Ernest Gellner Quotes

A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.

The model that can be drawn up, of a plural society in which the multiplicity of forces and institutions prevent any one of their number dominating the rest, and which function on the basis of a broad and non-doctrinaire consensus — this picture does not warm the blood like wine. To appreciate and savour its appeal, one needs a rather sophisticated taste, perhaps.

Obstruction of mobility, where it occurs, is one of the most serious and intractable problems of industrial society.

I am deeply sensitive to the spell of nationalism. I can play about thirty Bohemian folk songs ... on my mouth-organ. My oldest friend, who is Czech and a patriot, cannot bear to hear me play them because he says I do it in such a schmalzy way, 'crying into the mouth organ'. I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write, were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs, which happen to be my favourite form of music.

Tribalism never prospers, for when it does, everyone will respect it as a true nationalism, and no-one will dare call it tribalism.

[I am a humble adherent of]...Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalism.

Dr J. O. Wisdom once observed to me that he knew people who thought there was no philosophy after Hegel, and others who thought there was none before Wittgenstein; and he saw no reason for excluding the possibility that both were right.

It is this which explains nationalism: the principle — so strange and eccentric in the age of agrarian cultural diversity and the 'ethnic' division of labour — that homogeneity of culture is the political bond, that mastery of (and, one should add, acceptability in) a given high culture ... is the precondition of political, economic and social citizenship.

Looking at the contemporary world, two things are obvious: democracy is doing rather badly, and democracy is doing very well. New states are born free, yet everywhere they are in chains. Democracy is doing very badly in that democratic institutions have fallen by the wayside in very many of the newly independent 'transitional' societies, and they are precarious elsewhere. Democracy, on the other hand, is doing extremely well in so far as it is almost (though not quite) universally accepted as a valid norm.

This is indeed one of the most important general traits of a modern society: cultural homogeneity, the capacity for context-free communication, the standardization of expression and comprehension.

This is Disenchantment: the Faustian purchase of cognitive, technological and administrative power, by the surrender of our previous meaningful, humanly suffused, humanly responsive, if often also menacing or capricious world.

Ideas, and even the detection of errors, require more than care and caution.

Capital, like capitalism, seems an overrated category.

Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak.

When knowledge is the slave of social considerations, it defines a special class; when it serves its own ends only, it no longer does so. There is of course a profound logic in this paradox: genuine knowledge is egalitarian in that it allows no privileged source, testers, messengers of Truth. It tolerates no privileged and circumscribed data. The autonomy of knowledge is a leveller.