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1 " Hope is more the consequence of action than its cause. As the experience of the spectator favors fatalism, so the experience of the agent produces hope. "
― Roberto Mangabeira Unger , The Future of American Progressivism: An Initiative for Political and Economic Reform
2 " In such a view, time is not emergent. It is, in fact, the only aspect of reality that cannot emerge from a more fundamental background. We register its reality, always and everywhere, by recognizing the differential character of change: some things change relative to other things. However, the kinds of things that there are also change, and so do the ways in which they change. That is what time is: the transformation of transformation. "
― Roberto Mangabeira Unger , The Religion of the Future
3 " Our dominant idea about the mind fail to recognise the conflict between the two sides of the mind — the mind as machine and the mind as anti-machine, delighting in its powers of combination and transgression. They fail as well to appreciate the extend to which the relative presence of these two sides of the mind is influenced by the organisation of society and of the culture, with the result that the history of politics is internal to the history of the mind. In these as in many other respects, our beliefs about ourselves resist acknowledging the relation between our context-shaped and our context-transcending identities and powers. "
4 " The combination of our mortality with our groundlessness imparts to human life its pressing and enigmatic character. We struggle to in our brief time in the midst of an impenetrable darkness. A small area is lighted up: our civilizations, our sciences, our loves. We prove unable to define the place of the lighted area within a larger space devoid of light, and must go to our deaths unenlightened. "
5 " The embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a burst of visonary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the center of that world but on the contrary, a dependent and even hapless creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die "
6 " So we must run back and forth between these two suns in our firmament—the presentiment of death and awareness of life—and avoid being transfixed by either of them. If we are lucky in this uncertain middle distance, we may form attachments and projects that enhance the sentiment of life. However, even as we try our luck, death comes to us, and brings our experiment to a end. "
7 " Insofar we are death-bound, existence is urgent and frightful. Insofar as are groundless, it is vertiginous and dreamlike. Insofar as we are insatiable, it is unquiet and tormented. "
8 " The power worship of the Promethean amounts to a travesty of the enhancement of life. "
9 " If the self remains in its citadel, anxious to control and heavily defended, it declines in the sources of vitality. To lay the citadel open, however, is to court danger: a danger inseparable from the enhancement of life. "
10 " there is nothing real or true that is timeless "
― Roberto Mangabeira Unger , The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy
11 " He faces the burdens of belittlement a third time as he grows older, and settles into an existence that he has embraced, or that has been forced upon him. A carapace of routine, of compromise, of silent surrenders, of half-term solutions, and of diminished consciousness begins to form around him. He turns himself over to the rigidified version of the self: the character. He begins to die small deaths, many times over. He fails to die only once, which is what he would desire if he were able fully to recognize the value of life. This third encounter with belittlement reveals belittlement for what it in fact is: death by installments. "
12 " The road back to reality, we suggest, begins by making two affirmations about nature: the uniqueness of the universe and the reality of time. These together have an immediate consequence which is the central hypothesis of our program: that the laws of nature evolve, and they do so through mechanisms that can be discovered and probed experimentally because they concern the past. "
13 " They [Americans] believe that the terrors of vast problems yield to the effects of many small solutions. Use little things to break big things, says Saint Paul, describing an essential feature of the psychology of hope. "
14 " To understand your country you must love it. To love it you must, in a sense, accept it. To accept it as it is, however, is to betray it. To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that in which it shows what it might become. America - this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of the no into the yes - needs citizens who love it enough to reimagine and remake it. "
15 " the relation of mathematics to the world of temporal change and of phenomenal particularity is direct: less by induction than by what Pierce called abduction – an imaginative jumping off from an open-ended series of particulars. "
16 " Our desires are insatiable. We seek from the limited the unlimited. We must fail. Our insatiability is a third incurable defect in human life. "
17 " We must ask ourselves: what should we demand of ourselves, given the imperfections of politics and the disappointments of history. "
― Roberto Mangabeira Unger
18 " The market order should no longer be fastened to a single dogmatic version of itself. The new vanguardism should be deepened and disseminated to achieve its revolutionary potential, lifting up the productivity of the mass of workers in the economy "
19 " The financial sector grows, it undergoes a hypertrophy. It devours not just profits but talents; and its contribution to real productive activity and innovation is completely disproportional to its parasitic relation to the economy. "
