Short Quotations
The Law of Morality…
“The good life posits a person or actor endowed by nature and by culture with all the capacities that are possible to him, with these capacities developed to their fullest possible degree; the person living in a world so organized and ordered as to guarantee to the person full and free access to all the means and instruments necessary to the adequate and appropriate expression of his capacities and to the realization of his acts in satisfying objects.”
The Good Life, p. 59
On work, business and economics…
“The prostitution of the work function is called ‘business’; the perversity of intellect which writes its apology is called ‘economic science.’
The Good Life, p. 295
Objective vs subjective freedom…
“Freedom in the one sense is the vacuum in which a state of mind can be conceived. This is ‘political freedom.’ In the other it is a concrete structure made up of the physical and cultural means to action. This is moral freedom. One is subjective freedom; the other, objective freedom.”
The Good Life, pp. 296-297
Morality and property…
“We overlook and ignore the material world, the world of things, which alone may be valuable; as a consequence the world of things organizes itself outside morality. We merely entangle ourselves within its blind and insentient processes and are crushed.”
The Good Life, p. 433
Subjective morality, objective conditions and the good life…
“We have a morality complete and perfect in our hearts and our states of mind, and we have the objective conditions for its realization in our industrial and religious and artistic and legal and political achievements; and yet the good life is prostrate and as yet unable to be born. Why?”
The Good Life, p. 429
Property and freedom…
“…it is in property alone that will effects itself in freedom.”
Forms of Individuality, p. 21
Urgency of the problem…
“So long as there exists the possibility of a general war, or the necessity that one man should work and live for another, there is all the refutation that can be required of the principles of organization upon which human life rests; and humanity might better risk its destiny in an intelligent effort at reconstruction than in the blind carnage that is inevitably its alternative.”
Forms of Individuality, p. 40
Interest undermining government…
“It is a fact patent to everyone that at the present moment there exists behind every throne of governmental authority an interest bodied in property which ignores the personal and cultural and spiritual purposes upon which government is supposed to rest.”
Forms of Individuality, p. 22
“The impersonal mass-interest is therefore outside and above the law of the land at the same time that it dictates the terms of the law by personal interests themselves are controlled.”
Forms of Individuality, p. 22