Barrington Moore, Jr. famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

For the essence of science, I would suggest, is simply the refusal to believe on the basis of hope.
-- Barrington Moore, Jr.

#Believe #Science #Essence

I still secretly believe that afternoons are the time for the test card and you shouldn't watch television when the sun is out.
The gods have fled, I know. My sense is the gods have always been essentially absent. I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods. If anthropologists and historians believe that, it is because they believe whatever they have been able to recover about what humankind told the gods humankind was doing. I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of eachother and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know.
I'm still agnostic. But in the words of Elton Richards, I'm now a reverant agnostic. Which isn't an oxymoron, I swear. I now believe that whether or not there's a God, there is such a thing as sacredness. Life is sacred. The Sabbath can be a sacred day. Prayer can be a sacred ritual. There is something transcendent, beyond the everyday. It's possible that humans created this sacredness ourselves, but that doesn't take away from its power or importance.
Psychoanalysts believe that the only "normal" people are those who cause not trouble to either themselves or anyone else.
I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, "What happened next?
The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.
growth requires purposeful division. Responsible dissent is the essence of democracy.
The field is a halfway house, halfway between the detail of those intimately known places and the ignorance of a landscape view ... The essence of a field is that the cultural accommodates the natural there. The human being makes room for and makes use of those organisms that are not him. In that way the field is a poem to symbiosis, and a human contract with the natural.
It's not written in the Constitution or anything else.... Congress, just out of the clear blue sky, said the airwaves belong to the people, which means, in essence, that it belongs to Congress.
I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out.

Barrington Moore, Jr. famous quotes

You may also like: