A Quote by Michael Joseph Oakeshott

Political action involves mental vulgarity, not merely because it entails the occurrence and support of those who are mentally vulgar, but because of the simplification of human life implied in even the best of it purposes.

Michael Joseph Oakeshott

Quote Topics

Action Because Best Entails Even Human Human Life Implied Involves Life Mental Mentally Merely Occurrence Political Political Action Purposes Simplification Support Those Vulgar Vulgarity

Quote Author

Michael Joseph Oakeshott
English - Philosopher
December 11, 1901 - December 19, 1990

The word humility (also human) is derived from the Latin humus, meaning the soil. Perhaps this is not simply because it entails stooping and returning to earthly origins, but also because, as we are rooted in this earth of everyday life, we find in it all the vitality and fertility unnoticed by people who merely tramp on across the surface, drawn by distant landscapes.

Piero Ferrucci

The movie cheerfully offends all civilized notions of taste, decorum, manners and hygiene... The movie is vulgar? Vulgarity is when we don't laugh. When we laugh, it's merely human nature.

Roger Ebert

The best kind of travel – the kind I wanted to experience – involves a particular state of mind, in which one is not merely open to the occurrence of the unexpected, but to deep involvement in the unexpected, indeed, open to the possibility of having one’s life changed forever by a chance encounter.

Elisabeth Eaves

The worst vulgarity is to avoid vulgarity solely on the grounds that it is vulgar.

Tanith Lee

To anyone who has followed the practice of using profanity or vulgarity and would like to correct the habit, could I offer this suggestion? First, make the commitment to erase such words from your vocabulary. Next, if you slip and say a swear word or a substitute word, mentally reconstruct the sentence without the vulgarity or substitute word and repeat the new sentence aloud. Eventually you will develop a non-vulgar speech habit.

L. Tom Perry

A purely mental life may be destructive if it leads us to substitute thought for life and ideas for actions. The activity proper to man is purely mental because man is not just a disembodied mind. Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts.

Thomas Merton

I hate vulgarity. I hate vulgarity even though it attracts me - and it attracts me very much. I love all that is transgressive or vulgar. But in my opinion, it has to reach a limit that is always a little surreal and never becomes in your face.

Riccardo Tisci

I do not support individual countries taking military action against another country because of its human rights record, or subsequently justifying taking such action on human rights grounds.

Mary Robinson

Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar; it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns.

George Gilder

There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.

John Ruskin

Doing your best is taking the action because you love it, not because you're expecting a reward. Most people do the exact opposite: They only take action when they expect a reward, and they don't enjoy the action. And that's the reason why they don't do their best.

Miguel Angel Ruiz

The last thing abandoned by a party is its phraseology, because among political parties, as elsewhere, the vulgar make the language, and the vulgar abandon more easily the ideas that have been instilled into it than the words that it has learnt.

Alexis de Tocqueville

A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common.

William Hazlitt

The project of organizing a democratic political movement entails the hope that one's ideas and beliefs are not merely idiosyncratic but speak to vital human needs, interests and desires, and therefore will be persuasive to many and ultimately most people. But this is a very different matter from deciding to put forward only those ideas presumed (accurately or not) to be compatible with what most people already believe.

Ellen Willis

Democracy suits Europeans today partly because it is associated with the triumph of capitalism and partly because it involves less commitment or intrusion into their lives than any of the alternatives. Europeans accept democracy because they no longer believe in politics. It is for this reason that we find both high levels of support for democracy in cross-national opinion polls and high rates of political apathy.