Quotes About Materialist

Love is anti-mechanical, anti-materialist: that's why bad love is still good love. It may make us unhappy, but it insists that the mechanical and the material needn't be in charge

There was a time when 'science' meant the systematic pursuit of knowledge through experimentation and observation. But it's rapidly becoming a synonym for progressive politics and materialist philosophy.

The celebrated Parisian doctor Professor Xavier Bichat developed a fully materialist theory of the human body and mind in his lectures Physiological Researches on Life and Death, translated into English in 1816. Bichat defined life bleakly as 'the sum of the functions by which death is resisted

Since the criminal mentality derives from such hypnosis by a Real Universe and the helplessness and rage induced by such metaphors, the criminal becomes, more and more, the typical person of our age. When the Real Universe becomes politicized — when the hypnotic model is based on Us-versus-Them Aristotelian logic — the criminal graduates into the Terrorist, another increasingly typical product of the materialist era.

Even when Darwin's teaching first made its appearance, it became clear at once that its scientific, materialist core, its teaching concerning the evolution of living nature, was antagonistic to the idealism that reigned in biology.

Nothing is more lethal to the effect that a ghost story should make than for the author to provide alternative materialist solution. This reduces a poem to a puzzle and confines the reader's spirit instead of enlarging it.

The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge.

I feared so-you're sentimental. You're not like me. I'm a romantic little materialist. I'm not sentimental-I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last-the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't.

A few years ago, there was a popular stage play in London—you'll have to pardon me, but I'm quoting accurately—titled Shopping and F***ing. That's an apt description of the passions of our era, the goals most of us, liberal and conservative, aspire to. Democrats are the Party of Lust, Republicans the Party of Greed—both are individualist and materialist to the core.

Whereas Absurdism in Europe seemed a logical, almost inevitable response to the irrationality of war, the analogous elements that surfaced in American drama seemed more a response to a materialist society run amok. The American-style Absurdism seemed to spring full-blown out of television advertisements and situation comedies, which had become new myth-making machines.

The classics of Marxism, while fully appreciating the significance of the Darwinian theory, pointed out the errors of which Darwin was guilty. Darwin's theory, though unquestionably materialist in its main features, is not free from some serious errors.

A major fault, for example, is the fact that, along with the materialist principle, Darwin introduced into his theory of evolution reactionary Malthusian ideas.

Our ideas do not make the world, the world makes our ideas. Marx is therefore a materialist; Hegel, an idealist.

A greedy insistence that the whole of nature and life must present itself to our voracious demand for instantaneous intelligibility is a symptom of all world-shrinking ideology, whether religiously fundamentalist or scientifically materialist. In

Epicurus was a materialist, but not a determinist. He followed Democritus in believing that the world consists of atoms and the void; but he did not believe, as Democritus did, that the atoms are at all times completely controlled by natural laws.

I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the Communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.

There is no more fatal fault in the reading of history, nor any illusion to which the human mind is more prone. To read the remote past in the light of the recent past; to think the process of the one towards the other inevitable; to regard the whole matter as a slow inexorable process, independent of the human will, still suits the materialist pantheism of our time.

Perhaps you could not find such godless, such ruthless and such materialist people as clergy.

Millions of ideas, constantly changing and shifting, drifting into consciousness and out again, and all supposedly at random, with no "soul" to direct them! No purpose, no goal, though every materialist was a living determination to destroy the idea of a soul, and of a God who had anything to do with a purely accidental universe! What a strange accident, that men should labor so purposefully to destroy the idea of purpose!

A consistent materialist would consider it as self-evident that the mind has very important innate structures, physically realized in some manner. Why should it be otherwise?

Just as Marx is not simply a materialist, insofar as he is a historical materialist, so Nietzsche is not simply an atheist, insofar as he is a historical atheist: Zarathustra is 'the most pious of all those, who do not believe in God'.

For all I know, most practicing scientists may have no opinion about the overarching cosmological questions to which this materialist reductionism provides an answer. Their detailed research and substantive findings do not in general depend on or imply either that or any other answer to such questions. But among the scientists and philosophers who do express views about the natural order as a whole, reductive materialism is widely assumed to be the only serious possibility.

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history.