Roberto Unger Quotations

In a world of democracies, in a world where the great projects that have set humanity on fire are the projects of the emancipation of individuals from entrenched social division and hierarchy; in such a world individuals must never be puppets or prisoners of the societies or cultures into which they have been born.

In my view, a political vision is not a grab-bag of discrete problems and solutions. It is the visionary anticipation of a direction.

The Amazon is not just a set of trees. It is a set of 25 million people. If we don't create real economic opportunities for them, the practical result is to encourage disorganized economic activities that results in the further destruction of the rain forest.

The scientist should treasure the riddles he can't solve, not explain them away at the outset.

One of the striking features of the form of globalisation that has now been established is that it is based on the premise that goods and even capital should be free to roam but labour must remain imprisoned within the nation state.

When we imagine our Universe to be just one out of a multitude of possible worlds we devalue this world, the one we see, the one we should be trying to explain.

In a world of democracies, the most deserving basis of national differences is that the different states of the world should represent a form of moral specialisation within humanity.

The supreme good of life is vitality. And vitality is always seeping away.

Brazil has no future as a China with fewer people.

I regard myself as a man without charm in a country of charmers.

Insofar we are death-bound, existence is urgent and frightful. Insofar as are groundless, it is vertiginous and dreamlike. Insofar as we are insatiable, it is unquiet and tormented.

The embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a burst of visonary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the center of that world but on the contrary, a dependent and even hapless creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die

The essential thing, the ultimate goal of politics and thought, is a bigger life for the individual. A bigger life – that remains the main objective…to increase our divine attributes to have moral life.

Social solidarity must rest (instead) on the sole secure basis it can have: direct responsibility of people for one another. Such responsibility can be realized through the principle that every able-bodied adult holds a position within a caring economy - the part of the economy in which people care for one another - as well as within the production system

At every level the greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different