Jurgen Habermas Quotes

#1. Today's Islamic fundamentalism is also a cover for political motifs. We should not overlook the political motifs we encounter in forms of religious fanaticism.

Jurgen Habermas

#2. The speaker must choose a comprehensible [verstandlich] expression so that speaker and hearer can understand one another.

Jurgen Habermas

#3. Philosophy's position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name "theory of knowledge," has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy.

Jurgen Habermas

#4. Some of those drawn into the holy war had been secular nationalists only a few years before. If one looks at the biographies of these people, remarkable continuities are revealed.

Jurgen Habermas

#5. I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech act, raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated.

Jurgen Habermas

#6. Positivism stands or falls with the principle of scientism, that is that the meaning of knowledge is defined by what the sciences do and can thus be adequately explicated through the methodological analysis of scientific procedures.

Jurgen Habermas

#7. Reaching and understanding is the process of bringing about an agreement on the presupposed basis of validity claims that are mutually recognized.

Jurgen Habermas

#8. Today, the language of the market penetrates every pore and forces every interpersonal relation into the schema of individual preference.

Jurgen Habermas

#9. From a moral point of view, there is no excuse for terrorist acts, regardless of the motive or the situation under which they are carried out.

Jurgen Habermas

#10. I take as my fundamental starting point the fundamental distinction between work and interaction

Jurgen Habermas

#11. I would in fact tend to have more confidence in the outcome of a democratic decision if there was a minority that voted against it, than if it was unanimous ... Social psychology has amply shown the strength of this bandwagon effect.

Jurgen Habermas

#12. Disappointment over nationalistic authoritarian regimes may have contributed to the fact that today religion offers a new and subjectively more convincing language for old political orientations.

Jurgen Habermas

#13. The difference between political terror and ordinary crime becomes clear during the change of regimes, in which former terrorists become well-regarded representatives of their country.

Jurgen Habermas

#14. A threatened nation can react to uncertain dangers solely through administrative channels, to the truly embarrassing situation of perhaps overreacting.

Jurgen Habermas

#15. The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future ... The avant-garde must find a direction in a landscape into which no one seems to have yet ventured.

Jurgen Habermas

#16. Since the intervention in Afghanistan, we suddenly began to notice when, in political discussions, we found ourselves only among Europeans or Israelis.

Jurgen Habermas

#17. Manhattan ... capital of the 20th century, a city that has fascinated me for more than three decades.

Jurgen Habermas

#18. What was new was the symbolic force of the targets struck. The attackers did not just physically cause the highest buildings in Manhattan to collapse; they also destroyed an icon in the household imagery of the American nation.

Jurgen Habermas

#19. Each murder is one too many.

Jurgen Habermas

#20. Science can only be comprehended epistemologically , which means as one category of possible knowledge , as long as knowledge is not equated either effusively with the absolute knowledge of a great philosophy or blindly with scientistic self-understanding of the actual business of research.

Jurgen Habermas

#21. The uncertainty of the danger belongs to the essence of terrorism.

Jurgen Habermas

#22. The state is in danger of falling into disrepute due to the evidence of its inadequate resources.

Jurgen Habermas

#23. Only by externalization, by entering into social relationships, can we develop the interiority of our own person.

Jurgen Habermas

#24. The scientistic faith in a science that will one day not only fulfill, but eliminate, personal self-conception through objectifying self-description is not science, but bad philosophy.

Jurgen Habermas

#25. Freedom may never be conceived merely negatively, as the absence of compulsion. Freedom conceived intersubjectively distinguishes itself from the arbitrary freedom of the isolated individual. No one is free until we are all free.

Jurgen Habermas

#26. I consider Bush's decision to call for a war against terrorism a serious mistake. He is elevating these criminals to the status of war enemies, and one cannot lead a war against a network if the term war is to retain any definite meaning.

Jurgen Habermas

#27. Perhaps at a later point important developments will be traced back to September 11. But for now we do not know which of the many scenarios will actually hold in the future.

Jurgen Habermas

#28. The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible mutual understanding.

Jurgen Habermas

#29. I cannot imagine a context that would some day, in some manner, make the monstrous crime of September 11 an understandable or comprehensible political act.

Jurgen Habermas

#30. Osama bin Laden, the person, more likely serves the function of a stand-in. Compare the new terrorists with partisans or conventional terrorists in Israel. These people often fight in a decentralized manner in small, autonomous units, too.

Jurgen Habermas

#31. One never really knows who one's enemy is.

Jurgen Habermas

#32. If the September 11 terror attack is supposed to constitute a caesura in world history, it must be able to stand comparison to other events of world historical impact.

Jurgen Habermas

#33. [Critical social science attempts] to determine when theoretical statements grasp invariant regularities of social action as such and when they express ideologically frozen relations of dependence that can in principle be transformed.

Jurgen Habermas

#34. Partisans fight on familiar territory with professed political objectives to conquer power. This is what distinguishes them from terrorists.

Jurgen Habermas

#35. All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects that [the norm's] general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone's interests, and the consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation.

Jurgen Habermas

#36. In the U.S.A. or Europe there is no realistic way to estimate the type, magnitude, or probability of the risk, nor any way to narrow down the potentially affected regions.

Jurgen Habermas

#37. The only knowledge that can truly orient action is knowledge that frees itself from mere human interests and is based in Ideas in other words knowledge that has taken a theoretical attitude.

Jurgen Habermas

#38. Instead of the international police action we had hoped for during the war in Kosovo, there are wars again - conducted with state-of-the-art technology, but still in the old style.

Jurgen Habermas

#39. Historically, terrorism falls in a category different from crimes that concern a criminal court judge.

Jurgen Habermas

#40. Only one who takes over his own life history can see in it the realization of his self. Responsibility to take over one's own biography means to get clear about who one wants to be.

Jurgen Habermas

#41. The interpretation of a case is corroborated only by the successful continuation of a self-formative process , that is by the completion of self-reflection , and not in any unmistakable way by what the patient says or how he behaves

Jurgen Habermas

#42. Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.

Jurgen Habermas

#43. Perhaps September 11 could be called the first historic world event in the strictest sense: the impact, the explosion, the slow collapse - a gruesome reality literally took place in front of a global public.

Jurgen Habermas

#44. The clever, albeit fragile, coalition against terrorism brought together by the U.S. government might be able to advance the transition from classical international law to a cosmopolitan order.

Jurgen Habermas

#45. The misery in war-torn Afghanistan is reminiscent of images from the Thirty Years' War.

Jurgen Habermas

#46. After September 11, the European governments have completely failed. They are incapable of seeing beyond their own national scope of interests.

Jurgen Habermas

#47. Since our complex societies are highly susceptible to interferences and accidents, they certainly offer ideal opportunities for a prompt disruption of normal activities.

Jurgen Habermas

#48. The scenarios of biological or chemical warfare painted in detail by the American media during the months after September 11 only betray the inability of the government to determine the magnitude of the danger.

Jurgen Habermas