Category: Thought

At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition, and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success.

John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, 1st Baron Acton (January 10, 1834 – June 19, 1902), The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877).

A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.

Umberto Eco, “Can Television Teach?” in Screen Education 31 (1979), p. 12.

This is the gravest danger that to-day threatens civilisation: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State.

José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1929).

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

José Ortega y Gasset, Man and Crisis (1962).

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), opening sentence.

Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d’état, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high degree of industrialization the whole scene changes. The day after the fall of Khrushchev, the editors of Pravda, Izvestiia, the heads of the radio and television were replaced; the army wasn’t called out. Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.

Umberto Eco, Il costume di casa (1973); as translated in Travels in Hyperreality (1986).