Final Exam

“[R]ecognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, U.N.

“D]isregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people”

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, U.N.

“remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals... but upon its inferior races”

War of the World, H.G. Wells

“looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of”

War of the World, H.G. Wells

“scrutinize[d] and studied... as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the ...creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water”

War of the World, H.G. Wells

“we come upon a contention which is so astonishing that we must dwell upon it. This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery“

Civilization and its Discontents, Freud

“I can, as often as I please, hear the voice of a child of mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible time after a friend has reached his destination that he has come through the long and difficult voyage unharmed . . . [but] If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if travelling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea- voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him”

Civilization and its Discontents, Freud

“For him studying human factors first was so important that all other

investigations, including astronomical or cosmic ones, were subordinate:

“Psychology . . . that is humanity in its entirety . . . is the only true KOSMOS. Why

should we care about the moon and the stars?”

A Tenth of a Second: A History, Canales

“Bloch’s views on reaction were consistent with the philosophy of Victor Cousin,

which placed strict limits on scientific materialism by dividing the human body

into passive and active components. It identified nature with vegetarian

passivity, sensibility, and femininity. Selfhood was in turn identified with activity,

willfulness, and masculinity”

A Tenth of a Second: A History, Canales

“During the second half of the nineteenth century, influential physiologists and

psychologists came to the conclusion that the tenth of a second was a

constitutive unit of human consciousnes”

A Tenth of a Second: A History, Canales

“This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection”

On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin

“Can it, then, be thought improbable, seeing that variations useful to man have

undoubtedly occurred, that other variations useful in some way to each being in

the great and complex battle of life, should sometimes occur in the course of

thousands of generations”

On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin

“The peoples of Asia and Africa are now animated by a keen and sincere desire to renew their old cultural contacts and develop new ones in the context of the modern world

Asian-African Conference

“Unfortunately contacts among Asian and African countries were interrupted during the past centuries”

Asian-African Conference

“AS GREGOR SAMSA awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect”

The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

“Well, supposing he were to say he was sick? But that would be very awkward and would look suspicious, since during his five years' employment he had not been ill once. The boss himself would be sure to come with the health insurance doctor, would reproach his parents for their son's laziness, and would cut all excuses short by handing the matter over to the insurance doctor, who of course regarded all mankind as perfectly healthy malingerers”

The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

“exhausting job...the trouble of constant traveling, of worrying about train connections, the bad food and irregular meals, casual acquaintances that are always new..”

The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

“Western’ civilization [a]s it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving...the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem...Europe is unable to justify itself either before the bar of ‘reason’ or ‘conscience”

Discourse on Colonialism, Cesaire

“And that is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism: that for too long it has diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been-and still is-narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist”

Discourse on Colonialism, Cesaire

“Here is the testament of a man who swung a great people into his wake. Let us watch it carefully... let us try also to discover what kind of ‘medicine’ this medicine-man has concocted, that, we may know, with greater accuracy, Exactly what to guard against, if we are to forestall the concocting of similar medicine in America”

Rhetoric of Hitlers Battle, K. Burke

“It is part of the genius of a great leader to make adversaries of different fields appear as always belonging to one category only, because to weak and unstable characters the knowledge that there are various enemies will lead only too easily to incipient doubts as to their own cause“

Rhetoric of Hitlers Battle, K. Burke

“Those who attack Hitlerism as a cult of the irrational should emend their statements to this extent: irrational it is, but it is carried on under the slogan of ‘Reason”

Rhetoric of Hitlers Battle, K. Burke

“A moment comes, which comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”

A Tryst with Destiny, Nehru

“Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this one world that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.”

A Tryst with Destiny, Nehru

“The thesis of convergence, which posits that inequality will automatically diminish as capitalism develops, has fragile theoretical and empirical foundation”

Dynamics of Inequality, Thomas Piketty

“in the 20th century it was primarily wars that razed the past to the ground and dealt the cards anew. Competition in itself will not guarantee social and democratic harmony”

Dynamics of Inequality, Thomas Piketty

“To give a concrete example, it is easier to save—and so to accumulate wealth—when you have inherited a flat and don't have to pay rent“

Dynamics of Inequality, Thomas Piketty

“Neoliberalism is . . . the conversion of every human need or desire into a profitable enterprise, from college admissions preparation to human organ transplants, from baby adoptions to pollution rights, from avoiding lines to securing legroom on an airplane”

Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown

“A subject construed and constructed as human capital both for itself and for a firm or state is at persistent risk of failure, redundancy and abandonment through no doing of its own, regardless of how savvy and responsible it is. Fiscal crises, downsizing, outsourcing, furloughs—all these and more can jeopardize us, even when we have been savvy and responsible investors and entrepreneurs”

Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown

“Speech or writing framed as straightforward assertion is privileged over more circuitous, hesitant, or questioning expression”

Inclusion and Democracy, Young

Speech norms] “falsely identify objectivity with calm and the absence of emotional expression”

Inclusion and Democracy, Young

“This is Descartes' error: the abyssal separation between body and mind“

Descartes’ Error, Damasio

“We need to understand the nature of these human beings whose actions can be destructive to themselves and to others, if we are to solve humanely the problems they pose”

Descartes’ Error, Damasio

“But European culture was not as different in this respect from Africa and Asia as they wanted to believe. They were wrong. Modernity was a false paradigm. It was itself a myth”

The Myth of Disenchatment, Josephson-Storm

“the founders of the human sciences all tended to take as given the idea that there was something distinctive and original in ‘modern’ European thought and culture, even as they treated the specifics of European history as the blueprint for universal history that all cultures were supposed to follow. Moreover, they inherited the bias that this distinctiveness was to be found in the dismissal of magic, myth, and spirits”

The Myth of Disenchatment, Josephson-Storm

“modern human societies so little value knowledges found beyond the protocols of narrowl defined scientific inquiry”

Red Alert, Wildcat

“Primary among the myths to which modern humankind faithfully adheres is the deep-seated notion that humankind constitutes the center of creation around which the rest of the world revolves”

Red Alert, Wildcat

“There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private”

The World of Wrestling, Barthes

“What is thus displayed for the public is the great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice”

The World of Wrestling, Barthes