Roberto Unger Quotes

#1. The power worship of the Promethean amounts to a travesty of the enhancement of life.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

#2. If the self remains in its citadel, anxious to control and heavily defended, it declines in the sources of vitality. To lay the citadel open, however, is to court danger: a danger inseparable from the enhancement of life.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

#3. I regard myself as a man without charm in a country of charmers.

Roberto Unger

#4. In a world of democracies, the most deserving basis of national differences is that the different states of the world should represent a form of moral specialisation within humanity.

Roberto Unger

#5. The difference between helping and selling is just two letters. But those two letters are critically important to the success of business today.

Jay Baer

#6. One of the striking features of the form of globalisation that has now been established is that it is based on the premise that goods and even capital should be free to roam but labour must remain imprisoned within the nation state.

Roberto Unger

#7. They [Americans] believe that the terrors of vast problems yield to the effects of many small solutions.

Use little things to break big things, says Saint Paul, describing an essential feature of the psychology of hope.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

#8. At every level the greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different

Roberto Unger

#9. The embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a burst of visonary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the center of that world but on the contrary, a dependent and even hapless creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die

Roberto Unger

#10. I think it can be quite impossible to think well of yourself, so I prefer not to think about that too much. But I am very pleased, obviously.

Robert Sheckley

#11. The Amazon is not just a set of trees. It is a set of 25 million people. If we don't create real economic opportunities for them, the practical result is to encourage disorganized economic activities that results in the further destruction of the rain forest.

Roberto Unger

#12. The supreme good of life is vitality. And vitality is always seeping away.

Roberto Unger

#13. Ideal love is fostered only between two sincere, mature and independent people. Real love is not two people clinging to each other; it can only be fostered between two strong people secure in their individuality.

Daisaku Ikeda

#14. Brazil has no future as a China with fewer people.

Roberto Unger

#15. Our desires are insatiable. We seek from the limited the unlimited. We must fail. Our insatiability is a third incurable defect in human life.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

#16. In my view, a political vision is not a grab-bag of discrete problems and solutions. It is the visionary anticipation of a direction.

Roberto Unger

#17. What better use for words than to inspire:
It's not by chance desire rhymes with fire.

Joseph Roccasalvo

#18. The scientist should treasure the riddles he can't solve, not explain them away at the outset.

Roberto Unger

#19. Insofar we are death-bound, existence is urgent and frightful. Insofar as are groundless, it is vertiginous and dreamlike. Insofar as we are insatiable, it is unquiet and tormented.

Roberto Unger

#20. Bill Ayers, Frank Marshall Davis, Edward Said, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, and Jeremiah Wright. This is a group I've previously called Obama's founding fathers.

Dinesh D'Souza

#21. You need to make a decision. Either be with her and accept the bad with the good, or get out of her life. Because like it or not, you represent Christ to her, and the last thing she needs is for you to walk away when things get hard.

Tammy L. Gray

#22. At least with all the blood moved to his face he'd be able to leave the table without further embarrassing himself.

Nicole Castle

#23. Hope is more the consequence of action than its cause. As the experience of the spectator favors fatalism, so the experience of the agent produces hope.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

#24. When we imagine our Universe to be just one out of a multitude of possible worlds we devalue this world, the one we see, the one we should be trying to explain.

Roberto Unger