Moses Hess Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

My main problem was, naturally, religion: from it I moved later on to the principles of ethics. First to be examined was my positive religion [ie. Judaism]. It collapsed. So I wanted to base myself on naturaly religion: but my agony was so great, that this [foundation] also collapsed before my eyes. Nothing, nothing remained. I was the most miserable person in the world. I became an atheist.

Moses Hess
He who wishes to study the barometric level of spiritual freedom must examine the relationship of the state to its Jewish subjects.

Moses Hess
We Germans are the most universal, the most European people of Europe.

Moses Hess
The race struggle is the primal one, and the class struggle secondary. The last dominating race is the German.

Moses Hess
A writer? What education did I receive? None. Where did I study? Nowhere. What did I study? It does not matter. I nonetheless became a writer immediately, because I wrote more than I have ever read; hence I thought more than I had food for thought.

Moses Hess
I was supposed to devote myself only to the Talmud. But the Talmud utterly repelled me, thought I was still a pious Jew-boy [Judenkind]. I wanted to satisfy my craving to be active, to do something: this craving looked for a sphere for itself because none was offered it. I did not want to be a good-for-nothing - and therefore I became a writer.

Moses Hess
The Messianic era is the present age, which began to germinate with the teachings of Spinoza, and finally came into historical existence with the great French Revolution.

Moses Hess
The focus of all life is its economy, the mode through which every living creature produces its material existence. I know no other criterion for the evaluation of social life except that of social economy. In society, just like anywhere else, the mode of production is the focus around which revolve all the modes of life: in the historical life of conscious beings, it is also the focus of all modes of consciousness.

Moses Hess
In the Jewish Quarter [Judengasse] was I born and educated; until my fifteenth year, they tried to beat the Talmud into me. My teachers were inhuman beings [Unmenschen], my colleagues were bad company, inducing me to secret sin; my body was frail, my spirit raw.

Moses Hess
The vocation of man, as that of any other creature, is to be active in all his being. But man cannot act as an individual. The essence of his life activity is cooperation with other individuals of his species. Outside this cooperation, outside of society, man does not achieve any specific human activity. But so long as this co-operation is arbitrarily ruled by accidentality, so long as it is not organized, man remains limited and constricted in his life-activity....

Moses Hess
Judaism is not a passive religion, but an active life factor which has coalesced
with the national consciousness into one organic whole. It is primarily the
expression of a nationality whose history for thousands of years coincides with
the history of the development of a humanity and the Jews are a nation which,
having once acted as the leaven of the social world, is destined to be resurrected
with the rest of civilized nations.

Moses Hess
The eternity of the spirit does not begin after death... but is, like God, always present.

Moses Hess