Quotes & Sayings About Absolutism

As liberals, men like Richter viewed socialism as the great modern counter-revolution, and believed that the achievement of the socialist goal would lead both to appalling poverty and state absolutism. There was nothing in the socialist doctrine of the time that would suggest otherwise. — Ralph Raico

The principle of evil in Europe is the enervating spirit of Russian absolutism. — Lajos Kossuth

The law of love is the ultimate law because it is the negation of law; it is absolute because it concerns everything concrete. The paradox of final revelation, overcoming the conflict between absolutism and relativism, is love. — Paul Tillich

If a man can realize his divine nature with the help of an image, would it be right to call that a sin? Nor, even when he has passed that stage, should he call it an error. [ ... ] man is not traveling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower to higher truth. To him all the religions from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, mean so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realize the Infinite, each determined by the conditions of its birth and association, and each of these marks a stage of progress; and every soul is a young eagle soaring higher and higher, gathering more and more strength till it reaches the Glorious Sun. — Swami Vivekananda

Every step which leads from capitalism toward planning is necessarily a step nearer to absolutism and dictatorship. The — Ludwig Von Mises

Not only was one cartoonist gunned down, but riots erupted around the world, resulting in the deaths of scores. No one could say toward what positive social end, yet free speech absolutists were unchastened. — Garry Trudeau

In general, however, these gentlemen, the reformers, legislators, and politicians, do not desire to exercise an immediate despotism over mankind. No, they are too moderate and too philanthropic for that. They only contend for the despotism, the absolutism, the omnipotence of the law. — Frederic Bastiat

The absolutist takes himself to read nature in her very own language, but the relativist insists that nature does not speak, and we hear only what we have elected to hear. — Simon Blackburn

Most people believe you have to have some moral absolutes if you want to hold back chaos. — Peter Kreeft

Muslims stand by their religion entirely. It is a sort of religious absolutism. While Europeans have stopped defending the values of their civilization. They confuse tolerance with relativism. — Bassam Tibi

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. — Christopher Hitchens

Ivan showed that in his time and place the only antidote to chaos was absolutism. — Robert D. Kaplan

The idea of God is the type and foundation of the principle of authority and absolutism, which it is our task to destroy or at least to subordinate wherever it manifests itself. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

The French have a penchant for absolutism, for thinking that things are all one way or all another, which is why their politics are marked by a general inability to compromise and why they tend to hold their personal opinions until the bitter end, even after they have clearly lost an argument. — Mark Zero

Until the end of the nineteenth century these undergraduates never numbered more than a few thousand. Entirely on their own, however, and in
defiance of the most integrated absolutism of the time, they aspired to liberate and provisionally did
contribute to the liberation of forty million muzhiks. Almost all of them paid for this liberation by suicide,
execution, prison, or madness. The entire history of Russian terrorism can be summed up in the struggle
of a handful of intellectuals to
abolish tyranny, against a background of a silent populace. Their debilitated victory was finally betrayed.
But by their sacrifice and even by their most extreme negations they gave substance to a new standard of
values, a new virtue, which even today has not ceased to oppose tyranny and to give aid to the cause of
true liberation. — Albert Camus

We humans, through old habits, and because of the inherent structure of human knowledge have a tendency to make static, definite, and, in a way, absolutistic one-valued statements. But when we fight absolutism, we quite often establish, instead, some other dogma equally silly and harmful. For instance, an active atheist is psycho-logically as unsound as a rabid theist. — Alfred Korzybski

Absolutism is a guarantee of objectionable morals in the same way that absolutism in government is a guarantee of objectionable government. — Robert Briffault

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

In insisting that personal habit and political action be one and the same, absolutist moralizing limits the possibilities of both. — Heather Paxson

Where does it all begin? History has no beginnings, for everything that happens becomes the cause or pretext for what occurs afterwards, and this chain of cause and pretext stretches back to the Palaeolithic age, when the first Cain of one tribe murdered the first Abel of another. All war is fratricide, and there is therefore an infinite chain of blame that winds its circuitous route back and forth across the path and under the feet of every people and every nation, so that a people who are the victims of one time become the victimisers a generation later, and newly liberated nations resort immediately to the means of their former oppressors. The triple contagions of nationalism, utopianism and religious absolutism effervesce together into an acid that corrodes the moral metal of a race, and it shamelessly and even proudly performs deeds that it would deem vile if they were done by any other. — Louis De Bernieres

Religion and ethics were not always - or even frequently - mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often deflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice. — Dan Simmons

The only real recourse that [Russian] people had against tsarist rule was violence and rebellion. It was once remarked that Russia's constitution was absolutism moderated by assassination. — Alan Beattie

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

If you don't have the faith in principles and you don't believe in the absolutism of the truth then you won't be able achieve anything in life. — Sunday Adelaja

If I hear someone say something, and they're 100 per cent about it, then it's almost inevitable that I'll take the opposite view. I guess I feel at odds with things like society. Absolutism is always a trigger for me. — Andy Serkis

The man of authentic self-confidence is the man who relies on the judgment of his own mind. Such a man is not malleable; he may be mistaken, he may be fooled in a given instance, but he is inflexible in regard to the absolutism of reality, i.e., in seeking and demanding truth. — Ayn Rand

Relativity must replace absolutism in the realm of morals as well as in the spheres of physics and biology. — Thomas Cochrane

I have no intention of sharing my authority. — Louis XVI Of France

Hard edges make truth and by necessity, truth is unbending. Unlike truth's absolutism, justice is a qualitative substance; it is not an absolute tenet. Justice must be pliable in order to meet the needs of more than one person or one group. Justice goes against separation; it is a form of human superglue. Justice is what binds us as people. No human is capable of measuring out or dispensing unqualified justice. Justice naturally seeks conciliation and demands compromise. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Moral relativism says morality is relative, not absolute, I want to show moral relativism, in its popular form, is logically incoherent. — Peter Kreeft

The interests of the state must come first. — Louis XVI Of France

There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism. [ ... ] The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power ... the Kingdom of God is anarchy. — Nikolai Berdyaev

One king, one law, one faith. — Louis XVI Of France

As Camille Paglia's success has demonstrated, what is most marketable is absolutism and attitude undiluted by thought. — Wendy Kaminer

produced a race of heroes, so not less surely did the growth of luxury and absolutism, assisted by the narrow-mindedness of a dynasty of bigots, lose for Portugal the lofty place which her heroes had won for her. These are things well worth pondering upon and lessons well worth learning, for the great value of the study of history is in teaching such truths as these - truths which are eternal, while nations wax and wane. The — H. Morse Stephens

We Hindus do not merely tolerate, we unite ourselves with every religion, praying in the mosque of the Mohammedan, worshipping before the fire of the Zoroastrian, and kneeling to the Cross of the Christian. We know that all religions alike, from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, are but so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realize the Infinite. So we gather all these flowers and, binding them together with the cords of love, make them into a wonderful bouquet of worship. — Seraphim Rose

One reason for the decline in moral values is that the world has invented a new, constantly changing and undependable standard of moral conduct referred to as "situational ethics." Now, individuals define good and evil as being adjustable according to each situation; this is in direct contrast to the proclaimed God-given absolute standard: "Thou shalt not!"-as in "Thou shalt not steal". — David B. Haight

All parties without exception, when they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies where we are not afraid of the police; we have extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have those things, then you have the kind of responsibility that a person does not have if he or she is slaving seventy hours a week to put food on the table; a responsibility at the very least to inform yourself about power. Beyond that, it is a question of whether you believe in moral certainties or not. — Noam Chomsky

Above all, creators remain drawn to the age-old paradoxes that philosophy grapples with [and] ... that art occasionally resolves ... the problem of the one and the many; unity and variety; determinism and freedom; mechanism and vitalism; good and evil; time and eternity; the plenum and the void; moral absolutism and relativism ... These are the basic problems of human existence, and as far as we possibly can we arrange things to forget them. — Frank Barron

There is nothing quite like the moral absolutism of the young. -Hodge — Cassandra Clare

Moral relativism has a reputation for being compassionate, caring and humane, but it is an extremely useful philosophy for tyrants. — Peter Kreeft

There is nothing," he added, "quite like the moral absolutism of the young. It's easy, as a child, to believe in good and evil, in light and dark. — Cassandra Clare

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

I am a firm believer that there is rarely a straight line between good and evil. — Nicholas Denmon

In Europe, where climate change absolutism is at its strongest, the quasi-religion of greenery in general and the climate change issue in particular have filled the vacuum of organised religion, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as a form of blasphemy. — Nigel Lawson

Philosophically, I believe that libertarianism - and the wider creed of sound individualism of which libertarianism is a part - must rest on absolutism and deny relativism. — Murray Rothbard

For centuries it was never discovered that education was a function of the State, and the State never attempted to educate. But when modern absolutism arose, it laid claim to everything on behalf of the sovereign power ... When the revolutionary theory of government began to prevail, and Church and State found that they were educating for opposite ends and in a contradictory spirit, it became necessary to remove children entirely from the influence of religion. — Lord Acton

We had principles in mathematics that were granted to be absolute in mathematics for over 800 years, but new science has gotten rid of those absolutism, gotten forward other different logics of looking at mathematics, and sort of turned the way we look at it as a science altogether after 800 years. — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Their usual mistaken premise is that they affirm some consensus among people, at least among tame peoples, concerning certain moral principles, and then conclude that these principles must be unconditionally binding also for you and me-or conversely, they see that among different peoples moral valuations are necessarily different and infer from this that no morality is binding-both of which are equally childish. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The absolutist parades his good solid grounding in observation, reason, objectivity, truth and fact; the relativist sees only fetishes. — Simon Blackburn

If we move in the direction of biblial absolutism how can we escape turning the New Testament into a Christian Torah and the gospel into a new law? Once we do that, religious fascism with all its sectarian ugliness cannot be far away. Far better a mistaken Christian (a heretic) who has somehow caught the Spirit of Christ, than an orthodox Protestant who thinks that the Spirit is mediated to him through the letter of correct theology. — Robert D. Brinsmead

In a bravura demonstration of stonewalling, righteousness, and hurt sincerity, Steve Jobs successfully took to the stage the other day to deny the problem, dismiss the criticism, and spread the blame among other smartphone makers.". "This is a level of modern marketing, corporate spin, and crisis management about which you can only ask with stupefied incredulity and awe: How do they get away with it? Or, more accurately, how does he get away with it?" Wolff attributed it to Jobs's mesmerizing effect as "the last charismatic individual." Other CEOs would be offering abject apologies and swallowing massive recalls, but Jobs didn't have to. "The grim, skeletal appearance, the absolutism, the ecclesiastical bearing, the sense of his relationship with the sacred, really works, and, in this instance, allows him the privilege of magisterially deciding what is meaningful and what is trivial. — Walter Isaacson

We learned long ago that liberty could be preserved only by limiting in some way the freedom of action of individuals; that otherwise liberty would necessarily yield to absolutism; and in the same way we have learned that unless there be regulation of competition, its excesses will lead to the destruction of competition, and monopoly will take its place. — Louis D. Brandeis

It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power. — Emma Goldman

Does it seem to you impossible to imagine anything more inextricable than the social contract, when you think of the frightful number of relations that it must regulate
something like squaring the circle, or finding perpetual motion? That is the reason why, wearied of the struggle, you fall back on absolutism and force. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

The theorizing mind tends always to the over-simplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested. — William James

I saw in States' rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy ... Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization, and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo. — Lord Acton

Peace cannot be built on exclusivism, absolutism, and intolerance. But neither can it be built on vague liberal slogans and pious programs gestated in the smoke of confabulation. There can be no peace on earth without the kind of inner change that brings man back to his "right mind." p. 31 — Thomas Merton

When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion. — Ayn Rand

The antagonistic exponents of freedom and absolutism must thus meet at last and then will be fought the mighty battle on which the world will look with breathless interest; for on its issue the freedom or the slavery of the world will depend. — Christopher Hitchens

Don't succumb to the fear; don't mistake the absolutism of Khan's opposition for morality — Amy Waldman

The saving principles and doctrines of the Church are established, fixed, and unchangeable. — James E. Faust

According to the moral absolutism that characterizes McCandless's beliefs, a challenge in which a successful outcome is assured isn't a challenge at all. — Jon Krakauer

At some point free expression absolutism becomes childish and unserious. — Garry Trudeau

Those who claim absolutism is merely a myth are right that it has been misused simply as a byword for political centralisation. — Peter Wilson

For now, decisions are upon us and we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate. — Barack Obama

The absolutist trumpets his plain vision; the relativist sees only someone who is unaware of his own spectacles. — Simon Blackburn

The Bible is clear: Truth exists. It can be known. And when we ground our beliefs in it, we are rational. — Patty Houser

Some forms of absolutism are not bad; they may even be heroic. — D. A. Carson

Thomas Jefferson had rather serious concerns about the fate of the democratic experiment.28 He feared the rise of a new form of absolutism that was more ominous than the British rule overthrown in the American Revolution. He distinguished in his later years between what he called "aristocrats and democrats."29 And then he went on to say, "I hope we shall ... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial and bid defiance to the laws of our country."30 He also wrote, "I sincerely believe ... that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies."31 That's the kind of quote from a Founding Father you don't see too much. — Noam Chomsky

By exclaiming that "there are no absolute truths" the postmodern stance is also claiming that the statement it just made is an absolute truth - trying to have it both ways, rejecting absolutism with absolutism. — Gudjon Bergmann

It is reasonable to love the Absolute absolutely for the same reason it is reasonable to love the relative relatively. — Peter Kreeft

The uniting of Orthodoxy with state absolutism came about on the soil of a non-belief in the Divineness of the earth, in the earthly future of mankind; Orthodoxy gave away the earth into the hands of the state because of its own non-belief in man and mankind, because of its nihilistic attitude towards the world. Orthodoxy does not believe in the religious ordering of human life upon the earth, and it compensates for its own hopeless pessimism by a call for the forceful ordering of it by state authority. — Nikolai Berdyaev

It is possible that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads to the same practical result - ruthlessness in political life. — Richard Hofstadter