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> We talk of extinction and no future. And still business continues very much as usual.
> Since the present is difficult to grasp, people love to take refuge in the past.
> Reality is what one can never know completely. If an object is real, any description we make of it will necessarily be partial and incomplete. That is, indeed, how we can tell it is real. The only things we can hope to know perfectly are ones that exist entirely in our imaginations.
> Economist Wilhelm Buiter of Citigroup expects “to see a globally integrated market for fresh water within 25 to 30 years. Once the spot markets for water are integrated, future markets and other derivative water-based financial instruments…will follow.… Water as [a natural] asset class will…become eventually the single most important physical-commodity based asset class dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities and precious metals.”
> ...capitalism no longer needs to justify itself as a moral utopia. It can openly wallow in its authentic dystopia because it has declared itself synonymous with reality. Capitalism is just the way things are, the only reality capable of being real. Everything else is impossible.
> Against revolution nothing beats an election.
> Rather than inspire the difficult work of forging new rules or frameworks, or committing to responsible disposal guidelines, the specter of an environmental crisis can spur an unproductive focus on private choices and silver-bullet solutions. There's nothing our deep-pocketed monopolists love more than to find new reasons for throwing technology at social problems.
> Rather than a locus for creativity, difference, agency, and responsibility, the individual is the overburdened remainder of dismantled institutions and solidarities. Commanded individuality obscures individual incapacity even as it amplifies the contradictions barely congealed in the individual form. At the same time, these commands and incapacities attest to another force, the power of collectivity that manifests in crowds.
> It is an anthropological commonplace that if you want to get a sense of a society’s ultimate values it is best to look at what they consider to be the worst sort of behaviour; and that the best way to get a sense of what they consider to be the worst possible behaviour is by examining ideas about witches.
> One enters, one leaves, one circulates, one gathers. The laughter of Parisian children interrupts political discussions. Approach the groups, listen. A whole people entertain profound matters. For the first time workers can be heard exchanging their appreciations on things that hitherto only philosophers had tackled. There is no trace of supervisors; no police agents obstruct the street hindering passers-by. The security is perfect.
> Beginnings can be measured by the re-beginnings they authorize.
> In Seattle, on November 30, 1999, demonstrators faced something like 400 police officers; by 2017, demonstrators were facing off with over 28,000 security personnel at Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington, DC, or 31,000 at the G20 protests in Hamburg. Over the past two decades, the state has poured a tremendous amount of resources into repressing domestic protests.
> No perfection can ever bring joy or there's none without it.
> This points to the real problem with geoengineering as presently conceived. Capitalism is geoengineering. To be anything other than capitalist would be another form of geoengineering. There is no human metabolic relationship with nature that does not engineer planetary processes – potentially this might proceed in considered and commensurate fashion, but overwhelmingly it has been reckless and benighted.
> Why such historians imagine that a collection of sixteenth-century Spanish friars, petty aristocrats and soldiers were likely to know anything about democratic procedure (much less, be impressed by it) is unclear, because educated opinion in Europe was almost uniformly anti-democratic at the time. If anyone was learning something new from the encounter [with indigenous Tlaxcalteca people], it was surely the Spaniards.
> Already, capitalist petro-modernity builds a certain quantum of acceptable death into its predicates: at the very least, the 8.7 million killed by fossil fuels each year according to Harvard University are considered a price worth paying for the stupendous advantages of fossil capital.
> [The state is] not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents us from seeing political practice as it is.
> Most supreme court opinions exclude precisely those facts about the surrounding context about the case that permit the court to engage in a lot of the of propaganda that it engages in.
> To a first approximation, all species are insects.
> As you’ll know, one of the most widely mocked themes of Marxism has been that of the withering away of the state… Well, today we are seeing a wholly pathological phenomenon, a capitalist process of the withering away of states. It is a fundamental phenomenon today, even if it is masked by the subsistence, which will probably continue for a lengthy historical period, of state poles of substantial power. But in truth, the general logic of globalised capitalism is to have no direct or intrinsic relation to the subsistence of national states, because its deployment today is transnational. The multinational character of large companies came to light during the sixties. But since that time, these large companies have become transnational monsters of an entirely other nature.
> The average oppressed medieval serf still worked less than a modern nine-to-five office or factory worker, and the hazelnut gatherers and cattle herders who dragged great slabs to build Stonehenge almost certainly worked, on average, less than that.
> Scholarship does not always advance. Sometimes it slips backwards.
> It’s possible to imagine overthrowing capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it’s not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve ‘eliminated inequality’?) The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.
> As a student, I had mistakenly thought that physics was driven mostly by mathematics and logical reasoning. Einstein’s conviction was that principles are the driving force behind new discoveries, while mathematics is necessary to make physics precise, to inform the clarification of the principles, to explain and clarify our characterizations of how we conceptualize phenomena, and to make predictions. In short, math is not enough; it is a tool. The important question is how does one come up with new principles?
> We should remember that [Deleuze] used to say that when the philosopher hears the words 'democratic debate', he turns and runs.
> Let us agree that by ʻdialecticʼ, following Hegel, we should understand that the essence of all difference is the third term that marks the gap between two others.
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