Das Quotes
Karl Marx, who knew quite a bit about the human tendency to fall down and worship our own creations, wrote Das Capital in an attempt to demonstrate that, even if we start from the economists' utopian vision, so long as we also allow some people to control productive capital, and, again, leave others with nothing to sell but but their brains and bodies, the results will be in very many ways barely distinguishable from slavery, and the whole system will eventually destroy itself.
David Graeber
Now I'm not saying that Keynes was right about everything, that we should treat The General Theory as a sort of secular bible - the way that Marxists treat Das Kapital. But the essential truth of Keynes's big idea - that even the most productive economy can fail if consumers and investors spend too little, that the pursuit of sound money and balanced budgets is sometimes (not always!) folly rather than wisdom - is as evident in today's world as it was in the 1930s. And in these dangerous days, we ignore or reject that idea at the world economy's peril.
Paul Krugman
Well I came across Marx rather late in life actually, and when I read him, two things: first of all I realised that he'd come to the conclusion about capitalism which I'd come to much later, and I was a bit angry he'd thought of it first; and secondly, I see Marx who was an old Jew, as the last of the Old Testament Prophets, this old bearded man working in the British Library, studying capitalism, that's what 'Das Kapital' was about, it was an explanation of British capitalism. And I thought to myself, 'Well anyone could write a book like that, but what infuses, what comes out of his writing, is the passionate hostility to the injustice of capitalism. He was a Prophet, and so I put him in that category as an Old Testament Prophet.
Tony Benn
Sarojini Naidu : Kingly was Deshbandhu Das in every impulse and gesture of his life, royal alike in the splendour of his bounty and the splendour of his renunciation. As the idol of the nation he served with unsurpassing devotion. To the generations of tomorrow, he will grow into a radiant figure of historic legend and romance, a vital portion of epic beauty and grandeur of their spiritual heritage.
Chittaranjan Das
I was a student at the Delhi School at the very end of its Golden Age. The departments of economics and sociology were still world-class. Amartya Sen had left for England and M. N. Srinivas had retired to Bangalore; but Sukhamoy Chakravarty and André Béteille remained. There were also other brilliant scholars on the faculty-such as A. L. Nagar and Kaushik Basu in economics, and Veena Das and J. P. S. Uberoi in sociology. Both departments had active research programmes.
Ramachandra Guha
Now the leap by which this reasoning lands us in labour as the sole constituent element of value appears to me so surprising that I am prepared to learn that the yet unpublished portions of Das Kapital contain supplementary or elucidatory matter which may set it in a new light. Meanwhile the analysis appears to be given as complete and adequate, so far as it goes, and I can, therefore, only take it as I find it and try to test its validity. But instead of directly confronting it with what seems to be the true analysis of the phenomenon of exchange, I will follow it out a little further, and we shall see that Marx himself introduces a modification into his result (or develops a half-latent implication in it), in such a way as to vitiate the very analysis on which that result is founded, and to lead us, if we work it out, to what I regard as the true solution of the problem.
Philip Wicksteed
The tri-coloured play with music begins' (in Deutsch: Das Drei Farben Singespiel beginnt..)
the cast is as follows
Dr. and MRS. Knarre, a married couple
Franziska and Charlotte, their daughters
Dr. Kahn, a physician
Charlotte Kahn, his daughter
Paulinka Bimbam, a singer
Dr. Singsong, a versatile person
Professor Klingklang, a famous conductor
An Art teacher
Professor and Students at an art academy
and Chorus..
.. The action takes places during the years 1913 to 1940 in Germany, later in Nice, France.
Charlotte Salomon
Chittaranjan Das: I believe that Bengal has a message for the world. Keshub Chunder Sen delivered that message. Again and again that message has been delivered on the banks of the Ganges, and again and again will that message be delivered and redelivered in a fuller and yet fuller manner till we listen, till the world listens.
Keshub Chunder Sen
Lacan conceives the difference between the two deaths as the difference being real (biological) death and its symbolization, the settling of accounts the accomplishment of symbolic destiny (deathbed confession in Catholicism, for example). This gap can be filled in various ways; it can contain either sublime beauty or fearsome monsters: in Antigone's case, her symbolic death, her exclusion from the symbolic community of the city, precedes her actual death and imbues her character with sublime beauty, whereas the ghost of Hamlet's father represents the opposite case, - actual death unaccompanied by symbolic death, without a settling of accounts - which is why he returns as a frightful apparition until his debt has been repaid. This place between the two deaths, a place of sublime beauty as well as terrifying monsters, is the site of das Ding, of the real-traumatic Kernel in the midst of symbolic order.
Slavoj Žižek
Claus Graf von Stauffenberg's famous last words Es lebe das geheime Deutschland have turned out to be not quite so romantically foolish as they sounded at the time. If there never was a secret Germany, the July plotters at least provided a sacred moment, and the Germans of today are right to cherish it.
Clive James
You don't have to signal a social conscience by looking like a frump. Lace knickers won't hasten the holocaust, you can ban the bomb in a feather boa just as well as without, and a mild interest in the length of hemlines doesn't necessarily disqualify you from reading Das Kapital and agreeing with every word.
Elizabeth Bibesco
...This contrariety between Reason and Necessity, which Spinoza threw out in so strong a light, I, strangely enough, applied to my own being; and what has been said is, properly speaking, only for the purpose of rendering intelligible what follows. [Original in German: Diesen Gegensatz, welchen Spinoza so kräftig heraushebt, wendete ich aber auf mein eignes Wesen sehr wunderlich an, und das Vorhergesagte soll eigentlich nur dazu dienen, um das, was folgt, begreiflich zu machen.].
Baruch Spinoza
...They [the Jews] have had the most painful history of all peoples, not without the fault of all of us, and when one owes to them the noblest man (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the most powerful book, and the most effective moral law in the world. [Original in German: Trotzdem möchte ich wissen, wie viel man bei einer Gesamtabrechnung einem Volke nachsehen muß, welches, nicht ohne unser aller Schuld, die leidvollste Geschichte unter allen Völkern gehabt hat, und dem man den edelsten Menschen (Christus), den reinsten Weisen (Spinoza), das mächtigste Buch und das wirkungsvollste Sittengesetz der Welt verdankt.].
Baruch Spinoza
You know that I do not share your opinion in this matter. That Spinozism and Atheism are to me two different things. That when I read Spinoza I can only explain him by reference to himself and that if it came to naming a book which, of all that I know, most agrees with my way of seeing things, then I would have to name the Ethics-even though by nature I do not share his way of seeing things. [Original in German: Du weißt daß ich über die Sache selbst nicht deiner Meinung bin. Daß mir Spinozismus und Atheismus zweyerlei ist. Daß ich den Spinoza wenn ich ihn lese mir nur aus sich selbst erklären kann, und daß ich, ohne seine Vorstellungsart von Natur selbst zu haben, doch wenn die Rede wäre ein Buch anzugeben, das unter allen die ich kenne, am meisten mit der meinigen übereinkommt, die Ethik nennen müsste.].
Baruch Spinoza
It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment. [Wahrlich es ist nicht das Wissen, sondern das Lernen, nicht das Besitzen sondern das Erwerben, nicht das Da-Seyn, sondern das Hinkommen, was den grössten Genuss gewährt.] When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again. The never-satisfied man is so strange; if he has completed a structure, then it is not in order to dwell in it peacefully, but in order to begin another. I imagine the world conqueror must feel thus, who, after one kingdom is scarcely conquered, stretches out his arms for others.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Strength of character does not consist solely in having powerful feelings, but in maintaining one's balance in spite of them. Even with the violence of emotion, judgment and principle must still function like a ship's compass, which records the slightest variations however rough the sea. (Original German: "Ein starkes Gemüt ist nicht ein solches, welches bloß starker Regungen fähig ist, sondern dasjenige, welches bei den stärksten Regungen im Gleichgewicht bleibt, so daß trotz den Stürmen in der Brust der Einsicht und Überzeugung wie der Nadel des Kompasses auf dem sturmbewegten Schiff das feinste Spiel gestattet ist.")
Carl von Clausewitz