Absolutism Quotes

“George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism. What the president should have done, in the unlikely event that he wanted the support of America's peace-mongers, was to describe a confrontation with Saddam as the 'lesser evil.' This is a term the Left can appreciate. Indeed, 'lesser evil' is part of the essential tactical rhetoric of today's Left, and has been deployed to excuse or overlook the sins of liberal Democrats, from President Clinton's bombing of Sudan to Madeleine Albright's veto of an international rescue for Rwanda when she was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Among those longing for nuance, moral relativism—the willingness to use the term evil, when combined with a willingness to make accommodations with it—is the smart thing: so much more sophisticated than 'cowboy' language.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

“It is reasonable to love the Absolute absolutely for the same reason it is reasonable to love the relative relatively.”
― Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

“People subscribe to absolutism or relativism because it gives their minds stability. It doesn’t matter what the choice is. Our beliefs underpin our egos. So, people end up taking sides. It doesn’t matter what side you are on! Everyone here on Earth has a role to play.”
― Abhaidev, The Influencer: Speed Must Have a Limit

“I saw exactly one picture of Marx and one of Lenin in my whole stay, but it's been a long time since ideology had anything to do with it. Not without cunning, Fat Man and Little Boy gradually mutated the whole state belief system into a debased form of Confucianism, in which traditional ancestor worship and respect for order become blended with extreme nationalism and xenophobia. Near the southernmost city of Kaesong, captured by the North in 1951, I was taken to see the beautifully preserved tombs of King and Queen Kongmin. Their significance in F.M.-L.B. cosmology is that they reigned over a then unified Korea in the 14th century, and that they were Confucian and dynastic and left many lavish memorials to themselves. The tombs are built on one hillside, and legend has it that the king sent one of his courtiers to pick the site. Second-guessing his underling, he then climbed the opposite hill. He gave instructions that if the chosen site did not please him he would wave his white handkerchief. On this signal, the courtier was to be slain. The king actually found that the site was ideal. But it was a warm day and he forgetfully mopped his brow with the white handkerchief. On coming downhill he was confronted with the courtier's fresh cadaver and exclaimed, 'Oh dear.' And ever since, my escorts told me, the opposite peak has been known as 'Oh Dear Hill.'

I thought this was a perfect illustration of the caprice and cruelty of absolute leadership, and began to phrase a little pun about Kim Jong Il being the 'Oh Dear Leader,' but it died on my lips.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“Historians of the sentimental school have sometimes regretted that royalty became absolute, while at the same time rejoicing that it installed plebeians in office. They deceive themselves. Royalty exalted plebeians just because it aimed at becoming absolute; it became absolute because it had exalted plebeians.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, ON POWER: The Natural History of Its Growth

“She takes after Laura in that respect: the same tendency towards absolutism, the same refusal to compromise, the same scorn for the grosser human failings. To get away with that, you have to be beautiful. Otherwise it seems mere peevishness.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“The modern absolutism, which we find the most natural thing in the world, would have been quite beyond the dreams of the most absolute of kings.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good

“The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.”
― Alexander von Humboldt

“Every category has its snobs: music, books, movies. There are so many things a man is only pressured into liking or disliking.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“The challenge that faced the English in the seventeenth century was how to curb the absolute power of the monarch. In the twenty-first century, it is the markets that have taken on the mantle of absolutism, placing themselves above the jurisdiction of national governments. Holding the king to account was unprecedented and went against custom and tradition - holding the global markets to account is just as audacious and just as necessary.”
― Billy Bragg, The Three Dimensions of Freedom

“A man demonstrates his rationality, not by a commitment to fixed ideas, stereotyped procedures, or immutable concepts, but by the manner in which, and the occasions on which, he changes those ideas, procedures, and concepts.”
― Stephen Toulmin

“In insisting that personal habit and political action be one and the same, absolutist moralizing limits the possibilities of both.”
― Heather Paxson, Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America (California Studies in Food and Culture)

“God gave us His Word so we could know truth. His truth. The whole truth. And nothing but the truth.”
― Patty Houser, A Woman's Guide to Knowing What You Believe: How to Love God With Your Heart and Your Mind

“A rejection of absolutism, in all its forms, may sometimes slip into moral relativism or even nihilism, an erosion of values that hold society together, but for most of our history it has encouraged the very process of information gathering, analysis, argument, and persuasion which allows us to make better, if not perfect, choices – not only about the means to our ends, but also the ends themselves.”
― Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

“In an absolutism, the autocrat is visible and tangible. The real despotism of republican institutions is far deeper, more insidious, because it rests on the popular delusion of self-government and independence. That is the subtle source of democratic tyranny, and, as such, it cannot be reached with a bullet.”
― Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist

“Whereas it seemed to me, back then, in the absolutism of my condition, that love had nothing to do with practicality; indeed, was its polar opposite. And the fact that it showed contempt for such banal considerations was part of its glory. Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Beauty” is not universal or changeless, though the West pretends that all ideals of female beauty stem from one Platonic Ideal Woman; the Maori admire a fat vulva, and the Padung, droopy breasts.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“The clock indicates the moment - but what does eternity indicate?”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“The Bible is clear: Truth exists. It can be known. And when we ground our beliefs in it, we are rational.”
― Patty Houser, A Woman's Guide to Knowing What You Believe: How to Love God With Your Heart and Your Mind

“But what are theses "essentials"? They are the lasting, unchanging, inconrruptible things whose value lies, above all, in their remoteness from mere actuality and chance. On the other hand, the concrete and the direct, the accidental and the individual - whose things which the art of the Quattrocento considered the most interesting and substantial elements in reality - are regarded by this art as inessentials. The elite of the High Renaissance creates the fiction of a timeless valid, "eternally human" art because it wants to think of its own influence and position as timeless, imperishable, and immutable. In reality, of course, its art is just a time conditioned, just as limited and transitory, with its own standards of value and criteria of beauty, as the art of any other period. For even the idea of timelessness is the product of a particular time, and the validity of absolutism just as relative as that of relativism.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque

“Like all the forms of life and culture of the age, first of all the mercantilism economic system, the aesthetic of classicism of guided by the principles of absolutism - the absolute primacy of the political conception over all the other expressions of cultural life. The special characteristic of the new social and economic forms is the anti-individualistic tendency derived from the idea of the absolute state. Mercantilism is also, in contrast to the older form of profit economy, based on state-centralism, not on individual units, and it attempts to eliminate the regional centres of trade and commerce, the municipalities and the corporations - that is to say, to put state-autonomy in the place of separate autarchies.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque

“Mind, body, and soul united as one entity
Physically, mentally, emotionally with inner peace
Remove one’s ego, humanity connecting, and not being selfish
Avoid absolutism—the middle path leads the way!”
― Joseph S. Spence Sr.

“If you reject Absolute Truth, as Discordians do, you are thereby claiming that any doxa (opinion, belief ) is as valid as any other doxa, and thus we enter the absurdist world of non-knowledge, of “all truths” = “all lies”. There is neither truth nor falsehood, just what people arbitrarily choose to call truth or falsehood at any instant, according to their shifting beliefs, opinions and speculations. This is exactly what the Discordians subscribe to in their demented war against knowledge and truth. Discordians are ignoramuses who oppose and sneer at reason and logic. They are those who burn down the Tree of Knowledge , without ever having eaten from it. Instead, they have devoured the fruit of the Tree of Ignorance.”
― Brother Cato, Illuminism Contra Discordianism

“Every human position has a problem with it. Believed in too much, it slides into error. It's not that no position is correct; it's that no position is correct for long. We're perpetually slipping out of absolute virtue and failing to notice, blinded by our desire to settle in--to finally stop fretting about things and relax forever; to find an agenda and stick with it.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life