Quotes from Leszek Ko?akowski

The phrase 'Marxism before Marx' has no meaning, but Marx's thought would be emptied of its content if it were not considered in the setting of European cultural history as a whole, as an answer to certain fundamental questions that philosophers have posed for centuries in one form or another.

In fact, you cannot condemn torture on political grounds, because in most cases it is perfectly efficient and the torturers get what they want. You can condemn it only on moral grounds and then, necessarily, everywhere in the same way, in Batista's Cuba or in Castro's Cuba, in North Vietnam and in South Vietnam.

Many observers, including the present author, believe that the Soviet system as it developed under Stalin was a continuation of Leninism, and that the state founded on Lenin's political and ideological principles could only have maintained itself in a Stalinist form; such critics hold, moreover, that 'Stalinism' in the narrow sense, i.e. the system that prevailed until 1953, has not been affected in any essential way by the changes of the post-Stalinist era.

Marxism under Stalin cannot be defined by any collection of statements, ideas, or concepts: it was not a question of propositions as such but of the fact that there existed an all-powerful authority competent to declare at any given moment what Marxism was and what it was not.

The equation: truth = the proletarian world-view = Marxism = the party's world-view = the pronouncements of the party leadership = those of the supreme is wholly in accordance with Lenin's version of Marxism.

The disagreements between Stalin and Trotsky were real to a certain extent, but they were grossly inflated by the struggle for personal power and never amounted to two independent and coherent theories.

like all over-thrown Communist leaders he became a democrat as soon as he was ousted from power.

With the disappearance of the sacred, which imposed limits to the perfection that could be attained by the profane, arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization—the illusion that there are no limits to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is "in principle" an endlessly flexible thing, and that to deny this flexibility and this perfectibility is to deny man's total autonomy and thus to deny man himself.

Is it not reasonable to suspect that if existence were pointless and the universe devoid of meaning, we would never have achieved not only the ability to imagine otherwise, but even the ability to entertain this very thought—to wit, that existence is pointless and the universe devoid of meaning.

In politics, being deceived is no excuse.

I was then a young and omniscient student (alas, I was soon to lose both these virtues).

The search for the ultimate foundation is as much an unremovable part of European culture as is the denial of the legitimacy of this search.

Mankind can never get rid of the need for religious self-identification: who am I, where did I come from, where do I fit in, why am I responsible, what does my life mean, how will I face death? Religion is a paramount aspect of human culture. Religious need cannot be ex-communicated from culture by rationalist incantation. Man does not live by reason alone.

I am not a Kant expert and no Kantian but, I should say, a Kant sympathizer—especially where conflicts between Kantian and so-called historicist thinking are concerned, both in epistemology and in ethics.

Christian humanists were engaged in a vast enterprise to make the spiritual and intellectual riches of ancient culture available to the Christian world; they did so with no sense of unease or internal conflict, for they believed that paganism – in other words, the 'forces of nature' themselves, not yet sanctified by the blessings of incarnation – could achieve splendid things in all areas of culture.

Extremely unlikely events occur every moment and it is not a priori unthinkable that the evolution of life should be due to mere chance than that a particular order in a pack of cards should result from mechanical shuffling.

Mniej o prawdÄ™ przy tym chodzi, jak o ducha prawdy, nikt bowiem nie mo?e obieca?, ?e nie bÄ™dzie siÄ™ myliÅ', mo?e jednak przechowywa? ducha prawdy równie? w pomyÅ'kach, czyli nie wyrzeka? siÄ™ czujnej nieufnoÅ›ci do wÅ'asnych sÅ'ów.

W?? dowodzi gryzieniem, ?e ma racj?. A kto umrze od uk?szenia w??a, nie ma racji, bo nie?ywi z definicji racji nie maj?!

Messianic hopes are the counterpart of the sense of despair and impotence that overcomes mankind at the sight of its own failures.

The idea of perfect equality, i.e. an equal share of all goods for everybody, is not only unfeasible economically but is contradictory in itself: for perfect equality can only be imagined under a system of extreme despotism, but despotism itself presupposes inequality at least in such basic advantages as participation in power and access to information.

In the developed industrial countries, all social institutions for the purpose of evening out inequalities and ensuring a minimum of security (progressive taxation, health services, unemployment relief, price controls, etc.) have been created and extended at the price of a vastly expanded state bureaucracy, and no one can suggest how to avoid paying this price.