Jurgen Habermas Quotes

The era of 'anything goes' is gone for ever.

I watch children a great deal; their idea is that rules are always negotiable, whereas you absolutely cannot joke at the airport about your toothpaste, and you cannot rollerblade in Grand Central Station. I keep running up against these things.

Where would we be without inhibitions? They're quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.

Any fool can make a rule And any fool will mind it.

There will always be a rule. There will be people who break the rules. There will be consequences. We fundamentally think these things will be true for a time. The question becomes, What are the consequences? Who enforces the consequences? What are the worst consequences?

rules exist for a reason. Rules exist because when people don't follow them, people get hurt.

Society, in the aggregate, is no fool. It is astonishing what an amount of "eccentricity" it will stand from anybody who takes the bull by the horns, too fearless or too indifferent to think of consequences.

The customs and practices of life in society sweep us along.

I know the next best thing is often the very best.

Pleasure is like a cordial - a little of it is not injurious, but too much destroys.

There is one thing that has disappeared, not just from the U.S. but from the entire world, is the idea of ever being embarrassed by anything.

There is always the other side, always.

I'm on probation, so I can't even pick my nose the right way.

People who tell you that control is bad are trying to tell you that automobile accidents and industrial accidents are good.

Some tribes [of monkeys] have taken to washing potatoes in the river before eating them, others have not. Sometimes migrating groups of potato-washers meet non-washers, and the two groups watch each other's strange behavior with apparent bewilderment. But unlike the inhabitants of Lilliput, who fought holy crusades over the question at which end to break the egg, the potato-washing monkeys do not go to war with the non-washers, because the poor creatures have no language which would enable them to declare washing a diving commandment and eating unwashed potatoes a deadly heresy.

To try to regulate the internal affairs of a family, the relations of love or friendship, or many other things of the same sort, by law or by the coercion of public opinion, is like trying to pull an eyelash out of a man's eye with a pair of tongs. They may put out the eye, but they will never get hold of the eyelash

We should encourage comrades to take the interests of the whole into account. Every Party member, every branch of work, every statement and every action must proceed from the interests of the whole Party; it is absolutely impermissible to violate this principle.

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.

A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear.

There aren't any answers, only choices

You know, when you're 23 and you get pissed, I mean drunk, you can just go crazy and it's all right. But if you're 43 and you do it, it's like your best friend's mother who used to come in pissed and everybody was really embarrassed. It just doesn't go down well, you know, after a certain age.

Girls will get together just to get together. Guys need an activity as an excuse. Otherwise it’s too homo for them to handle.

There are things you don't do in life. You don't tug on superman's cape.

When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better.

The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.