“ Many writers have dreamed up republics and principalities such as have never been seen or known in the real world. ·And attending to them is dangerous·, because the gap between •how men live and •how they ought to live is so wide that any prince who thinks in terms not of how people do behave but of how they ought to behave will destroy his power rather than maintaining it. A man who tries to act virtuously will soon come to grief at the hands of the unscrupulous people surrounding him. Thus, a prince who wants to keep his power must learn how to act immorally, using or not using this skill according to necessity. ”
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter 15: “Things for Which Men, Especially Princes, are Praised or Blamed”
“Thus there are ways of acting, thinking and feeling which possess the remarkable property of existing outside the consciousness of the individual.
Not only are these types of behaviour and thinking external to the individual, but they are enduedwith a compelling and coercive power by virtue of which, whether he wishes it or not, they impose themselves upon him.
”
Emile Durkheim, Rules of Sociological Method, ”What is a Social Fact?”
“ Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not. ”
Dr Seuss, The Lorax
“ In China’s thousands of years of civilisation, the conflict between humanity and nature has never been as serious as it is today…The depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the deterioration of the environment have become serious bottlenecks constraining economic and social development. ”
Environment minister Zhou Shengxian
“ Already one can see the environmental political landscape marked by crosscutting and competing claims for different scopes-planetary universals and place-based specificities-of conceiving environmental problems and environmental activism. ”
Tim Choy. Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong.
“ So we’re to be ravaged by speculation and thrill-seekers. We’ll be the wilds. I’ve been to deadwood planets and pioneer towns: even those way stations have their good things. We’ll open up the sky. We’ll have knowledge to sell. Uniquely detailed maps. Immer byways only locals like us can find. We have to establish our credentials as an explorocracy; so to survive and rule ourselves, we have to explore. ”
China Mievelle. Embassytown. p 345.
“ This would remain the eternal characteristics of Asia: The despotic form of existence, the absence of history and of decision, the stabilization of the spirit of fatalism. Asia would be the universal, enduring world that outlives Europe and includes it. Whatever fashions itself out of Asia and must sink back into Asia is transitory. ”
Wang Hui. The Politics of Imagining Asia.
“ Multiplicity is thus about coexistences at a single moment. To make sense of multiplicity, we need to think and write in topological ways, discovering methods for laying out a space, for laying out spaces, and for defining paths to walk through these. ”
John Law & Annemarie Mol. Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices. p. 8.
“ It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form. ”
Michel Foucault. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
“ Only later did I feel the futility of it all; at that time I did not really understand anything. Later I felt if a man’s proposals met with approval, it should encourage him; if they met with opposition, it should make him fight back; but the real tragedy for him was to lift up his voice among the living and meet with no response, neither approval nor opposition, just as if he were left helpless in a boundless desert. So I began to feel lonely. ”
Lu Xun, 1922. “Preface to Call to Arms.”
