Karl Popper
KARL R. POPPER  Macroknow Library
   

   
The Poverty of Historicism.

"How could we arrest scientific and industrial progress? By closing down, or by controlling, laboratories for research, by suppressing or controlling scientific periodicals . . ., by suppressing Universities . . . , by suppressing books, the printing press, writing, and, in the end, speaking."1a


     
   
The Open Society and Its Enemies.

"In our own time, Hegel's hysterical historicism is still the fertilizer to which modern totalitarianism owes its rapid growth. . . 
Thus the formula of the fascist brew is in all countries the same: Hegel plus a dash of nineteenth-century materialism (especially Darwinism . . . )."2a
HEGEL CASSIRER

"Money . . . becomes dangerous only if it can buy power, either directly, or by enslaving the economically weak who must sell themselves in order to live."2b

" . . . [T]he history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder . . . "2c* GANDHI

"The fact that a statement is true may sometimes help to explain why it appears to us as self-evident. This is the case with '2+2=4' . . . But the opposite is clearly not the case. The fact that a sentence appears to some or even to all of us to be 'self-evident' . . . is no reason why it should be true."1d ARISTOTLE DESCARTES PASCAL BERKELEY VOLTAIRE JAMES SANTAYANA RUSSELL ORWELL DRUCKER PENROSE


 
       

* Italics in the original.

1 Karl R. Popper (1902-1994). The Poverty of Historicism. Karl Raimund Popper, 1957, 1960, 1961. London, UK: Routledge, 1994.
a The Institutional Theory of Progress, at 154.

2 Karl R. Popper. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Volume II: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath. Fifth ed. (revised). Karl Raimund Popper, 1962, 1966. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
a Hegel and the New Tribalism, at 59 and 61.
b The Legal and the Social System, at 128.
c Has History Any Meaning?, at 270.
d
Chapter 11: The Aristotelian Roots of Hegelianism, Note 42, at 291.