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Quotes About Dialectic

The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.
~ Christopher Hitchens
I got Jackie into the suite without any outbursts of Kantian Dialectic, and as we settled into our chairs on the balcony and waited for mojitos, Kathy knocked on the door, bustling past me with a haughty glare when I let her in, and heading straight out to Jackie, her hands full of papers and her eternal phone and Starbucks cup.
~ Jeff Lindsay
The problem of postmodernism and film thus smuggles in with it the problem of modernism in film, or, in other words, the dialectic of modernism and mass culture, in which cinematic entertainments are usually regarded as a low cultural form.
~ Unknown
Like most of the left's leaders, I was a Marxist and a socialist. I believed in the "dialectic" of history and therefore, even though I knew that the societies calling themselves Marxist were ruled by ruthless dictatorships, I believed they would soon evolve into socialist democracies. I attributed their negative features to under-development and to the capitalist pasts from which they had emerged.
~ David Horowitz
Was not Hypatia the greatest philosopher of Alexandria, and a true martyr to the old values of learning? She was torn to pieces by a mob of incensed Christians not because she was a woman, but because her learning was so profound, her skills at dialectic so extensive that she reduced all who queried her to embarrassed silence. They could not argue with her, so they murdered her.
~ Iain Pears
Then you will make a law that they shall have such an education as will enable them to attain the greatest skill in asking and answering questions? Yes, he said, you and I together will make it. Dialectic, then, as you will agree, is the coping-stone of the sciences, and is set over them; no other science can be placed higher—the nature of knowledge can no further go? I agree, he said. But to whom we
~ Plato
But when a man begins to get older, he will no longer be guilty of such insanity; he will imitate the dialectician who is seeking for truth, and not the eristic, who is contradicting for the sake of amusement; and the greater moderation of his character will increase instead of diminishing the honour of the pursuit. Very true, he said. And
~ Plato
But why should women and queer people learn to forget? Generational logic underpins our investments in the dialectic of memory and forgetting;
~ Unknown
Adept as he was in the Hegelian dialectic — a system easy of abuse by those who seek to dominate thought by arbitrary flights of fancy and metaphysical verbosity — he was not slow in finding a way out of the dilemma in which socialists found themselves.
~ Ludwig von Mises
The Marxist dialectic is essentially word-fetishism. Every article of the faith is embodied in a word fetish whose double or even multiple meaning makes it possible to unite incompatible ideas and demands. The interpretation of these words, as intentionally ambiguous as the words of the Delphic Pythia, eventually brings the different parties to blows, and everyone quotes in his favour passages from the writings of Marx and Engels to which authoritative importance is attached.
~ Ludwig von Mises
In Marxism there are always two ways at least of looking at anything and everything, and the reconciliation of these views is attained only by dialectic artificialities. The commonest device is to use, according to the needs of the moment, a word to which more than one meaning may be attached. With these words, which at the same time serve as political slogans to hypnotize the mass psyche, a cult suggestive of fetishism is carried on. The Marxist dialectic is essentially a word-fetishism.
~ Ludwig von Mises
Skepticism is certainly a beneficial tool, to the extent that it yields a dialectic of ideas that can progress toward empirical resolution of difficult issues, but at present it is too commonly an attitude, a well-cultivated academic pretense, that leads to the neglect of important problems.
~ Unknown
Engaging in Socratic question-and-answer dialectic is the key and indispensable means by which to sustain this commitment to care for one's own soul.
~ Unknown
Faith is not uprooted by dialectic proof; it must already be deeply shaken by other causes to be unable to withstand the shock of argument.
~ Émile Durkheim
Dialectic, she says, describes the rational discussion between those who hold conflicting positions, to find resolution and deduce the truth through the disciplines of logic and reason. Rhetoric, meanwhile, is the art of persuasion. It makes use of invention, arrangement, delivery and style. Therefore, can the delivery and style of rhetoric take precedence over truth?
~ Unknown
Within the Nation, he [Malcolm] explained that his purpose was to present the views of Elijah Muhammad and to challenge distortions about their religion. In fact, his objectives were to turn upside down the standard racial dialectic of black subordination and white supremacy, and to show off his rhetorical skill at the expense of white authorities and Negro integrationists (185).
~ Manning Marable
Within the Nation, he [Malcolm] explained that his purpose was to present the views of Elijah Muhammad and to challenge distortions about their religion. In fact, his objectives were to turn upside down the standard racial dialectic of black subordination and white supremacy, and to show off his rhetorical skill at the expense of white authorities and Negro integrationists.
~ Manning Marable
To the dialectical partner, the question is never Who is right? Rather, the question is How do our views fit together? Nothing stands independent of its opposite; rather, the two positions have common elements that allow harmonizing and blending.
~ Unknown
The substance, the essence, the Spirit is freedom.
~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity.
~ Friedrich Engels
The true termary dialectic does not realize the synthesis, not even in the future...realization...would be death...The dialectic requires permanent revolution, that is, the self-contestimg of power, which, therefore, should not be considered as absolute
~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Dialectic is not a property of consciousness, rather consciousness is the property of dialectic. Dialectic has consciousness. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel
~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty
What then is obsolete is not the dialectic but the pretension of terminating it in an end of history, in a permanent revolution, or in a regime which, being the contestation of itself, would no longer need to be contested from the outside and, in fact, would no longer have anything outside it.
~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and "gives the whole show away." The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden
~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty