63 Quotes About Hegel

Our way of life is inherently based on masters and slaves. We bow to assorted Gods, like slaves bowing to masters. We bow to monarchs and presidents, to the rich, to celebrities. We never tire of bowing to others and getting on our knees. We are controlled at every turn. Isn’t it time to unshackle ourselves, to stand up straight for once? Isn’t it time to bring an end to the master-slave dialectic?

My criticism of Hegel procedure is that when in his discussion he arrives at a contradiction, he construes it as a crisis in the universe.

Both Zizek and early Hegelians hint at some sort of state that is both beyond and within reality, both an escape and a hyper-examination that allows for some sort of becoming that does not escape ideology, but at least to some degree has a self that knows the game which the mind is playing and is not fooling itself.

Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.

Marx's simultaneous critique of the categories of political economy, of utopian socialism and of Hegel does not aim to replace them with an improved set. He grasps them as expressions of the way that humanity is concealed within inhumanity. By tracing their logical interconnections, he finds the way to break their stranglehold on our consciousness and on our lives.

Religion is a begetting of the divine spirit, not an invention of human beings but an effect of the divine at work, of the divine productive process within humanity

If sharing meant receiving, well and good, but if it was a question of giving, then to hell with it, the Clochemerlins would cry out in chorus. Sad to relate, these bumpkins knew nothing about Hegel or Marx. They each had their little patch of ground inherited from previous generations, their trade secrets handed down from father to son, and they could see no farther.

The (paradoxical?) correlative of Hegelian ideology is a realist reading of scientific texts: by way of the concept, the content shows through. We read as if words were holes in the page through which reality surfaces; or again, skylights through which the real process can be studied in a kind of speculative voyeurism.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.