Saidiya Hartman:
The project of educating white people has failed.
Karl Marx:
If men relate their products to one another as values insofar as these objects count as merely objectified husks of homogeneous human labour, there lies at the same time in that relationship the reverse, that their various labours only count as homogeneous human labour when under objectified husk. They relate their various labours to one another as human labour by relating their products to one another as values. The personal relationship is concealed by the objectified form. So just what a value is does not stand written on its forehead. In order to relate their products to one another as commodities, men are compelled to equate their various labours to abstract human labour. They do not know it, but they do it, by reducing the material thing to the abstraction, value. This is a primordial and hence unconsciously instinctive operation of their brain, which necessarily grows out of the particular manner of their material production and the relationships into which this production sets them.
The Gospel of Luke:
Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.
Plato, The Republic:
is comfort, this man would not make light of another when he met with a confused soul. He would take the time to understand if that soul was coming from a luminous realm and his eyes were blinded by darkness, or whether journeying from the darkness of ignorance into an illuminated state had overwhelmed his eyes. One, he would consider fortunate. He would pity the other—and if he laughed at either, it would be less justified if he laughed at the expense of the one who was descending from the light above.
Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason:
Suppose, now, that in this matter nature had conformed to our wish and had given us that capacity of discernment or that enlightenment which we would gladly possess, or which some imagine they actually possess, what would in all probability be the consequence? Unless our whole nature were at the same time changed, our inclinations, which always have the first word, would first of all demand their own satisfaction, and, joined with rational reflection, the greatest possible and most lasting satisfaction, under the name of happiness; the moral law would afterwards speak, in order to keep them within their proper bounds, and even to subject them all to a higher end, which has no regard to inclination. But instead of the conflict that the moral disposition has now to carry on with the inclinations, in which, though after some defeats, moral strength of mind may be gradually acquired, God and eternity with their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes (for what we can prove perfectly is to us as certain as that of which we are assured by the sight of our eyes). Transgression of the law, would, no doubt, be avoided; what is commanded would be done; but the mental disposition, from which actions ought to proceed, cannot be infused by any command, and in this case the spur of action is ever active and external, so that reason has no need to exert itself in order to gather strength to resist the inclinations by a lively representation of the dignity of the law: hence most of the actions that conformed to the law would be done from fear, a few only from hope, and none at all from duty, and the moral worth of actions, on which alone in the eyes of supreme wisdom the worth of the person and even that of the world depends, would cease to exist.
