demonstrate how Wagnerian leitmotifs serve as fetishized elements of easy recognition and thus constitute a kind of inner-structural commodification of his music. It is then a supreme irony that traces of this same fetishizing procedure can be found in Adorno's own writings. Many of his provocative one-liners do effectively capture a profound insight or at least touch on a crucial point (for example: "Nothing is more true in pscyhoanalysis than its exaggeration"); however, more often than his partisans are ready to admit, Adorno gets caught up in his own game, infatuated with his own ability to produce dazzlingly "effective" paradoxical aphorisms at the expense of theoretical substance (recall the famous line from Dialectic of Englightment on how Hollywood's ideological maniuplation of social reality realized Kant's idea of the transcendental constitution of reality). In such cases where the dazzling "effect" of the unexpected short-circuit (here between Hollywood cinema and Kantian ontology) effectively overshadows the theoretical line of argumentation, the brilliant paradox works precisely in the same manner as the Wagnerian leitmotif: instead of serving as a nodal point in the complex n ~ Slavoj Zizek

We often speak of Anglican "comprehensiveness." If this is a way of making relativism palatable or a means of accommodating all shades of opinion with no regard for truth, then it needs to be rejected. If by comprehensive we mean the priority of a dialectic quest over precision and immediate closure, then we are speaking of the Anglican consciousness at its best. ~ Urban T. Holmes III

After the revolution you have the problem of keeping things going, of sorting out all the different views. It's quite natural that revolutionaries should have different solutions, that they should split into different groups and then reform, that's the dialectic, isn't it - but at the same time they need to be united against the enemy, to solidify a new order. ~ John Lennon

In some ways, the great danger for this commodified universe is our boredom with it ... There is this sort of dialectic that you could tease out, that even in this overdeveloped late-capitalist world, that boredom was still this kind of critical energy that you could work on and try to theorize and then act on, to find other kinds of belonging, other kinds of desire, other kinds of life. ~ Kenneth McKenzie Wark

As Uncle Hegel used to enjoy pointing out, the trouble with perspectives is that they are, by definition, PARTIAL points of view; the Real problems are appreciated only when, in the course of the development of the World Spirit, the limits of perspective come to be transcended. Or, to put it less technically, it helps to be able to see the whole elephant. ~ Jerry A. Fodor

I am an imperfect man living in an imperfect world, trying to weave through the chaotic interactions of semi-causal events with linear logic, contradictory emotions, dialectic wisdom, and mortal integrity. ~ Leonard Seet

The breakdown of mummies and daddies was an important part of lesbian relationships in the Bagatelle ... For some of us, however, role-playing reflected all the depreciating attitudes toward women which we loathed in straight society. It was the rejection of these roles that had drawn us to 'the life' in the first place. Instinctively, without particular theory or political position or dialectic, we recognized oppression as oppression, no matter where it came from.
But those lesbians who had carved some niche in the pretend world of dominance/subordination rejected what they called our 'confused' lifestyle, and they were in the majority. ~ Audre Lorde

It was not by dialectic that it pleased God to save His people. ~ Ambrose

There is a dialectic between common humanity and particular ways of being human. ~ Howard Morphy

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another. ~ Susan Sontag

This illustration might also be used to illustrate the dialectic, which consists of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. First we say: 'Reality is an uncle.' This is the thesis. But the existence of an uncle implies that of a nephew. Since nothing really exists except the Absolute, and we are now committed to the existence of a nephew, we must conclude: 'The Absolute is a nephew.' This is the antithesis. But there is the same objection to this as to the view that the Absolute is an uncle; therefore we are driven to the view that the Absolute is the whole composed of uncle and nephew. This is the synthesis. But this synthesis is still unsatisfactory, because a man can be an uncle only if he has a brother or sister who is a parent of the nephew. Hence we are driven to enlarge our universe to include the brother or sister, with his wife or her husband. ~ Bertrand Russell

Daddy's girl. Was it a 'itty-bitty bravekins and did it suffer? Oooooo-tweet, de tweetest thing, wasn't she dest too tweet? Before her tiny fist the forces of lust and corruption rolled away; nay, the very march of destiny stopped; inevitably became inevitable, syllogism, dialectic, all rationality fell away ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

A government has the duty to preserve the order as well as the truth which it represents; when a Gnostic leader appears and proclaims that God or progress, race or dialectic, has ordained him to become the existential ruler, a government is not supposed to betray its trust and to abdicate. And this rule suffers no exception for governments which operate under a democratic constitution and a bill of rights. Justice Jackson in his dissent in the Terminiello case formulated the point: the Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact. A democratic government is not supposed to become an accomplice in its own overthrow by letting Gnostic movements grow prodigiously in the shelter of a muddy interpretation of civil rights; and if through inadvertence such a movement has grown to the danger point of capturing existential representation by the famous "legality" of popular elections, a democratic government is not supposed to bow to the "will of the people" but to put down the danger by force and, if necessary, to break the letter of the constitution in order to save its spirit. ~ Eric Voegelin

Regret and remorse" is a dialectic issue about what has been done, about what should have been done and about what should not have been done. ( "Island of regret. Island of remorse" ) ~ Erik Pevernagie

Apparently the world today can no longer be anything other than a world of masters and
slaves because contemporary ideologies, those that are changing the face of the earth, have learned from
Hegel to conceive of history in terms of the dialectic of master and slave. If, on the first morning of the
world, under the empty sky, there is only a master and a slave; even if there is only the bond of master
and slave between a transcendent god and mankind, then there can be no other law in this world than the
law of force. Only a god, or a principle above the master and the slave, could intervene and make men's
history something more than a mere chronicle of their victories and defeats. ~ Albert Camus

The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Yet it is perhaps worth mentioning that the masculine tenor of God-talk is particularly problematic in English. In Hebrew, Arabic and French, however, grammatical gender gives theological discourse a sort of sexual counterpoint and dialectic, which provides a balance that is often lacking in English. Thus in Arabic al-Lah (the supreme name for God) is grammatically masculine, but the word for the divine and inscrutable essence of God - al-Dhat - is feminine. ~ Karen Armstrong

It's possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way. ~ Karl Marx

Each stage of development, remember, has a dialectic of progress
in plain language, every new development is good news, bad news. ~ Ken Wilber

The best we can do, according to Bradley, is to say things that are 'not intellectually corrigible' - further progress is only possible through a synthesis of thought and feeling, which, when achieved, will lead to our saying nothing. Ideas have degrees of truth, greater or less according to the stage at which they come in the dialectic. ~ Bertrand Russell

The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason. ~ Theodor Adorno

This is the dialectic - there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art. ~ Douglas Sirk

The function of my comedy is not to provide answers, but to postulate questions, impertinent questions and therefore finally, pertinent questions. Not to open doors, merely to unlock them. To not invade the boundaries of probability but stabd a cool guard this side of the boundaries. Somewhere between there's a thesis. To pump up the muscle of dialectic (or in my case Di-Eclectic!) against the brawn of surrealistic solution.

I play not Hamlet, but the second gravedigger, not Lear but the fool. ~ Marty Feldman

In other words, to see if through these cultural phenomena a new Middle Ages is to take shape, a time of secular mystics, more inclined to monastic withdrawal than to civic participation. We should see how much, as antidote or as antistrophe, the old techniques of reason may apply, the arts of the Trivium, logic, dialectic, rhetoric. As we suspect that anyone who goes on stubbornly practicing them will be accused of impiety. ~ Umberto Eco

here is one other element of the apocalyptic tradition to be considered, namely transition. I said a minute ago that one of the assumptions prevalent in sophisticated apocalyptism was what Yeats called 'antithetical multiform influx'--the forms assumed by the inrushing gyre as the old one reaches its term. The dialectic of Yeats's gyres is simple enough in essence; they are a figure for the co-existence of the past and future at the time of transition. The old narrows to its apex, the new broadens towards its base, and the old and new interpenetrate. Where apex and base come together you have an age of very rapid transition. Actually, on Yeats's view of the historical cycle, there were transient moments of perfection, or what he called Unity of Being; but there was no way of making these permanent, and his philosophy of history is throughout transitional. In this he is not, of course, original; but his emphasis on the traditional character of our own pre-apocalyptic moment, in contrast with those exquisite points of time when life was like the water brimming beautifully but unstably over the rim of a fountain, seems, for all the privacy of the expression, characteristically modern.

It is commonplace that our times do in fact suffer a more rapid rate of change technologically, and consequently in the increase of social mobility, than any before us. There is nothing fictive about that, and its implications are clear in our own day-to-day lives. What is interesting, t ~ Frank Kermode

There was...the discrepancy between what one expected of the accomplished medieval scholar (and, later, the penetrating exponent of theological and spiritual matters) and the robust, no-nonsense, unmistakably strident man, clumsy in movement and in dress, apparently little sensitive to the feelings of others, determined to cut his way to the heart of any matter with shouts of distinguo! before re-shaping it entirely. One quickly felt that for him dialectic supplied the place of conversation. Any general remarks were of an obvious and even platitudinous kind; talk was dead timber until the spark of argument flashed. Then in a trice you were whisked from particular to fundamental principles; thence (if you wanted) to eternal verities; and Lewis was alert for any riposte you could muster. It was comic as well as breathtaking; and Lewis would see the comedy as readily as the next man. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

Time to silence the Hegelian Dialect ~ Dean Cavanagh

Power and glory are two dialectic energies working in common ground. Taking a glimpse of the meandering under swell of glory in the shade of power, can be very inspiring and illuminating. ("The power and the glory" ) ~ Erik Pevernagie

I never sat down and wrote, but what I do is kind of act as a dramaturge for the piece. I am sitting with the writers. I'm discussing ideas with the writers and concepts. We're debating and having a dialectic where we are taking a lot of different ideas and trying to synthesize them into the right idea. I'm very much a part of that process. That's my job as the director. ~ Larry Charles

The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness. ~ Adrienne Rich

Ideas should be freely and dispassionately considered on their own merits, since after all, one generation's heretic is another generation's hero. Mystics like the Ramchal disagreed with rationalists like the Rambam on what exactly is the highest mode of being. The Rambam believed that the ultimate existence is purely spiritual, in Olam HaBah, while the Ramchal believed it to be corporeal resurrection in this world.1 In his time, the Ramchal was labeled a heretic and had his works burned by fellow Jews, but nevertheless lives on today as one of the most respected Jewish philosophers in history. The Rambam before him suffered the same fate, not just for his views on the afterlife, in which corporeal resurrection only played a minor role, but also for his "radical" belief that God does not have a body. It seems possible that his debate may find a sister in modern times: I would not be surprised if future generations view the figurative nature of Olam HaBah with the same certainty as modern Jews now view the Rambam's "heresy" about the nature of God. Because frankly, these Talmudic passages make no sense unless viewed as metaphor, and the Rambam provides a kind of Rabbinic precedent to do so. It is precisely the same dialectic: as our scientific view of reality expands and sharpens, our religious teachings must evolve and conform. If the evidence confirms a literal reading, then so be it. If it refutes it, then so be it. Truth is truth, and we must cherish our integrity just as ~ Shmuel Pernicone

This is the study of the whole realm of Forms, working out in full detail all the relationships in which the various ones of them stand to one another. So the rise to full life, in our self-absorption into our intellectual origins and natures, is itself an exercise of philosophy, of philosophy at its essential core of active knowledge of Forms. ~ John M. Cooper

Now, even though it be neither necessity nor caprice, history, for the authentic reactionary, is not, for all that, an interior dialectic of the immanent will, but rather a temporal adventure between man and that which transcends him. His labors are traces, on the disturbed sand, of the body of a beast and the aura of an angel. History is a tatter, torn from man's freedom, waving in the breath of destiny. Man cannot be silent because his liberty is not merely a sanctuary where he escapes from deadening routine and takes refuge in order to become his own master. But in the free act the radical does not attain possession of his essence. Liberty is not an abstract possibility of choosing among known goods, but rather the concrete condition in which we are granted the possession of new goods. Freedom is not a momentary judgement between conflicting instincts, but rather the summit from which man contemplates the ascent of new stars among the luminous dust of the starry sky. Liberty places man among prohibitions that are not physical and imperatives that are not vital. The free moment dispels the unreal brightness of the day, in order that the motion of the universe which slides its fleeting lights over the shuddering of our flesh might rise up on the horizon of our soul.

If the progressive casts himself into the future, and the conservative into the past, the authentic reactionary does not measure his anxiety with the history of yesterday or with the history of tomorro ~ Nicolas Gomez Davila

Culture cannot be a monolithically universal phenomenon without some kind of demonic imposition of one culture over the rest of cultures. Nor is it possible to dream of a universal "Christian culture" without denying the dialectic between history and eschatology which is so central, among other things, to the eucharist itself. Thus, if there is a transcendence of cultural divisions on a universal level - which indeed must be constantly aimed at by the Church - it can only take place via the local situations expressed in and through the particular local Churches and not through universalistic structures which imply a universal Church. ~ John D. Zizioulas

Absolute trust in the reality of things begins to be shaken as the problem of truth enters upon the scene. The moment man ceases merely to live in and with reality and demands a knowledge of this reality, he moves into a new and fundamentally different relation to it. At first, to be sure, the question of truth seems to apply only to particular parts and not to the whole of reality. Within this whole different strata of validity begin to be marked off, reality seems to separate sharply from appearance. But it lies in the very nature of the problem of truth that once it arises it never comes to rest. The concept of truth conceals an immanent dialectic that drives it inexorably forward, forever extending its limits. ~ Ernst Cassirer

For this reason I get impatient with people who depict Marx's dialectic as a closed method of analysis. It is not finite; on the contrary, it is constantly expanding, and here he is explaining precisely how. We only have to review what we have already experienced in reading Capital; the movement of its argument is a perpetual reshaping, rephrasing and expansion of the field of contradictions. ~ David Harvey

In mysticism that love of truth which we saw as the beginning of all philosophy leaves the merely intellectual sphere, and takes on the assured aspect of a personal passion. Where the philosopher guesses and argues, the mystic lives and looks; and speaks, consequently, the disconcerting language of first-hand experience, not the neat dialectic of the schools. Hence whilst the Absolute of the metaphysicians remains a diagram - impersonal and unattainable - the Absolute of the mystics is lovable, attainable, alive. ~ Evelyn Underhill

Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and gives the whole show away. The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty