The Abolition of Man Quotes

“The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.”

“Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.”

“The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself.”

“Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won.”

“If any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power.”

“What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”

“A wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”

“We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.”

“If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.”

“Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consumption, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.”

“Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger.”

“Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao . . . or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own ‘natural’ impulses.”

“At the moment, then, of Man’s victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely ‘natural’ – to their irrational impulses.”

“It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption.”

“The being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same.”

“For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.”

“If man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be.”

“For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.”

“I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently.”

“The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.”