Quotes About Gellner

#1. The whole schizophrenia angle interested me. When I first started working on it, I thought I would play up that angle more than I ended up doing. The religious aspect of the story was also a draw.

Chester Brown

#2. [I am a humble adherent of] ... Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalism.

Ernest Gellner

#3. It is precisely by binding things together that traditional visions perpetuate themselves and the prejudgments contained within them; and it is by insisting on prising things apart that we have liberated ourselves from them

Ernest Gellner

#4. He who possesses a reasonable, sound theoretical equipment will perceive correctly, however neurotic or wicked he may be personally; he who lacks it or possesses an unsound one, will perceive incorrectly, however pure of neurotic tensions or compulsions he may be.

Ernest Gellner

#5. The Times' new credibility committee report that was issued on Monday very specifically said they will be putting in a policy that reporters must get permission from their department heads to appear on television, which I think is a really good thing.

Daniel Okrent

#6. People are even more reluctant to admit that man explains nothing, than they were to admit that God explains nothing.

Ernest Gellner

#7. But the whole idea of knowledge, even, or especially, of oneself and one's own inner states, attained by direct contact and not dependent on theoretical and conceptual assumptions, is absurd.

Ernest Gellner

#8. Who looks in the sun will see no light else; but also he will see no shadow. Our life revolves unceasingly, but the centre is ever the same, and the wise will regard only the seasons of the soul.

Henry David Thoreau

#9. People tried to force me to feel better. But the only things that worked were time and distraction. Distract yourself. Stay busy. Count marshmallows, study frogs, whatever it takes. Time heals all wounds. It just does.

Carrie Firestone

#10. Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist ...

Ernest Gellner

#11. Obstruction of mobility, where it occurs, is one of the most serious and intractable problems of industrial society.

Ernest Gellner

#12. A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.

Ernest Gellner

#13. Capital, like capitalism, seems an overrated category.

Ernest Gellner

#14. America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it.

Ernest Gellner

#15. Ideas, and even the detection of errors, require more than care and caution.

Ernest Gellner

#16. It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.

Ernest Gellner

#17. Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak.

Ernest Gellner

#18. I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don't think of.

Diane Arbus

#19. Civil Society is a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather than imposed by birth or sustained by awesome ritual. You can join the Labour Party without slaughtering a sheep ...

Ernest Gellner

#20. Tribalism never prospers, for when it does, everyone will respect it as a true nationalism, and no-one will dare call it tribalism.

Ernest Gellner

#21. The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.

Ernest Gellner

#22. The strong belief that the interests of a particular nation-state are of primary importance. Also, the belief that a people who share a common language, history, and culture should constitute an independent nation, free of foreign domination.

Ernest Gellner

#23. Just as every girl should have a husband, preferably her own, so every culture must have its state, preferably its own.

Ernest Gellner

#24. Nowledge which ... transcends the bounds, the prejudices and prejudgements of any one society and culture is not an illusion but, on the contrary, a glorious and luminous reality. Just how it was achieved remains subject to debate.

Ernest Gellner