Quotes About Absolutism

He offered a crystal-clear notion of right and wrong, an unambiguous definition of good and evil. And although his perspective was absolutist and unyielding, it presented a kinder, gentler alternative to Calvinism, which had been the ecclesiastical status quo in the early years of the American republic.

Fundamentalists don't know how to make exceptions.

Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing.

It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.

The Rules were that if he got her he'd live and if he didn't he'd die, simple as that. We're dealing pretty much in binary-notational absolutism, here. Prometheus

They felt their own judgements absolute and the judgements of others idiocy or wickedness deserving the worst punishment. It was as if everyone had to believe their own story—any story, really—because if they stopped believing there would only be reality left to deal with. No one doubted, or was unsure; every individual was infallible because it was their truth, and so there could be no truth and the world was wrong.

It is possible that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads to the same practical result—ruthlessness in political life.

Whereas it seemed to me, back then, in the absolutism of my condition, that love had nothing to do with practicality; indeed, was its polar opposite. And the fact that it showed contempt for such banal considerations was part of its glory. Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love.

he certainly never regretted his love for Susan. What he did regret was that he had been too young, too ignorant, too absolutist, too confident of what he imagined love's nature and workings to be.

From love's absolutism to love's absolution? No: I don't believe in the cosy narratives of life some find necessary, just as I choke on comforting words like redemption and closure. Death is the only closure I believe in; and the wound will stay open until that final shutting of the doors. As for redemption, it's far too neat, a movie-maker's bromide; and beyond that, it feels like something grand, which human beings are too imperfect to deserve, much less bestow upon themselves.

All parties without exception, when they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism.

The idea of God is the type and foundation of the principle of authority and absolutism, which it is our task to destroy or at least to subordinate wherever it manifests itself.

Once you believe that God is speaking directly to you, there is no discussion.

Absolutism is a guarantee of objectionable morals in the same way that absolutism in government is a guarantee of objectionable government.

It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power.

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

In an absolutism, the autocrat is visible and tangible. The real despotism of republican institutions is far deeper, more insidious, because it rests on the popular delusion of self-government and independence. That is the subtle source of democratic tyranny, and, as such, it cannot be reached with a bullet.

Absolutism, in both religious and political realism, is a splendid incentive to heroic action, but a dangerous guide in immediate and concrete situations.

Muslims stand by their religion entirely. It is a sort of religious absolutism. While Europeans have stopped defending the values of their civilization. They confuse tolerance with relativism.

Lenin rejected the idea of confining the revolutionary political struggle to a small group's conspiracy to seize power. The battle against absolutism should consist, he said, not in hatching plots but in training, disciplining, and organizing the workers, in propaganda and agitation among them.

It has been observed that one common characteristic of "classical populism" in all its forms was the feeling that the "Russian state of bureaucratic absolutism has been the primordial enemy of the popular masses and their intrinsic communal-socialist tendencies."[

Competing absolutisms respect each other more than either respects those who are allergic to absolutes as an absolute principle.

By effectively proscribing all change from below without placing any constraints on the powers of rulers, such a system arrested normal development and created a situation in which, since absolutist rulers were unlikely agents of social, economic or political development, change could only be brought about by violent revolution.

By effectively proscribing all change from below without placing any restraints on the powers of rulers, such a system arrested normal development and created a situation in which, since absolutist rulers were unlikely agents of social, economic or political development, change could only be brought about by violent revolution.