Top 31 Dialectical Quotes
#1. The world is not dialectical - it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.
Jean Baudrillard
#2. Nirvana is something that cannot be known here. I know it seems incongruous, but it is only incongruous from the perspective of the dialectical consciousness of division, of time and space
Frederick Lenz
#3. Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.
Robert Smithson
#4. Marxism is not only the theory of socialism, it is an integral world outlook, a philosophical system, from which Marx's proletarian socialism logically follows. This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism.
Joseph Stalin
#5. The dialectical movement of economics, politics, and military power is folding and swirling like weather. Politics is being reshaped by military failure. Military failure is being shaped by economics.
Stan Goff
#6. To fail to exhibit that we take truth seriously at those points where there is a cost in our doing so, is to push the next generation in the relative, dialectical millstream that surrounds us.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#7. All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#8. When two friends, like you and me, are in the mood to chat, we have to go about it in a gentler and more dialectical way. By 'more dialectical,' I mean not only that we give real responses, but that we base our responses solely on what the interlocutor admits that he himself knows.
Plato
#9. The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.
Norman Mailer
#10. Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.
Rollo May
#11. We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.
Susan Sontag
#12. For the word is dialectical in itself and at the same time is integrated into the whole of existence. By this I mean that the word is intended to be lived.
Jacques Ellul
#13. Socrates splits himself into two, so that there are two Socrates: the Socrates who knows in advance how the discussion is going to end, and the Socrates who travels the entire dialectical path along with his interlocutor.
Pierre Hadot
#14. Dialectical materialism works like cocaine, let's say. If you sniff it once or twice, it may not change your life. If you use it day after day, though, it will make you into an addict, a different man.
Nicolae Ceausescu
#15. What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#16. Sorry, I'm still a dialectical materialist.
Fidel Castro
#17. The comprehensive mind is always dialectical.
Plato
#18. No authentic conservative metaphysic can be operable when the discipline of God and the discipline of the soul have been ceded to the doxai, the dialectical structures and superstructures of modern life.
George A. Panichas
#20. Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tensions between the poles of disorder and order.
Walter Benjamin
#21. I write when the urge hits me, getting the words down as fast as I can type and then I step back from what I just wrote and start a dialectical process where I begin challenging my own writing.
Donald McKay
#22. The natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent of the materialism represented by Marx, i.e., he must be a dialectical materialist.
Vladimir Lenin
#23. In the eyes of dialectical philosophy, nothing is established for all times, nothing is absolute or sacred.
Karl Marx
#24. Heaven cannot but be high. Earth cannot but be broad. The sun and moon cannot but revolve. All creation cannot but flourish. To do so is their TAO. But it is not from extensive study that this may be known, nor by dialectical skill that his may be made clear. The true sage will have none of these.
Zhuangzi
#25. The dialectical change of mind that occurs in Buddhism is not simply the assimilation of a new philosophical basis or religious basis for viewing and interpreting experience. Rather it is the complete structural revision of that which is.
Frederick Lenz
#26. Poetry and the arts can't exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram
remain inaccessible to this state of mind.
Marshall McLuhan
#27. Dialectical thought is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion.
Leon Trotsky
#28. As a dialectical teacher, I have had many lives where I have taught Zen and Tibetan Buddhism and mysticism. I teach in many different modalites. But the theme that unites them - is love.
Frederick Lenz
#29. As a scientist, I am not sure anymore that life can be reduced to a class struggle, to dialectical materialism, or any set of formulas. Life is spontaneous and it is unpredictable, it is magical. I think that we have struggled so hard with the tangible that we have forgotten the intangible.
Diane Frolov
#30. Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.
Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer
#31. History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.
Karl Marx
