Quote

In late modernity we grow more and more accustomed to politicians and public figures who are indebted to their appetites for their values, to their intellectual sloth for their principles, to their rhetorical cleverness for their conscience, and to their regimented conformism for their philosophy.

Kenny Smith

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Kenny Smith
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: March 8
Basketball Player
Sports Commentator
Queens
New York
Kenneth Smith
Principles
Appetite
Regimented
Philosophy
Politicians
Appetites
Grows
Conscience
Rhetorical
Public
Politician
Indebted
Values
Figures
Modernity
Intellectual
Sloth
Late
Cleverness
Grow
Accustomed
Conformism

More quotes by Kenny Smith

Image
The only measures that count are progress over your own self, and triumph over the vacant abstractions that most people mistake for thinking.
Kenny Smith
Image
Terence: nihil humanum alienum a me-nothing human is alien to me, the greatest expression of ancient megalopsychia or great-souled and cosmopolitan magnanimity.
Kenny Smith
Image
Human beings belong to some minor comity or enclave of faith at the expense of the clarity and autarkia of their intelligence and conscience, of course. Belonging is another way of saying: capitulating to.
Kenny Smith
Image
Damian Lillard is having a better year than Chris Paul. Lillard got snubbed when he was left off of the USA Men’s Basketball team, and now the All-Star team.
Kenny Smith
Image
Intellect is merely a narrow and highly specific kind of thing that we DO, but our immediacy relates us to what we naturally and essentially ARE, the actualities of our full-dimensional existence.
Kenny Smith
Image
Like the priestly cult of the Middle Ages, the modern priestly cult of scientific psychotherapists exist overwhelmingly to stultify or blunt a too-acute insight into the powers benumbed in our personalities by our prevailing culture.
Kenny Smith
Image
Philosophy exists in profoundest opposition to rhetoric, which is speaking for the sake of producing or controlling some effect in others' perceptions. Philosophy is about the caustic or cauterizing effect of the truth, not the currying of sensibilities.
Kenny Smith
Image
Bourgeois society, rife with an atomism or monadism of secluded egos, is profoundly uncomfortable with topics of domination just because of the rift between how it sees itself (Kantian autonomism) and how it actually exists (pathetic prole-culture).
Kenny Smith
Image
Values and verdicts never bother me half as much as people trying to weasel their way around them, or people compromising their reason to pander to their own prejudices and preconceptions, which they are so rarely competent to look in the face.
Kenny Smith
Image
I regret not getting brutally forthright with human beings a hell of a lot sooner than I did. Civility and obliquity are wasted on people who will not make the effort to be harsher or stricter on their own gooey egos than they are on other people.
Kenny Smith
Image
We should bear the intelligence and taste of the architect or the gardener in how we shape the becoming of our self. Too much precision (stringency) is simply misplaced, a formalism inappropriate to the kind of matter we have to deal with (and to be).
Kenny Smith
Image
I know one thing. If a NASCAR driver ever got on the court with me, they wouldn't be able to keep up. That would be like me driving a bus in a NASCAR race.
Kenny Smith
Image
Thinking is the subtlest form of self-polemics, the art of a certain finesse in psychological self-vivisection and self-crucifixion (Hegel of course called the path of self-disillusion the via dolorosa or highway of despair, in Baillie's fine and florid rendering, like Jesus' route to Golgotha).
Kenny Smith
Image
A vital part of philosophizing is learning to trust one's own intuitivist intelligence, getting one's center of gravity back between one's feet. In our culture-so outer-directed, objective or extraverted-this is already heresy. This is self-mastering thinking, centered in what has been well-tested as certainties: autarkia or self-rule.
Kenny Smith
Image
Most people traffic in abstractions and generalizations because they are grossly incompetent at culturing their intuition or powers of evidency, refining it to grasp the Thisness (Haecceitas) of what is before them. Thinking is like a Stradivarius that has more potential variations in how it is played than any human can finitely perform or capture.
Kenny Smith
Image
Wisdom is the aristic craving for extraordinary insights, for incandescent revelations that have the power to burst through banausic and doulic ordinariness: wisdom is the lust to be transfigured, transvaluated.
Kenny Smith
Image
As always, the illusion of self-transcendence is far more facile and available than self-transcendence itself: in the vast majority of cases what human consciousness opens up to is merely a more encompassing form of finitude (another captivating illusion or delusion).
Kenny Smith
Image
Always, a form of self-equilibration, a soul or psyche, is trying to assert itself, to continue the melody of its self-realized life.
Kenny Smith
Image
Between what human beings so naively and stupidly fear and what they most profoundly ought to fear-i.e. what they so pathogenically and addictively do to their own selves-there is a horrendous gulf and disparity.
Kenny Smith
Image
It is the cruelest of all ironies that moderns imagine themselves to be (abstractly understood) individuals, because in actuality moderns are types, abstracted and self-abstractive victims of a process of stereotyping that afflicts even would-be rebels and anarchists.
Kenny Smith