“The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”

Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze - “The fundamental problem of political...” 1

Similar quotes

“The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.”

Baruch de Spinoza
Read more

“Philosophy is "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.”

William James
Read more

“At one time I had given much thought to why men were so very rarely capable of living for an ideal. Now I saw that many, no, all men were capable of dying for one.”

Hermann Hesse
Read more

“Financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long-run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with Communism, lies the threat to Capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound.”

John Kenneth Galbraith
Read more

“Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection;”

Jennifer Egan
Read more