Pierre Clastres quotes

  • It is said that the history of peoples who have a history is the history of class struggle. It might be said with at least as much truthfulness, that the history of peoples without history is a history of their struggle against the state.
    -- Pierre Clastres

    #Struggle #Class #Might

  • Educational enterprises do not for any length of time remain immune from the struggle of interests for power which is the dominant feature of social life under a class system.

  • Those who can bring themselves to renounce wealth, position and power accruing from a social system based on violence and putting a premium on acquisitiveness, and to identify themselves in some real fashion with the struggle of the masses toward the light, may help in a measure - more, doubtless, by life than by words - to devise a more excellent way, a technique of social progress less crude, brutal, costly and slow than mankind has yet evolved.

  • This human struggle and scramble for office, for a way to live without work, will finally test the strength of our institutions.

  • Man has become great through struggle

  • Mankind has grown strong in eternal struggles and it will only perish through eternal peace.

  • Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition

  • When I was right out of college, I felt competitive with some of the guys in my class over career stuff.

  • I was already headed for Hell, I might as well enjoy the ride.

  • We are caught up in a paradox, one which might be called the paradox of conceptualization. The proper concepts are needed to formulate a good theory, but we need a good theory to arrive at the proper concepts.

  • Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? ...a good question might be not why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate?