Radical Thought Quotes

I think Noam Chomsky is a national treasure - make that an international treasure.

[Rousseau] has not had the precaution to throw any veil over his sentiments; and as he scorns to dissemble his contempt of established opinions, he could not wonder that all the zealots were in arms against him.

All political ideas cannot and should not be channeled into the programs of our two major parties. History has amply proved the virtue of political activity by minority, dissident groups, who innumerable times have been the vanguard of democratic thought and whose programs were ultimately accepted.

We cannot sway extremists with rational thought or with our ideas of right and wrong.

Nobody knows what self-radicalized means, and that's one of the weird things about the way that we talk about terrorism. We talk about radicalization as though it were a thing, as though you could sort of track it and identify it, and that's not the case.

We create revolution by living it.

I'm a radical, and I always have been.

Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with - the love of life

It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us unintelligibly, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.

These words are more revolutionary than anything written by Robespierre, Marx, or Lenin.

There must be something in the water in Minnesota because historically, despite its seemingly homogeneous population, the state has produced some of our more radical political thinkers, and its people have put their prejudices aside to vote for them.

Islam comes after everything else fails.

Extremist thought is about to overwhelm the world.

The saintly poet was without knowing it, the first radical and the first communist of his century.

The last book I read was Noam Chomsky on anarchism; maybe I will become an anarchist.

...it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.

Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt.

The revolutionary and critical thinker is in a certain way always outside of his society while of course he is at the same time also in it.

The history of intellectual progress is written in the lives of infidels.

I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!

I am a radical in thought (and principle) and a conservative in method (and conduct).

Yesterday's dangerous idea is today's orthodoxy and tomorrow's cliché.

I persist in preferring philosophers to rabbis priests imams ayatollahs and mullahs. Rather than trust their theological hocus-pocus I prefer to draw on alternatives to the dominant philosophical historiography: the laughers materialists radicals cynics hedonists atheists sensualists voluptuaries. They know that there is only one world and that promotion of an afterlife deprives us of the enjoyment and benefit of the only one there is. A genuinely deadly sin.

Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.

I've developed my anarchism, my critique of Marxism, which has been the most advanced bourgeois ideology I know of, into a community of ideas and ultimately a common sense of responsibilities and commitments.