Circumstances Existing Already Given All Men Are
For the final exam, each student, MUST submit an essay, four pages in length on ONE
of the following quotations. Each essay should make at least one reference to a reading,
discussion or article from the semester. In the essay, feel free to disagree, dispute, expand
upon the quotation. Do not be afraid to use your own intelligence however, be sure to
substantiate your view.
1, “Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political
animal” – Aristotle
2. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it
under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already given and
transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weights like a nightmare on the
brains of the living”. – Marx
3. “Do not be angry with me for speaking the truth; no man will survive who genuinely opposes
you or any other crowd and prevents the occurrence of many unjust and illegal happenings in
the city. A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive
for even a short time”. – Socrates
4. “I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don’t want any greatness for
it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice
alive”. – Camus
5. “Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every
man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security that what their
own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal….the life of man, solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short”. – Hobbes
6. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and
the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” – Jefferson
7. “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, saying ‘This is Mine”, and found people
simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society. From what crimes, murders,
horrors and misery would humans have been spared if one had pulled up the stakes and cried
out to all, ‘Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you do not remember that the fruits of the
earth belongs to all and the earth to no one'”. – Rousseau
8. “The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society,
the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond
definite forms of social consciousness”. – Marx
9. “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a
living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism
will grow in strength in our land”. – Franklin Delano Roosevelt
10. “If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it
go…perchance it will wear out…but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of
injustice to another, then I say, break the law…What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do
not lend myself to that which I condemn”. – Thoreau
11. “With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or
less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations the distinction should always be
made between the material transformation of production which can be determined with the
precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic-in short,
ideological-forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out”. – Marx
12. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways: the point, however, is to
change it”. –Marx
Feel free to interpret, argue, agree or otherwise expand upon the quotation but be sure to
substantiate your views.