Dialectic Quotes

The Soviets, where ten percent of the population controls the entire public by dictatorship. This will certainly not last long, in light of the historical dialectic

I consider myself to be quite persuasive when I want.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

Aristotle can be regarded as the father of logic. But his logic is too scholastic, full of subtleties, and fundamentally has not been of much value to the human understanding. It is a dialectic and an organon for the art of disputation.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.

The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion.

Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.

Philosophers are not honest enough in their work, although they make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic...; while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of "inspiration" most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact.

You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you.

After the revolution you have the problem of keeping things going, of sorting out all the different views. It's quite natural that revolutionaries should have different solutions, that they should split into different groups and then reform, that's the dialectic, isn't it - but at the same time they need to be united against the enemy, to solidify a new order.

Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; and science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,--I call it Dialectic,--which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true.

That's the beauty of argument, if you argue correctly, you're never wrong.

A debate is a very specific kind of performance.

I am not by any means a philosopher, although I have worked with some talented people in the discipline. But certain philosophical concepts deeply inform the way I think about the world. The idea of 'opposing truths at extremes' is a powerful concept that I came to appreciate in my twenties.

Plato's philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion.

To know one thing, you must know the opposite.

In my experience, it's common that deep truths exist at both extremes of a dialectic, and the wisest stance on an issue will incorporate 'both of the opposites within itself.'

Debates, I hate.

There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections.

Defining the terms of the debate generally dictates who's gonna' win it.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming and going: wisdom lies in the momentary.

He who frames the question wins the debate.

I'm not a polemicist; I had no business writing a polemic.

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.