Showing posts with label quote. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quote. Show all posts

March 23, 2024

Citação deste dia - "ou a democracia transforma o Chega ou o Chega transforma a democracia"



O Chega tem sido a surpresa da vida política nacional. E das eleições. Os seus próprios apaniguados devem estar surpreendidos. Como já tanta gente disse, se aparecem e se têm este êxito, é por motivos que devem ser investigados, sentidos e estudados. E sobretudo compreendidos.

Se a democracia não consegue detectar as razões pelas quais o Chega aparece e progride, é porque é cega e estúpida. Se a democracia não consegue integrar o Chega na luta política, nas eleições e nas instituições, é porque é sectária e fanática. Se a democracia não consegue eliminar as raízes do Chega, assim como as terras que lhe são férteis, é porque não tem força. Se a democracia não consegue, por actos e gestos, não por palavras, mostrar à população a carga demagógica e ridícula da política da “vassoura e da limpeza” do Chega, é porque é politicamente impotente e culturalmente medíocre.

Em poucas palavras: ou a democracia transforma o Chega ou o Chega transforma a democracia. Nestes cinquenta anos, a democracia portuguesa conseguiu integrar, dissolver e transformar partidos extremistas e radicais, revolucionários ou não. A democracia portuguesa, mesmo vulnerável, mesmo imatura, conseguiu integrar e transformar os seus delatores e os seus subversivos. Também poderá fazê-lo a estes. Se souber mudar, ouvir, ver, sentir e perceber.


António Barreto in www.publico.pt

December 07, 2022

Quote of the day

 

Art can’t solve our problem or make up for our losses. But it might help us transcend them. ~Griffin Oleynick

December 05, 2022

Thinking and poeticizing

 

"Philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor. Only a god could save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poeticizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering [Untergang] for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder. "(Heidegger)

 - Only a God Can Save Us. Interview (23 September 1966), published posthumously in Der Spiegel (31 May 1976), as translated by Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo in The Heidegger Controversy : A Critical Reader (1991), edited by Richard Wolin.


November 06, 2022

Quando os cidadãos desfrutam do seu país como inquilinos

 



“What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?

There are some nations in Europe whose inhabitants think of themselves in a sense as colonists, indifferent to the fate of the place they live in. The greatest changes occur in their country without their cooperation. They are not even aware of precisely what has taken place. They suspect it; they have heard of the event by chance. More than that, they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets, the fate of their church and its vestry. They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful stranger called “the government.” They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership, and never give a thought to how they might be improved. They are so divorced from their own interests that even when their own security and that of their children is finally compromised, they do not seek to avert the danger themselves but cross their arms and wait for the nation as a whole to come to their aid. Yet as utterly as they sacrifice their own free will, they are no fonder of obedience than anyone else. They submit, it is true, to the whims of a clerk, but no sooner is force removed than they are glad to defy the law as a defeated enemy. Thus one finds them ever wavering between servitude and license.

When a nation has reached this point, it must either change its laws and mores or perish, for the well of public virtue has run dry: in such a place one no longer finds citizens but only subjects.” 

― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

June 18, 2022

Quotes I like

 


"He could have gone for general but he went for himself instead."
 — apocalypse now