Quotes by Ernest Gellner

Ernest Gellner

A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.

Abandon

Calling

Philosopher

Academic environments are generally characterised by the presence of peole who claim to understand more than in fact they do. Linguistic Philosophy has produced a great revolution, generating people who claim not to understand when in fact they do. Some achieve great virtuosity at it. Any beginner in philosophy can manage not to understand, say, Hegel, but I have heard people who were so advanced that they knew how not to understand writers of such limpid clarity as Bertrand Russell or A.J. Ayer.

People

Philosophy

Revolution

America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it.

Achieve

America

Modern

Capital, like capitalism, seems an overrated category.

Capitalism

Civil Society is a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather than imposed by birth or sustained by awesome ritual. You can join the Labour Party without slaughtering a sheep.

Party

Sheep

Strong

I am a humble adherent of…Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalism.

Enlightenment

Fundamentalism

Humble

I am deeply sensitive to the spell of nationalism. I can play about thirty Bohemian folk songs … on my mouth-organ. My oldest friend, who is Czech and a patriot, cannot bear to hear me play them because he says I do it in such a schmalzy way, ‘crying into the mouth organ’. I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write, were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs, which happen to be my favourite form of music.

Book

Song

Writing

Ideas, and even the detection of errors, require more than care and caution.

Care

Errors

Ideas

In brief, nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires the ethnic boundaries should not be cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state a contingency already formally excluded by the principle in its general formulation should not separate the power holders from the rest.

Cutting

Political

Principles

Industrial Society is not merely one containing ‘industry,’ large-scale productive units capable of supplying man’s material needs in a way which can eliminate poverty: it is also a society in which knowledge plays a part wholly different from that which it played in earlier social forms, and which indeed possesses a quite different type of knowledge. Modern science is inconceivable outside an industrial society: but modern industrial society is equally inconceivable without modern science. Roughly, science is the mode of cognition of industrial society, and industry is the ecology of science.

Different

Men

Play

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Quotes by Ernest Gellner

Ernest Gellner

A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.

America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it.

Capital, like capitalism, seems an overrated category.

Civil Society is a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather than imposed by birth or sustained by awesome ritual. You can join the Labour Party without slaughtering a sheep.

I am a humble adherent of…Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalism.

Ideas, and even the detection of errors, require more than care and caution.

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The Behaviour Diary

The Dating Diary

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