aidan knight

"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas ..." - Karl Marx, The German Ideology

"To become the 'lords and possessors of nature' was the ambition that secretly united the conquistador, the merchant adventurer and banker, the industrialist, and the scientist, radically different though their vocations and their purposes might seem." - Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power

"It is not by chance that the European aristocracy went into business once heroes and warriors went out of style" - Rene Girard, Battling to the End

"Immediate self-observation is far from sufficient for getting to know ourselves: we need history, for the past flows on, through us, in a hundred waves ... And even here, if we want to descend into the river of what seems to be our most individual and personal nature, the saying of Heraclitus holds true: we do not step into the same river twice." - Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human