We do not live that we may become more godlike. We become more godlike that we may live. We turn to the future to live in the present. The practices … - Roberto Mangabeira Unger

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We do not live that we may become more godlike. We become more godlike that we may live. We turn to the future to live in the present. The practices by which we invent different futures bring down upon us a storm of impalpable meteors. The risks to which these practices subject us, the commotions, the hurts, the joys, strike and break the coats of armor within which we are all slowly dying. They enable each of us to live in action and in the mind until he dies all at once.

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About Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (born 24 March 1947) is a philosopher, politician, and law professor whose writings span the fields of social theory, philosophy of law, economics, religion, science, and general philosophy. Widely known as a key figure in the Critical Legal Studies movement, Unger has developed an intellectual project that proposes changes to political and social structures that would make society and individual lives more open to self-revision, fulfillment, risk-taking and experiment.

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Alternative Names: Roberto M. Unger Roberto Unger
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Additional quotes by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Humanity takes a long time to understand its relation to its structures of discourse and sociability. People have usually mistaken the forms of inquiry and discourse, exchange and community, to which they are accustomed for flawed approximations to the true face of reason or society. More often than not, they have cast this prejudice aside only to replace it with a more modest, halfhearted reformulation of the same belief.

People who can readily put on their agenda the foundations of the world they inhabit must be haughty, high-spirited, and even reckless. They must be secure in their inviolable independence. Yet the instruments of this independence must not smother the struggles that constantly offer them visible images of the connection between the forms of their life in common and the activities from which these forms arise and that cultivate the sense of mastery suitable to men and women who are neither masters nor servants.

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I have pursued this intellectual program by building a radical alternative in social theory to Marxism, by recasting legal thought as an instrument of the institutional imagination, by proposing particular institutional alternatives for the organization of the economy and the state, and by developing a philosophical conception of nature and mankind within which history is open, novelty is possible, and the divinization of humanity counts for more than the humanization of society.

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