Subjective Quotes
More Subjective Quotes
The more the concept of reason becomes emasculated, the more easily it lends itself to ideological manipulation and to propagation of even the most blatant lies. … subjective reason conforms to anything.
max horkheimer— pp. 24-25 (Eclipse of Reason (1947))
[I]f knowing is work, exclusively work, then the one who knows, knows only the fruit of his own, subjective activity, and nothing else. There is nothing in his knowing that is not the fruit of his own efforts; there is nothing "received" in it. […]It is the mark of "absolute activity" (which Goethe said "makes one bankrupt, in the end"); the hard quality of not-being-able-to-receive; a stoniness of heart, that will not brook any resistance — as expressed once, most radically, in the following terrifying statement: "Every action makes sense, even criminal acts ... all passivity is senseless."
josef pieper— p. 14
— The Goethe quote is from his Maximen und Reflexionen, ed. Günther Müller (Stuttgart, 1943), no. 1415. The other quote is from Hermann Rauschning's Conversations with Hitler (Gespräche mit Hitler, 1940).
With the emergence of nuclear-missile weaponry, cybernetics, electronics, and computer equipment, any subjective approach to military problems, hare-brained plans, and superficiality can cause irreparable damage.
matvei zakharov— Quoted in "Stalin's Generals" - Page 338 - by Harold Shukman - History - 2002
Economists tell us that the 'price' of an object and its 'value' have very little or nothing to do with one another. 'Value' is entirely subjective economic value, anyway while 'price' reflects whatever a buyer is willing to give up to get the object in question, and whatever the seller is willing to accept to give it up. Both are governed by the Law of Marginal Utility, which is actually a law of psychology, rather than economics. For government to attempt to dictate a 'fair price' betrays complete misunderstanding of the entire process.
l. neil smith— Ceres, Chapter Eighteen[31], 2009
[A]t its best, entertainment is going to be a subjective thing that can't win for everyone, while at worst, a particular game just becomes a random symbol for petty tribal behavior.
john d. carmack— Quoted in John Carmack Biography.
It has been a long time since I believed in Reality. I prefer the loveliness and the terror of my subjective experiences to those coldly scientific explanations which in the long run turn out to be no more real, and far less fun, than my own fantasies and musings.
sheldon kopp— p. 20 (Even a stone can be a teacher (1985))
Terrorism for one person is a freedom fight for another. [...] If you think about it, "terrorism" is a subjective term depending on which side you are on.
— Inside al Qaeda, CNN online transcript, June 14, 2006.
The study of the structure of subjective experience.
— Bandler, Grinder, also the subtitle of Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Volume I (1980) by Robert Dilts
Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.
niels bohr— "The Unity of Human Knowledge" (October 1960)
The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.
georg brandes— pp. 18-19 (An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889))
During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge— Ch. XII (Biographia Literaria (1817))
Our subjective judgment of what seems like a good bet is irrelevant to what is actually a good bet.
Richard Dawkins— Chapter 6 “Origins and Miracles” (p. 162)
Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities his preeminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.
william james— "Reflex Action and Theism"
This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.
carl jung— General Aspects of Dream Psychology (1928)
We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.
carl jung— The Symbolic Life (1953); also in Man and His Symbols (1964)
The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him. The uses of prayer are thus only subjective.
Immanuel Kant— A lecture at Königsberg (1775), as quoted in A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (1946) by H. L. Mencken, p. 955
The camera is as subjective as we are.
bertrand russell— An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics (1927)
Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.
john searle— John R. Searle (2002) Consciousness and Language, p. 47
The new way of thinking, spawned by the cognitive revolution, shows strong promise ... Reversing previous doctrine in science, the new paradigm affirms that the world we live in is driven not solely by mindless physical forces but, more crucially, by subjective human values. Human values become the underlying key to world change.
roger wolcott sperry— No page reference found; as quoted in "Search for Beliefs to Live by Consistent with Science" in Zygon, Journal of Religion & Science 26 p. 237–258
Sperry's thinking about subjective experience, consciousness, the mind, and human values makes a powerful plea for a new scientific examination of ethics in the workings of consciousness. These ideas were crystallized in his paper "The Impact and Promise of the Cognitive Revolution" (1993).
roger wolcott sperry— Theodore J. Voneida in the National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs V.71 (1997), p. 326
The concrete is a combination of abstractions not an arbitrary or subjective combination but one that corresponds to the laws of the movement of a given phenomenon.
— p.147 (In Defense of Marxism (1942))
Are we to suppose that the only being in the universe who cannot answer prayer is that One who alone has all power at His command? The weak theology that professes to believe that prayer has merely a subjective benefit is infinitely less scientific than the action of the child who confidently appeals to a Father in heaven.
— John William Dawson, p. 461. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
As is known, the question of the objectivity or the subjectivity of probability has divided the world of science into two camps. Some maintain that there exist two types of probability, as above, others, that only the subjective exists, because regardless of what is supposed to take place, we cannot have full knowledge of it. Therefore, some lay the uncertainty of future events at the door of our knowledge of them, whereas others place it within the realm of the events themselves.
— Stanis?aw Lem, "De Impossibilitate Vitae and De Impossibilitate Vitae Prognoscendi", in A Perfect Vacuum (1971), tr. Michael Kandel (1978).
It is psychological law that whatever we desire to accomplish we must impress upon the subjective or subconscious mind.
Marden Orison swett— In: Canaan Mashonganyika “It's Do-able!: Power to Unleash Your Dream”, p.125
Today secularists do pretty much the same thing. Modern secular thought has its own dualism: It treats only the physical world as knowable and testable, while locking everything else - mind, spirit, morality, meaning - into the realm of private, subjective feelings. The so-called fact/value split.
— Nancy Pearcey, in "Christian Label" and the War against Nativity Scenes
Philosophy is not the owl of Minerva that takes flight after history has been realized in order to celebrate its happy ending; rather, philosophy is subjective proposition, desire, and praxis that are applied to the event.
— Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
Such songs belong to a group of sometimes ephemeral phenomena which might be called "subjective folklore ".
— Víctor Jara, Music on the move; The UNESCO Courier: a window ... - unesdoc
subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world.
julian jaynes— Book I, Chapter 2, p. 55
subjective reason … is inclined to abandon the fight with religion by setting up two different brackets, one for science and philosophy, and one for institutionalized mythology, thus recognizing both of them. For the philosophy of objective reason there is no such way out. Since it hold to the concept of objective truth, it must take a positive or a negative stand with regard to the content of established religion.
max horkheimer— p. 12 (Eclipse of Reason (1947))
