Obscurantism Quotes

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“While many find the new clothes of the emperor magnificent, some dare to say out loud, he is simply naked. If the clear sighted are constrained by the credulous and when the “followers” are browbeating the "knowers", the cat is among the pigeons and the age of obscuration is under way. Obviously "something wicked this way comes…" ("His master's voice" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“ATHEIST is really a thoroughly honest, unambiguous term, it admits of no paltering and no evasion, and the need of the world, now as ever, is for clear-cut issues and unambiguous speech.”
― Chapman Cohen

“And I wonder, therefore, how James Atlas can have been so indulgent in his recent essay ‘The Changing World of New York Intellectuals.’ This rather shallow piece appeared in the New York Times magazine, and took us over the usual jumps. Gone are the days of Partisan Review, Delmore Schwartz, Dwight MacDonald etc etc. No longer the tempest of debate over Trotsky, The Waste Land, Orwell, blah, blah. Today the assimilation of the Jewish American, the rise of rents in midtown Manhattan, the erosion of Village life, yawn, yawn. The drift to the right, the rediscovery of patriotism, the gruesome maturity of the once iconoclastic Norman Podhoretz, okay, okay! I have one question which Atlas in his much-ballyhooed article did not even discuss. The old gang may have had regrettable flirtations. Their political compromises, endlessly reviewed, may have exhibited naivety or self-regard. But much of that record is still educative, and the argument did take place under real pressure from anti-semitic and authoritarian enemies. Today, the alleged ‘neo-conservative’ movement around Jeane Kirkpatrick, Commentary and the New Criterion can be found in unforced alliance with openly obscurantist, fundamentalist and above all anti-intellectual forces. In the old days, there would at least have been a debate on the proprieties of such a united front, with many fine distinctions made and brave attitudes struck. As I write, nearness to power seems the only excuse, and the subject is changed as soon it is raised. I wait for the agonised, self-justifying neo-conservative essay about necessary and contingent alliances. Do I linger in vain?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports

“I really don't like art with a message, unless the message is crystal clear.
If you have a message that really needs to be said, just fuckin' say it! Don't hide it in indecipherable lyrics... a sculpture, it's a play, the subtext... just fuckin' say it, 'cause the people who need to hear messages are dumb as shit--the masses of humanity are dumb as shit, and you're really just pandering to your friends. Say what the fuck you mean, just say it! Title the song 'eat more leafy greens'. 'Give a hoot, don't pollute' is as much message and art combined, 'cause I get that, it's a poem but I'm pretty sure you're saying 'don't pollute'. But if you have something... 'ooh, I have the cure for cancer...and I've hidden it in this Rubix cube!!' -- just fuckin' say it!
- Before Turning the Gun on Himself [2012]”
― Doug Stanhope

“The noble old synagogue had been profaned and turned into a stable by the Nazis, and left open to the elements by the Communists, at least after they had briefly employed it as a 'furniture facility.' It had then been vandalized and perhaps accidentally set aflame by incurious and callous local 'youths.' Only the well-crafted walls really stood, though a recent grant from the European Union had allowed a makeshift roof and some wooden scaffolding to hold up and enclose the shell until further notice. Adjacent were the remains of a mikvah bath for the ritual purification of women, and a kosher abattoir for the ritual slaughter of beasts: I had to feel that it was grotesque that these obscurantist relics were the only ones to have survived. In a corner of the yard lay a pile of smashed stones on which appeared inscriptions in Hebrew and sometimes Yiddish. These were all that remained of the gravestones. There wasn't a Jew left in the town, and there hadn't been one, said Mr. Kichler, since 1945.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Lenin clearly and unambiguously poses the question of the relationship
between the ‘form’ of materialism and its ‘essence’, of the impermissibility of
identification of the former with the latter. The ‘form’ of materialism is found
in those concrete-scientific ideas about the constitution of matter (about the
‘physical’, about ‘atoms and electrons’) and in natural scientific generalizations
of these ideas that are inevitably turn out to be historically limited, changing,
subject to reconsideration by the natural science itself. The ‘essence’ of materialism is found in the acceptance of the objective reality that exists independently of human cognition and that is only reflected in it. The creative development of dialectical materialism on the basis of the ‘philosophical conclusions derived from the newest discoveries of natural science’ is, according to Lenin, found not in the reconsideration of this essence and not in making the ideas
of natural scientists eternal, but in the deepening of the understanding of the
‘relationship between cognition and the physical world’ that is connected with
these new ideas about nature. The dialectical understanding of the relationship
between the ‘form’ and ‘essence’ of materialism, and therefore, the relationship between ‘ontology’ and ‘epistemology’ constitutes the ‘spirit of dialectical
materialism”
― Evald Ilyenkov, Intelligent Materialism: Essays on Hegel and Dialectics

“Informed and rationally articulated dissent contributes to growth of ideas. Uniformed dissent, expressed through lung power, is a sign of insecurity. Countering dissent with fortification leads to a siege mentality. It results in a stagnant society, devoid of organic growth. Such a society perceives itself to be so fragile that every whiff of fresh air is seen as a threat to its existence.”
― R. N. Prasher

“The transmogrification of Islam into Islamism is bad news not only for the West but also for the majority of Muslims who have no desire to live in totalitarian theocracies. “For the West it is but a physical threat in the form of terrorism,” said Pakistani journalist Ayaz Amir. “For the world of Islam . . . to be trapped in bin Ladenism is to travel back in time to the dark ages of Muslim obscurantism. It means to be stuck in the mire which has held the Islamic world back.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist

“Why do scientists never debate philosophers? It’s because they know they would be destroyed in argument, when they have to actually clarify their ridiculous and embarrassing belief system. Mandarins, in their little priesthoods, hide behind jargon so that they know that no outsiders can laugh at their lack of clarity. They create an in-language so that only the insiders can know how absurd the belief system is, and they all have a vested interest in maintaining the fiction. That’s how the Mandarin system works. They don’t dare to be clear because then it would be clear that they are the emperor in his new clothes and know nothing at all.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“Every democracy, whether ochlocracy, aristocracy, oligarchy, monarchy, anarchy, proletarian, popular, or liberal, is by its very nature always a scotocracy, that is, the rule of obscurants, derived from Greek words σκότος for darkness, and κράτος for power, dominion, strength. But the "power" of obscurants is based on ignorance and madness, and, like night, from which only shadows remain when the sun rises, is powerless against the light of knowledge and reason.”
― Andrej Poleev, Metaanalysis of psychoanalysis

“Демократия – это собрание психически нездоровых людей в попытке компенсировать дефекты их психической организации, хотя сложение недостатков вовсе не приводит к положительному результату.”
― Андрей Полеев, Конституционный строй в России.