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Henri Lefebvre Quotes
1901–1991 France
Henri Lefebvre (16 June 1901 – 29 June 1991) was a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, best known for pioneering the critique of everyday life, for introducing the concepts of the right to the city and the production of social space, and for his work on dialectics, alienation, and criticism of Stalinism, existentialism, and structuralism.
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11 quotes
Everything great and splendid is founded on power and wealth.
The 'meaning' of life is not to be found in anything other than that life itself.
It is through knowledge that the proletarian liberates himself and begins actively superseding his condition.
Change life! 'Change society!' These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space. … new social relationships call for a new space, and vice versa.
The method of Marx and Engels consists precisely in a search for the link which exists between what men think, desire, say and believe for themselves and what they are, what they do.
There is nothing more unbearable than the intellectual who believes himself to be free and human, while in every action, gesture, word and thought he shows that he has never stepped beyond bourgeois consciousness.
Socialism, when it attempts to predict or imagine the future (which Marx refused to do, since he conceived of a path, not a model), provides us merely with an improved form of labor (salaries and material conditions on the job).
The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labour to leisure
Henri Lefèbvre (2000)
Castles, palaces, cathedrals, fortresses, all speak in their various ways of the greatness and the strength of the people who built them and against whom they were built.
Only a vast inventory of the elements of our culture - in other words of our consciousness of life - will enable us to see clearly.
But it is equally possible to follow this link in another direction, taking real life as the point of departure in an investigation of how the ideas which express it and the forms of consciousness which reflect it emerge.