Dialectic Quotes

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. - Octavio Paz

Whenever a person strives, by the help of dialectic, to start in pursuit of every reality by a simple process of reason, independent of all sensuous information / never flinching, until by an act of the pure intelligence he has grasped the real nature of good / he arrives at the very end of the intellectual world. - Plato

When you're coming into something that is reasonably successful, the question always is, 'What are you going to do to make it more successful?' ... For me, it's just a question to find a way in which I can present material that I believe is relevant, and that there's a dialectic that begins to be created with the Seattle community. I mean, those are lofty ideas, but I think in presenting plays, there needs to be a combination of the plays that think [and] some understanding that theater should also be a place of pleasure and entertainment. - David Esbjornson

We hope to make clear the ways in which dialectical and metaphysical issues necessarily figure in the subject of motivation. Our speculations, as we interpret them, should show that the subject of motivation is a philosophic one, not ultimately to be solved in terms of empirical science. - Kenneth Burke

The world is not dialectical - it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil. - Jean Baudrillard

The link between peace and stability on the one hand, and social and economic growth on the other, is dialectic. Peace, poverty, and backwardness cannot mix in one region. - King Hussein I

The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state. - John Kenneth Galbraith

The dialectic is neither fiction or mysticism, but a science of the forms of our thinking insofar as it is not limited to the daily problems of life but attempts to arrive at an understanding of more complicated and drawn-out processes. The dialectic and formal logic bear a relationship similar to that between higher and lower mathematics. - Leon Trotsky