Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.
Jose Ortega Y GassetRead
This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State, that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long run sustains, nourishes, and impels human destinies.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote warns against excessive state control over society, suggesting that it stifles individual and historical progress.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset highlights the crucial role of spontaneous social effort in driving human history and civilizations. He argues that when the state overly intervenes in these organic societal movements, it can lead to stagnation and potentially jeopardize the very fabric of human progress and destiny.
Themes
State InterventionCivilizationSocial EffortHuman DestiniesHistorical Action
In practice
Example use cases
Discussing the role of government in a public forum on social freedoms.
More from Jose Ortega Y Gasset
All quotes →"Natural" man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.
Jose Ortega Y GassetRead
We have not reached ethical perfection in hunting. One never achieves perfection in anything, and perhaps it exists precisely so that one can never achieve it. Its purpose is to orient our conduct and to allow us to measure the progress accomplished. In this sense, the advancement achieved in the ethics of hunting is undeniable.
Jose Ortega Y GassetRead
I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.
Jose Ortega Y GassetRead
We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.
Jose Ortega Y GassetRead
Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and atrocious confluence. Hunting submerges man deliberately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, and in the laws of Nature.
Jose Ortega Y GassetRead
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