Ernest Gellner Short Quotes

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Capital, like capitalism, seems an overrated category.

Ernest Gellner
It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.

Ernest Gellner
[I am a humble adherent of]... Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalism.

Ernest Gellner
Ideas, and even the detection of errors, require more than care and caution.

Ernest Gellner
A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.

Ernest Gellner
America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it.

Ernest Gellner
Roughly, science is the mode of cognition of industrial society, and industry is the ecology of science.

Ernest Gellner
Obstruction of mobility, where it occurs, is one of the most serious and intractable problems of industrial society.

Ernest Gellner
People are even more reluctant to admit that man explains nothing, than they were to admit that God explains nothing.

Ernest Gellner
Just as every girl should have a husband, preferably her own, so every culture must have its state, preferably its own.

Ernest Gellner
Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak.

Ernest Gellner
Tribalism never prospers, for when it does, everyone will respect it as a true nationalism, and no-one will dare call it tribalism.

Ernest Gellner
The idea that some of the members of the smooth, bland variety of second generation of linguistic philosophers undergo perplexity, let alone intellectual cramp, has an element of high comedy.

Ernest Gellner
This is indeed one of the most important general traits of a modern society: cultural homogeneity, the capacity for context-free communication, the standardization of expression and comprehension.

Ernest Gellner