# Quote — Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Left Alternative

> I belong to the generation of 1968, which, throughout the world, hoped to recast society on the model of the imagination. I have tried to learn from disappointment and defeat, but I have not despaired. "If the fool would persist in his folly," wrote William Blake, "he would become wise."

- Author: [Roberto Mangabeira Unger](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger.md)
- Book: [The Left Alternative](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/the-left-alternative.md)
- Page: 188
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Roberto_Mangabeira_Unger#The_Left_Alternative_(2009)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/roberto-mangabeira-unger/the-left-alternative/i-belong-to-the

## More from this book

> 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)