17 Quotes by Martin Hägglund

What ultimately matters from a religious perspective is not freedom but salvation; what ultimately matters is not to lead a life but to be saved from being alive.

[T]hat we collectively value the 'growth' of capital as the final purpose of our economy is not reducible to the reigning ideology of neoliberal capitalism. Rather, the purpose of our economy is beyond democratic deliberation under any form of capitalism, since the defining purpose of capital accumulation is built into how we produce our social wealth in the first place.

To be finite means primarily two things: to be dependent on others and to live in relation to death. (4)

As soon as you remove the sense of finitude and vulnerability, you remove the vitality of any possible love relationship. (43)

That those who are enslaved or live in poverty may need faith in God to carry on with their lives is not a reason to promote religious faith but a reason to abolish slavery and poverty. (27)

To make our emancipation actual will require both our political mobilizations and our rational arguments; it will require our general strikes and our systematic reflections, our labor and our love, our anxiety and our passion.

What we believe deep in our hearts—the hymn ["We Shall Overcome"] avows—is not that God will save us but that we shall overcome our subordination through collective action. (372)

The point of democratic socialism is not to impose a general consensus regarding what matters, but to sustain a form of life that makes it possible for us to own the question of what is worth doing with our lives—what we value individually as well as collectively—as an irreducible question of our lives.