Roberto Mangabeira Unger Quotes on Time

Quotes

• Attributed to Roberto Mangabeira Unger:

  “The future is not something to be predicted; it is something to be invented.”

• “[T]here is a path of ascent, requiring and enabling us to undergo a transformation of both society and the self, and rewarding us with an incomparable good. The incomparable good is a greater share of the attributes of the divine, or eternal life, or a greater life, with higher powers, making us more godlike.”

  p. 121 (explaining the religious tradition Unger calls "struggling with the world")

• “By the structure of society, I mean the institutional and ideological presuppositions that shape the routine practices, conflicts, and transactions in that society, and that are largely taken for granted, even to the point of being invisible, as if they were part of the nature of things. In a free society, this institutional and ideological framework does not present itself as an alien fate beyond the reach of the transformative will and imagination.”

  p. 295

• “In history obedience rarely pays; what pays is defiance.”

  p. 8