Jurgen Habermas Quotes

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.

Every combination of two or more human beings has both a useful aspect and a political aspect.

There are people with an explicit political bent complaining about people having political agendas while nominating stories with political agendas. Is it political to try to be diverse? Is it political to try to imagine a non-heteronormative society? Yes, because it involves politics. But how do they expect us to not write about our lives?

When will we make the same breakthroughs in the way we treat each other as we have made in technology?

The deeper we trace the political influences in history, the more are we convinced that the "will to power" has up to now been one of the strongest motives in the development of human social forms.

We do not yet have a politics that is equal to the economics around us.

The agents that move politicks are the popular passions, and those are ever ... under the command of the disturbers of society.

The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future

In politics, reality is that which is unseen. Politics is the art of combining a nation’s diverse or opposing factors to the benefit of its domestic well-being, and of saving the country from the open enmity or covetous friendship of other nations.

The workers will obtain the satisfaction of a number of material demands, and the moderates in the student movement and the teachers will put through important university reforms… There will be some progress of course, but nothing basic will have changed and we will continue to challenge the system as a whole… Besides, I don’t believe the revolution is possible overnight like that … these adjustments can only be imposed by revolutionary action.

The political value of a word must be measured not in terms of its linguistic coherence but in the way people use it.

The state, and a certain form of politics from above, take control of the Women’s Movement by bribing individual members…. The trap is to allow one woman to rise and enjoy the fruits of the struggle of many.

Men and not measures are, no doubt, the very life of politics. But then it is not the fashion to say so in public places.

There can be no finality in politics.

About 10,000 years ago, the winners of wars began incorporating the losers into larger societies. The victors found that the only way to make these larger societies work was by developing stronger governments; and one of the first things these governments had to do, if they wanted to stay in power, was suppress violence among their subjects.

Tenure protects good teachers from being fired for bad reasons.

I am for "Peace, retrenchment, and reform," the watchword of the great Liberal party thirty years ago.

Undoubtedly, one comes closer to the truth when one sees history as the expression of the class struggle rather than a series of private quarrels among kings and nobles. But precisely because such an analysis of history comes closer to the truth, it is more dangerous. It gives the illusion of full knowledge; it supplies answers to all questions, answers which merely run around in a circle repeating a few formulas.

I think Haig will be foolish, but perhaps not quite as foolish as Kissinger was, because Haig doesn't have the education Kissinger had. Haig is a little more dangerous because, I fear, he believes what he says, whereas I never got that impression from Kissinger.

In my work as a historian and in my relationships as a friend, teacher, wife, and mother, I have come to think that the most useful way to understand the past and make it work for you is to look at the trade-offs and contradictions that, however deeply buried, can be uncovered in every memory, good or bad.

I understand that, for some, everything is political.

One thing that education can do is it can provide us with an opportunity to understand one another better, and so while I've spent a lot of my time in the world of politics, I've always felt that it is really not politics that will solve this for us.

Conservatism's vulnerability is simply that it has no way to extract power from the evils America owned up to in the '60s - no way to use the sins of the past to coerce Americans into doing what it wants.

The forces that precipitate the vicious cycle of conflict on this planet do not pledge allegiance to either the left or the right or the center. They take advantage of everyone.