That was purely a matter of etiquette—a Byzantine ceremonial which had developed out of the necessity to drill every sentence into the masses by vulgarization and endless repetition; what was presented as right must shine like gold, what was presented as wrong must be as black as pitch; political statements had to be coloured like gingerbread figures at a fair.
Sayfa 54 - Macmillan edition published May 1941Kitabı okudu
"The drain of asceticism from everyday worldly life had been stopped by a dam, and those passionately spiritual natures which had formerly supplied the highest type of monk were now forced to pursue their ascetic ideals within mundane occupations.
But in the course of its development Calvinism added some- thing positive to this, the idea of the necessity of proving one's faith in worldly activity"
Sayfa 74Kitabı okudu
In our case, there is a more subtle dialectic between necessity and contingency: as identity depends entirely on conditions of existence which are contingent, its relatonship with them is absolutely necessary. What we find, then, is a relationship of complete imbrication between both: essence is nothing outside its accidents. But this means - and this is the second consequence -that the antagonizing force fulfils two crucial and contradictory roles at the same time. On the one hand, it 'blocks' the full constitution of the identity to which it is opposed and thus shows its contingency. But on the other hand, given that this latter identity, like all identities, is merely relational and would therefore not be what it outside the relationship with the force antagonizing it, the latter is also part of the conditions of existence of that identity.
Sayfa 21 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyor
Bence bu kitabın en iyi alıntısı
"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune-often the surfeit of our own behavior-we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars . . . as if we were villains on necessity;
fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc'd obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting-on!"
Sayfa 388Kitabı okudu
“Always such a hypocrite. I acted from necessity, just like you. We are precisely the same, you and I. We've acquired more power than any mortal should have the right to, which means we have to make the decisions no one else can. The world is our chessboard. It's not our fault if the pieces get broken.”
