Download Quotes on Freedom, Happiness, and the Critique of Civilization from HWC 205 - Prof. Michae and more Study notes Cultural History of Europe in PDF only on Docsity! HWC 205 10/20/2010 Quotes Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863) “And after all, though he is beaten when he is free, though he has no work, though he dies of hunger and has no freedom at all the queer fellow still prefers his freedom. Of course, all the socialist can do is throw up his hands and tell him that hes a fool … ant hill “Huxley A Brave New World “Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Unversal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't and ofr course, wheneever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beatuy that mattered. Still, in spite of everything , unrestricted scientific research was still permitted. People still went on talking about truth and beauty... The Critique of Enlightened Self-Interest “Oh, tell me, who first announced, who was the first to proclaim.... he would start doing good? (20) “What is to be done with the millions of facts testifying … So, then, this stubbornness and willfulness were really more agreeable than any profit.” (20-21) “Profit! What is profit? … what is bad for himself, and not what is profitable? “(21) “One's own free and voluntary wanting …. Man needs only independent wanting, whatever this independence may cost and wherever it may lead” (25-26) “Who wants to want according to a little table? …. If not a spring in an organ barrel?” (26) “You see: reason, gentlemen, is a fine thing, that is unquestionable.... Still it is life and not just the extraction of a square root”(28) “Reason knows only what it has managed to learn... consciously and unconsciously, and though it lies, it still lives.” (28) “But wanting is very often, and even for the most part … is useful and sometimes even praiseworthy?” (29) “I believe in this, I will answer for this, because the whole human enterprise seems indeed to consist in man's proving to himself every moment that he is a man and not a spring!” (31) The Critique of Civilization and Utopias “ … all these beautiful systems, all these theories that explain to mankind its true …. becomes less bloodthirsty and less capable of war.” (22-23) “Why, look around you: blood is flowing in rivers, and in such a jolly way besides... What is it that civilization softens in us?” (23) “Civilization cultivates only a versatility of sensations in man, and … to whom the various Attilas and Stenka Razins sometimes could not hold a candle?” (23) “You believe in a crystal edifice, forever indestructible;... and it will be impossible to put out one's tongue at it even on the sly.” (35) “Destroy my desires, wipe out my ideals … my entire arrangement is a hoax? Can that be the purpose?
