# Roberto Mangabeira Unger - Quotes: 26 - Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger ## Books - [Plasticity into Power](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/plasticity-into-power.md) — 9 quotes - [The Critical Legal Studies Movement: Another Time, A Greater Task](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/the-critical-legal-studies-movement-another-time-a-greater-task.md) — 3 quotes - [The Left Alternative](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/the-left-alternative.md) — 5 quotes - [The Religion of the Future](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/the-religion-of-the-future.md) — 8 quotes - [What Should Legal Analysis Become?](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/what-should-legal-analysis-become.md) — 1 quote ## Recently added quotes > Openness to the new is the virtue that describes the moral consequence of the doctrine of the relation of spirit to structure. The religion of the future inherits this doctrine from the struggle with the world, and radicalizes it. This virtue acts out the human truth of our relation to the settled contexts of our life and thought. That they are ephemeral and defective, that they cannot accommodate all the experience and insight we have reason to value, that there is always more in us, individually as well as collectively, than is, or ever can be, in them are facts giving us persistent reason to rebel against such structures. p. 385 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/the-religion-of-the-future/openness-to-the.md) > Society will oscillate between long periods of relative stagnation in which state-protected privileges crowd out experiments in the organization of production and brief interludes in which much is destroyed before anything can be created. To perpetuate the practice of innovation, societies must replace such drastic and violent swings with a more constant liquefaction of deals and privileges. They must invent the structures that make structures easier to change. p. 192 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/plasticity-into-power/society-will-oscillate.md) > A deepened, high-energy democracy does not seek to replace the real world of interests and of interest-bearing individuals with the selfless citizen and with the all-consuming theater of public life. It is not a flight into republican purism and fantasy. It wants to enhance our ordinary powers, enlarge the scope of our ordinary sympathies and ambitions, and render more intense our ordinary experience. It seeks to do so by diminishing the distance between the ordinary moves we may within institutional and ideological contexts take for granted and the extraordinary initiatives by which we challenge and change pieces of those contexts. Its agent and its beneficiary are one and the same: the real thing—the frail, self-interested, longing individual in the flesh, the victim of circumstance whom no circumstance can ever completely or definitively confine. p. 30 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/the-left-alternative/a-deepened-high-energy.md) > In history obedience rarely pays; what pays is defiance. p. 8 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/the-left-alternative/in-history-obedience.md) > The reader should understand that this book forms a small part of a larger intellectual program: a struggle against fate through thought, an effort to give new meaning and new life to projects of individual and social liberation that for the last two hundred years have shaken and aroused the whole world, a fight to imagine the forms that those projects can and should take if they are to have a future. p. 187 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/the-left-alternative/the-reader-should.md) > To come out from under the protective wall of role, habit, and frozen perception, a person must throw himself into a situation of heightened exposure. He must put himself at greater risk to the harm that other people may do to him and to the destructive influence that enlarged experience may have on what he had previously regarded as his enduring core of identity. p. 12 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/plasticity-into-power/to-come-out.md) > In our advance to a greater life, we confront an initial obstacle. Unless we remove or overcome this obstacle, we can rise no further. We spend our time in a daze of diminished existence, neither awake nor asleep. We resign ourselves to compromise and routine, seeing the world through the categories of the prevailing culture or the methods of established ways of thinking. We reconcile ourselves to the mutilation of our experience that we begin to accept when we entered on a particular course of life. We allow ourselves to be subdued by the carapace of diminished experience that formed around is, as we grew older. For the vast majority of men and women, overwhelming economic necessity and drudgery overwhelm and disguise a stupefaction that would otherwise be apparent. For the increasing number of people who, with the material progress of society, are released from grinding material constraint, there is no disguise. In this way, we cease to live as embodied spirit: as the context-bound but context-resisting agents that we really are. That which is most precious—life itself—we give away in return for nothing. We belittle ourselves, wrongly mistaking our belittlement for a fate as inescapable as our mortality, our groundlessness, and our insatiability. p. 356 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/the-religion-of-the-future/in-our-advance.md) > The utopian element in politics lies in the ability to disentangle the image of possible human association from forms of life that make people's material and moral ability depend on their acceptance of predetermined hierarchical and communal divisions. The struggle of this visionary politics is to deny the identification of society with a limited repertory of social forms. Such a repertory imprisons all experiments in practical collaboration, in self-expression and reconciliation, within a determinate scheme of ranks and divisions, of authoritative ideals, and of accepted contexts for the realization of these ideals. p. 12 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/plasticity-into-power/the-utopian-element.md) > The imperative of plasticity requires that advances in productive or destructive powers be achieved through the subversion of fixed plans of social division and hierarchy and of stark contrasts between task setting and task following. All possible combinations have to be tried out, as quickly and as freely as possible. The only structure that can be allowed to subsist is one that offers the fewest obstacles to this principle of pitiless recombination. p. 208 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/plasticity-into-power/the-imperative-of-plasticity.md) > In a free society, the individual has the educational equipment, as well as the economic and political occasion, to cross the frontier between the activities that take the framework for granted and those that bring it into question. He has been educated in a way that enables the mind as imagination to become ascendant over the mind as machine. He has learned to philosophize by acting, in the sense that he recognizes in every project the seed of some great or small reformation. p. 295 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/the-religion-of-the-future/in-a-free.md) > A democratic experimentalist will not stand waiting for the next magical moment. Rather than have us be crowned by history, he will insist that we crown ourselves. p. 20 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/what-should-legal-analysis-become/a-democratic-experimentalist.md) > The more successfully we learn and practice the gospel of plasticity, the less suitable we become as subjects of the necessitarian styles of social and historical analysis that the great social theorists have taught us. We can, in fact, raise a storm in the world and still understand and explain ourselves. All we need is a better approach. p. 2 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/plasticity-into-power/the-more-successfully.md)