Superstructure Quotes & Sayings

According to Hegel
to use the Marxist terminology
Religion is only an ideological superstructure that is born and exists solely in relation to a real substructure. This substructure, which supports both religion and philosophy, is nothing but the totality of human actions realized during the course of universal history, that history in and by which man has created a series of specifically human worlds, essentially different from the natural world. It is these social worlds that are reflected in the religious and philosophical ideologies, and therefore
to come to the point at once
absolute knowledge, which reveals the totality of Being, can be realized only at the end of history, in the last world created by man. — Alexandre Kojeve

For better or worse, there is not a situation in one's daily life that does not have feminist subtext, superstructure, implications and one is constantly aware of it, even when you want to rest it stands up and hits you in the face. — Margo Jefferson

Unlike these powerful grown-ups, children have no ideologies to reinforce, no superstructure of political opinion to promote, no civic equanimity or image to defend, no personal reputation to secure. — Jonathan Kozol

Sadism dominates the culture. It runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, is at the core of pornography, and fuels the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective. This hypermasculinity has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed, and the sick ... We accept the system handed to us and seek to find a comfortable place within it. We retreat into the narrow, confined ghettos created for us and shut our eyes to the deadly superstructure of the corporate state. — Chris Hedges

Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality. — C. G. Jung

I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself. — Isaac Asimov

Land: A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure. — Ambrose Bierce

So many people come to church with the genuine desire to hear what we have to say, yet they are always going back home with the uncomfortable feeling that we're making it too difficult for them to come to Jesus. Are we determined to have nothing to do with all these people? They are convinced that it is not the Word Jesus himself that puts them off, but the superstructure of human, institutional, and doctrinal elements in our preaching. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It is a wretched thing to rest upon the fame of others, lest, the supporting pillar being removed, the superstructure should collapse in ruin. — Juvenal

Superstructure and the productive forces is admitted, is it still possible to maintain that production determines the superstructure, rather than the other way round? It is the old chicken-and-egg problem all over again. The productive forces determine the relations of production to which correspond the ideas of the society. These ideas lead to the further development of productive forces, which lead to new relations of production, to which correspond new ideas. In this cyclical movement it makes no more sense to say that productive forces play the determining role than to say that the egg ensures the continued existence of chickens rather than the other way round. — Anonymous

In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich."33 — Frantz Fanon

The elder Navarro had believed, as did the ancient philosophers of the Far East, that the cosmos ultimately revealed itself as a repeating pattern, an infinitely replicating superstructure contained and embodied in a galaxy, down to a drop of blood. — Laird Barron

The situation was primordial. The Man beneath prevailed for a moment over the civilised superstructure, the Draper. He pushed at the pedals with archaic violence. So Palaeolithic man may have ridden his simple bicycle of chipped flint in pursuit of his exogamous affinity. — H.G.Wells

You can't build a great building on a weak foundation. You must have a solid foundation if you're going to have a strong superstructure. — Gordon B. Hinckley

The distinction between the world of commerce and that of "culture" quickly became the distinction between infrastructure and superstructure, with the former clearly determining the latter. — Allan Bloom

Most of all I enjoy central-heating control rooms, where men with higher education, chained to their jobs like dogs to their kennels, write the history of their times as a sort of sociological survey and where I learned how the fourth estate was depopulated and the proletariat went from base to superstructure and how the university-trained elite now carries on its work. — Bohumil Hrabal

That to begin with; let respect be the foundation, affection the first floor, love the superstructure. — Charlotte Bronte

dedication Sometimes I wish I were an architect, so that I could dedicate a building to a person; a superstructure that broke the clouds and continued up into the abyss. And if Bird Box were made of bricks instead of letters, I'd host a ceremony, invite every shadowy memory I have, and cut the ribbon with an axe, letting everyone see for the first time that building's name. It'd be called the Debbie. Mom, Bird Box is for you. — Josh Malerman

I was especially delighted with the mathematics, on account of the certitude and evidence of their reasonings; but I had not as yet a precise knowledge of their true use; and thinking that they but contributed to the advancement of the mechanical arts, I was astonished that foundations, so strong and solid, should have had no loftier superstructure reared on them. — Rene Descartes

Even so we need the superstructure of spiritual life if we would have comfort in the day of doubt. But seek not a holy life without faith, for that would be to erect a house which can afford no permanent shelter, because it has no foundation on a rock. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The spiritual world of a Volk is not its cultural superstructure, just as little as it is its arsenal of useful knowledge [Kenntnisse] and values; rather, it is the power that comes from preserving at the most profound level the forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of a Volk, the power to arouse most inwardly and to shake most extensively the Volk's existence. — Martin Heidegger

Change of ministers amounts to nothing. One goes out, another comes in, and still the same measures, vices, and extravagances are pursued. It signifies not who is minister. The defect lies in the system. The foundation and superstructure of the government is bad. Prop it as you please, it continually sinks and ever will. — Thomas Paine

Some philosophers tell us that selfishness is at the root of our best loves and affections. Mr. Dombey's young child was, from the beginning, so distinctly important to him as a part of his own greatness, or (which is the same thing) of the greatness of Dombey and Son, that there is no doubt his parental affection might have been easily traced, like many a goodly superstructure of fair fame, to a very low foundation. — Charles Dickens

Human life, from the cradle to the grave, is a school. At every period of his existence man wants a teacher. His pilgrimage upon earth is but a term of childhood, in which he is to be educated for the manhood of a brighter world. As the child must be educated for manhood upon earth, so the man must be educated upon earth, for heaven; and finally that where the foundation is not laid in time, the superstructure can not rise for eternity. — John Quincy Adams

In years to come cities will stretch out horizontally and will be non-urban (Los Angeles). After that, they will bury themselves in the ground and will no longer have names. Everything will become infrastructure bathed in artificial light and energy. The brilliant superstructure, the crazy verticality will have disappeared. New York is the final fling of this baroque verticality, this centrifugal excentricity, before the horizontal dismantling arrives, and the subterranean implosion that will follow. — Jean Baudrillard

-Let respect be the foundation, affection the first floor, love the superstructure; Mdlle Reuters is a skillful architect.
- And interest?
-yes, no doubt; it will be the cement between every stone! — Charlotte Bronte

The base-superstructure metaphor when misunderstood as a causal rather than reciprocal relationship often leads to characterisations of historical materialism as determinist. The superstructure doesn't just reflect the base but has a reciprocal relation with the superstructure often enabling the base, i.e. the forces of production require property rights which are reliant upon political decisions at the level of the superstructure. The material base of every society is capped by an "ideological superstructure" that serves to legitimise and justify the arrangements and institutions in that society. It is from this superstructure that emanates ruling-class ideas and ultimately social consciousness, and thus we can see that the consciousness determined by the superstructure justifies and maintains the economic structure found in the base. — Anonymous

Character must show itself in the man's
performance both of the duty he owes himself and of the duty he owes the state.
The man's foremast duty is owed to himself and his family; and he can do this
duty only by earning money, by providing what is essential to material wellbeing;
it is only after this has been done that he can hope to build a higher
superstructure on the solid material foundation; it is only after this has been
done that he can help in his movements for the general well-being. He must pull
his own weight first, and only after this can his surplus strength be of use to the
general public. It is not good to excite that bitter laughter which expresses
contempt; and contempt is what we feel for the being whose enthusiasm to
benefit mankind is such that he is a burden to those nearest him; who wishes to
do great things for humanity in the abstract, but who cannot keep his wife in
comfort or educate his children. — Theodore Roosevelt

POLITICIAN, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles, he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. — Ambrose Bierce

The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. One can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit. — Alain De Botton

The monopoly capitalists - even while employing purely empirical methods - weave around art a complicated web which converts it into a willing tool. The superstructure of society ordains the type of art in which the artist has to be educated. Rebels are subdued by its machinery and only rare talents may create their own work. The rest become shameless hacks or are crushed. — Che Guevara

The greatest discovery of the 19th century was not in the realm of the physical sciences, but the power of the subconscious mind touched by faith. Any individual can tap into an eternal reservoir of power that will enable them to overcome any problem that may arise. All weaknesses can be overcome, bodily healing, financial independence, spiritual awakening, and prosperity beyond your wildest dreams. This is the superstructure of happiness. — William James

The secret studies of an author are the sunken piers upon which is to rest the bridge of his fame, spanning the dark waters of oblivion. They are out of sight, but without them no superstructure can stand secure. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We must have faith, for this is the foundation; we must have holiness of life, for this is the superstructure. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

My work is the only ground I've ever had to stand on. To put it bluntly, I seem to have a whole superstructure with no foundation, but I'm working on the foundation. — Marilyn Monroe

[On 9/11:] ... those towers represented human triumph over nature. Larger than life, built to be unburnable, they were the Titanic of our day. For them to burn and fall so quickly means that the whole superstructure we depend upon to mitigate nature and assure our comfort and safety could fall. — Starhawk

Nonetheless, many people, and especially intellectuals, passionately loathe capitalism. As they see it, this ghastly mode of society's economic organization has brought about nothing but mischief and misery. Men were once happy and prosperous in the good old days preceding the Industrial Revolution. Now under capitalism the immense majority are starving paupers ruthlessly exploited by rugged individualists. For these scoundrels nothing counts but their moneyed interests. They do not produce good and really useful things, but only what will yield the highest profits. They poison bodies with alcoholic beverages and tobacco, and souls and minds with tabloids, lascivious books and silly moving pictures. The "ideological superstructure" of capitalism is a literature of decay and degradation, the burlesque show and the art of striptease, the Hollywood pictures and the detective stories. — Ludwig Von Mises

The stage of the development of the productive forces determines the political and ideological superstructure of society which are crystallized into a system of social organization. — Earl Browder

Humor, to be comprehensible to anybody, must be built upon a foundation with which he is familiar. If he can't see the foundation the superstructure is to him merely a freak
like the Flatiron building without any visible means of support
something that ought to be arrested. — Mark Twain

Forgotten phone numbers and birthdays represent minor erosions of our everyday memory, but they are part of a much larger story of how we've supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of technological crutches - from the alphabet to the BlackBerry. These technologies of storing information outside our minds have helped make our modern world possible, but they've also changed how we think and how we use our brains. — Joshua Foer

Theology is a thing of unreason altogether, an edifice of assumptions and dreams, a superstructure without a substructure — Ambrose Bierce

It was then that she cut him off in midsentence and said that it was over. She said it with a certainty and a conviction in her voice and her face that left him fascinated and awed. Because guys, at least of his age, didn't have the confidence to make major decisions from their gut like that. They had to build a superstructure of rational thought on top of it. But not Zula. She didn't have to decide. She just had to pass on the news. — Neal Stephenson

Another flaw of the system is the fact that various danger fronts often require very different firmaments. As a logical superstructure is built upon each, there follow clashes of incommensurable modes of feeling and thought. Then despair can enter through the rifts. In such cases, a person may be obsessed with destructive joy, dislodging the whole artificial apparatus of his life and starting with rapturous horror to make a clean sweep of it. The horror stems from the loss of all sheltering values, the rapture from his by now ruthless identification and harmony with our nature's deepest secret, the biological unsoundness, the enduring disposition for doom. — Peter Wessel Zapffe

Patriarchy is like the elephant in the room that we don't talk about, but how could it not affect the planet radically when it's the superstructure of human society. — Ani DiFranco

Organize society effectively. The capitalist system is not the result of our collective greed; it is the manifestation of the greed of a few and the manipulation of the many. A global superstructure has been established to — Russell Brand

we have measured the value of the world with categories that refer to a purely fabricated world." A fabricated world? Yes, the world as a superstructure, the world as a spirit, weightless and abstract, of the same material with which thoughts are woven, and through which therefore they can move unhindered. A world that after three hundred years of natural science is left without mysteries. Everything is explained, everything is understood, everything lies within humanity's horizons of comprehension, from the biggest, the universe, whose oldest observable light, the farthest boundary of the cosmos, dates from its birth fifteen billion years ago, to the smallest, the protons and neutrons and mesons of the atom. — Karl Ove Knausgard

The psychiatrist knows only too well how each of us becomes the helpless but not pitiable victim of his own sentiments. Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality. — Carl Jung

A mosaic of memories takes me back to my own childhood, and then to my children. My earliest memory of St. Augustine was a day trip from Jacksonville; a day with some neighbors who were nice enough to purchase me a plastic toy-tugboat with a blue superstructure and white hull. Other accounts meld into my adult years. With its history and attractions, The Ancient City is pristine and picturesque by most accounts; but from the Newer Jail (not the Old Jail) , the perspective is very different. — H. Kirk Rainer

To form a new Government, requires infinite care, and unbounded attention; for if the foundation is badly laid the superstructure must be bad. — George Washington

And this is the main difference between the gospel and philosophy: for though the philosophers speak excellently and with great judgment on the subject of morals, yet whatever excellency shines forth in their precepts, it is, as it were, a beautiful superstructure without a foundation; for by omitting principles, they offer a mutilated doctrine, like a body without a head. — John Calvin

The Syllogism consists of propositions, propositions consist of words, words are symbols of notions. Therefore if the notions themselves (which is the root of the matter) are confused and over-hastily abstracted from the facts, there can be no firmness in the superstructure. Our only hope therefore lies in a true induction. — Francis Bacon

You cannot build a superstructure on a cracked foundation. — Billy Graham

Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion. — Dorothy L. Sayers

It is always easier to deal in truth and honesty and follow these to their legitimate ends, than it is to construct and adjust a false superstructure upon a false base. — Charles Lindbergh

Barely a teenager, Elizabeth Taylor was already more beautiful and voluptuous than Miss America. When she arrived at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for our magazine shoot, I was bowled over. I couldn't believe she was only fourteen. She filled out a swimsuit better than I did. We did the pictures, including one shot of me teaching her to float. With that superstructure of hers, she floated just fine. What she couldn't do was sink. — Esther Williams

This was a sometimes attractive and sometimes frustrating wrinkle of the dialectic, she'd found: everything turned out to be the superstructure of some other thing. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Political institutions are a superstructure resting on an economic foundation. — Vladimir Lenin

Le religioni non sono altro che residuo dei vecchi tabu selvatici, sistemi di divieto con diverse sovrastrutture ideologiche."
" ... religions are nothing but remnant of the old wild taboos, prohibition systems with varying ideological superstructure. — Giovanni Papini

The pride of ancestry is a superstructure of the most imposing height, but resting on the most flimsy foundation. It is ridiculous enough to observe the hauteur with which the old nobility look down on the new. The reason of this puzzled me a little, until I began to reflect that most titles are respectable only because they are old; if new, they would be despised, because all those who now admire the grandeur of the stream would see nothing but the impurity of the source. — Charles Caleb Colton

Religion must affirm, in the clearest terms, that morality and ethical values are not mere decorative frills of personal opinion, not subjective superstructure, but intrinsic laws of the cosmos built into the heart of reality. — Bhikkhu Bodhi