Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.
Jose Ortega Y GassetRead
This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State, that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long run sustains, nourishes, and impels human destinies.
Interpretation
The quote warns against excessive state control over society, suggesting that it stifles individual and historical progress.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset highlights the crucial role of spontaneous social effort in driving human history and civilizations. He argues that when the state overly intervenes in these organic societal movements, it can lead to stagnation and potentially jeopardize the very fabric of human progress and destiny.
In practice
Discussing the role of government in a public forum on social freedoms.
Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.
"Natural" man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.
We have not reached ethical perfection in hunting. One never achieves perfection in anything, and perhaps it exists precisely so that one can never achieve it. Its purpose is to orient our conduct and to allow us to measure the progress accomplished. In this sense, the advancement achieved in the ethics of hunting is undeniable.
I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.
We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.
Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and atrocious confluence. Hunting submerges man deliberately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, and in the laws of Nature.
…it is so much better to work for others than for one's self alone.
Search men's governing principles, and consider the wise, what they shun and what they cleave to.
She stops, pauses, turns to the left to glance at some possible threat or irregularity, and then continues to the north. This motion, so intensely human, transcends time.
An answer is always a form of death.
It is in the interest of tyrants to reduce the people to ignorance and vice. For they cannot live in any country where virtue and knowledge prevail. The religion and public liberty of a people are intimately connected; their interests are interwoven, they cannot subsist separately; and therefore they rise and fall together. For this reason, it is always observable, that those who are combin'd to destroy the people's liberties, practice every art to poison their morals.
I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner.
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