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Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

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Jose Ortega y Gasset
Age: 72 †
Born: 1883
Born: May 9
Died: 1955
Died: October 18
Essayist
Literary Critic
Mathematician
Opinion Journalist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Politician
Sociologist
Translator
University Teacher
Madrid
Spain
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Power
Resorts
Nothing
Reduce
Civilization
Effort
Lasts
Last
Force
Use
Resort

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There is no doubt even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.
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tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.
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The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.
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Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one
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The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
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Life is fired at us point blank.
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Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
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There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other.
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The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.
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Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
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What, by a word lacking even in grammar, is called amorality, is a thing that does not exist. If you are unwilling to submit to any norm, you have, nolens volens , to submit to the norm of denying all morality, and this is not amoral, but immoral. It is a negative morality which preserves the empty form of the other.
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The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the self-satisfied man.
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Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts.
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Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
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To wonder is to begin to understand.
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The people with the clear heads are the ones who look life in the face, realize that everything in it is problematic, and feel themselves lost. And this is the simple truth: that to live is to feel oneself lost. Those who accept it have already begun to find themselves, to be on firm ground.
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Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.
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Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.
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We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
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I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.
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