Quotes from Roberto Mangabeira Unger

The combination of our mortality with our groundlessness imparts to human life its pressing and enigmatic character. We struggle to in our brief time in the midst of an impenetrable darkness. A small area is lighted up: our civilizations, our sciences, our loves. We prove unable to define the place of the lighted area within a larger space devoid of light, and must go to our deaths unenlightened.

The embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a burst of visonary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the center of that world but on the contrary, a dependent and even hapless creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die

So we must run back and forth between these two suns in our firmament—the presentiment of death and awareness of life—and avoid being transfixed by either of them. If we are lucky in this uncertain middle distance, we may form attachments and projects that enhance the sentiment of life. However, even as we try our luck, death comes to us, and brings our experiment to a end.

Insofar we are death-bound, existence is urgent and frightful. Insofar as are groundless, it is vertiginous and dreamlike. Insofar as we are insatiable, it is unquiet and tormented.

Hope is more the consequence of action than its cause. As the experience of the spectator favors fatalism, so the experience of the agent produces hope.

If the self remains in its citadel, anxious to control and heavily defended, it declines in the sources of vitality. To lay the citadel open, however, is to court danger: a danger inseparable from the enhancement of life.

The road back to reality, we suggest, begins by making two affirmations about nature: the uniqueness of the universe and the reality of time. These together have an immediate consequence which is the central hypothesis of our program: that the laws of nature evolve, and they do so through mechanisms that can be discovered and probed experimentally because they concern the past.

The power worship of the Promethean amounts to a travesty of the enhancement of life.

In such a view, time is not emergent. It is, in fact, the only aspect of reality that cannot emerge from a more fundamental background. We register its reality, always and everywhere, by recognizing the differential character of change: some things change relative to other things. However, the kinds of things that there are also change, and so do the ways in which they change. That is what time is: the transformation of transformation.

They [Americans] believe that the terrors of vast problems yield to the effects of many small solutions. Use little things to break big things, says Saint Paul, describing an essential feature of the psychology of hope.

To understand your country you must love it. To love it you must, in a sense, accept it. To accept it as it is, however, is to betray it. To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that in which it shows what it might become. America - this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of the no into the yes - needs citizens who love it enough to reimagine and remake it.

the relation of mathematics to the world of temporal change and of phenomenal particularity is direct: less by induction than by what Pierce called abduction – an imaginative jumping off from an open-ended series of particulars.

Our desires are insatiable. We seek from the limited the unlimited. We must fail. Our insatiability is a third incurable defect in human life.

We must ask ourselves: what should we demand of ourselves, given the imperfections of politics and the disappointments of history.

The market order should no longer be fastened to a single dogmatic version of itself. The new vanguardism should be deepened and disseminated to achieve its revolutionary potential, lifting up the productivity of the mass of workers in the economy

The financial sector grows, it undergoes a hypertrophy. It devours not just profits but talents; and its contribution to real productive activity and innovation is completely disproportional to its parasitic relation to the economy.