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I cannot imagine a context that would some day, in some manner, make the monstrous crime of September 11 an understandable or comprehensible political act

Jurgen Habermas

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Jurgen Habermas
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: June 18
Philosopher
Sociologist
University Teacher
Dusseldorf
Jurgen Habermas
Habermas
Context
Manner
Crime
Imagine
Political
Comprehensible
Cannot
Understandable
Make
Monstrous
Would
September

More quotes by Jurgen Habermas

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The difference between political terror and ordinary crime becomes clear during the change of regimes, in which former terrorists become well-regarded representatives of their country.
Jurgen Habermas
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Since the intervention in Afghanistan, we suddenly began to notice when, in political discussions, we found ourselves only among Europeans or Israelis.
Jurgen Habermas
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Osama bin Laden, the person, more likely serves the function of a stand-in. Compare the new terrorists with partisans or conventional terrorists in Israel. These people often fight in a decentralized manner in small, autonomous units, too.
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[Critical social science attempts] to determine when theoretical statements grasp invariant regularities of social action as such and when they express ideologically frozen relations of dependence that can in principle be transformed.
Jurgen Habermas
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If the September 11 terror attack is supposed to constitute a caesura in world history, it must be able to stand comparison to other events of world historical impact.
Jurgen Habermas
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Instead of the international police action we had hoped for during the war in Kosovo, there are wars again - conducted with state-of-the-art technology, but still in the old style
Jurgen Habermas
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Perhaps at a later point important developments will be traced back to September 11. But for now we do not know which of the many scenarios will actually hold in the future.
Jurgen Habermas
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Each murder is one too many.
Jurgen Habermas
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Partisans fight on familiar territory with professed political objectives to conquer power. This is what distinguishes them from terrorists
Jurgen Habermas
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From a moral point of view, there is no excuse for terrorist acts, regardless of the motive or the situation under which they are carried out.
Jurgen Habermas
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Since our complex societies are highly susceptible to interferences and accidents, they certainly offer ideal opportunities for a prompt disruption of normal activities.
Jurgen Habermas
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After September 11, the European governments have completely failed. They are incapable of seeing beyond their own national scope of interests.
Jurgen Habermas
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Science can only be comprehended epistemologically, which means as one category of possible knowledge, as long as knowledge is not equated either effusively with the absolute knowledge of a great philosophy or blindly with scientistic self-understanding of the actual business of research.
Jurgen Habermas
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I take as my fundamental starting point the fundamental distinction between work and interaction
Jurgen Habermas
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The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future ... The avant-garde must find a direction in a landscape into which no one seems to have yet ventured.
Jurgen Habermas
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I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech act, raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated.
Jurgen Habermas
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Today's Islamic fundamentalism is also a cover for political motifs. We should not overlook the political motifs we encounter in forms of religious fanaticism
Jurgen Habermas
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Perhaps September 11 could be called the first historic world event in the strictest sense: the impact, the explosion, the slow collapse - a gruesome reality literally took place in front of a global public.
Jurgen Habermas
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Disappointment over nationalistic authoritarian regimes may have contributed to the fact that today religion offers a new and subjectively more convincing language for old political orientations.
Jurgen Habermas
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The interpretation of a case is corroborated only by the successful continuation of a self-formative process, that is by the completion of self-reflection, and not in any unmistakable way by what the patient says or how he behaves.
Jurgen Habermas