14 Quotes by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

The financial sector grows, it undergoes a hypertrophy. It devours not just profits but talents; and its contribution to real productive activity and innovation is completely disproportional to its parasitic relation to the economy.

The combination of our mortality with our groundlessness imparts to human life its pressing and enigmatic character. We struggle to in our brief time in the midst of an impenetrable darkness. A small area is lighted up: our civilizations, our sciences, our loves. We prove unable to define the place of the lighted area within a larger space devoid of light, and must go to our deaths unenlightened.

We must ask ourselves: what should we demand of ourselves, given the imperfections of politics and the disappointments of history.

The market order should no longer be fastened to a single dogmatic version of itself. The new vanguardism should be deepened and disseminated to achieve its revolutionary potential, lifting up the productivity of the mass of workers in the economy

If the self remains in its citadel, anxious to control and heavily defended, it declines in the sources of vitality. To lay the citadel open, however, is to court danger: a danger inseparable from the enhancement of life.

The embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a burst of visonary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the center of that world but on the contrary, a dependent and even hapless creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die

So we must run back and forth between these two suns in our firmament—the presentiment of death and awareness of life—and avoid being transfixed by either of them. If we are lucky in this uncertain middle distance, we may form attachments and projects that enhance the sentiment of life. However, even as we try our luck, death comes to us, and brings our experiment to a end.

Insofar we are death-bound, existence is urgent and frightful. Insofar as are groundless, it is vertiginous and dreamlike. Insofar as we are insatiable, it is unquiet and tormented.

The power worship of the Promethean amounts to a travesty of the enhancement of life.