Skip to main content
4 months 3 weeks ago

1. Fidelity & Allegiance sworn to the King is only such a fidelity and obedience as is due to him by the law of the land; for were that faith and allegiance more than what the law requires, we would swear ourselves slaves, and the King absolute; whereas, by the law, we are free men, notwithstanding those Oaths. 2. When, therefore, the obligation by the law to fidelity and allegiance ceases, that by the Oath also ceases...

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Dr. Covel Feb. 21, (1688-9) Thirteen Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to J. Covel, D.D.
2 months 2 weeks ago

There is no nature which is inferior to art, the arts imitate the nature of things.

0
0
Source
source
XI, 10
7 months 3 weeks ago

From the Christian point of view it stands firm that the truly Christian venturing requires probability.

0
0
4 months 6 days ago

There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas.

0
0
Source
source
North to the Orient (1935) Ch. 1
6 months 5 days ago

All the good are friends of one another.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Stromata, v. 14. by Clement of Alexandria
4 months 2 weeks ago

To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 6 "Origins and Miracles" (p. 141)
4 months 3 weeks ago

People never remember but the computer never forgets.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 69)
6 months 3 weeks ago

Abjection is a methodological conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian epoche: it establishes the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without, in the manner of divine understanding.

0
0
Source
source
p. 141
7 months 3 weeks ago

It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs but not of being unable to defend himself with reason when the use of reason is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free. War is the father and king of all, and has produced some as gods and some as men, and has made some slaves and some free.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Whenever our neighbour's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

It may indeed be true that in order to act we need a certain amount of self-confidence and intellectual self-assurance. It may also be true that the very form of expression, in which we clothe our thoughts, tends to impose upon them an absolute tone.

0
0
5 months 6 days ago

It isn't at all a matter of being optimistic, but rather of continuing to have faith in the ongoing and literally unending process of emancipation and enlightenment that, in my opinion, frames and gives direction to the intellectual vocation.

0
0
Source
source
Preface to 25th anniversary edition of Orientalism (1994), p. xv
3 months 1 day ago

I go into the Upanishads to ask questions.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in God Is Not One : The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World and Why Their Differences Matter (2010), by Stephen Prothero, Ch, 4 : Hinduism : The Way of Devotion, p. 144
4 months 2 weeks ago

My life was not useless; I gave important truths to the world, and it was only for want of understanding that they were disregarded. I have been ahead of my time.

0
0
Source
source
Deathbed statement (November 1858), in response to a church minister who asked if he regretted wasting his life on fruitless projects; as quoted in Harold Hill : A People's History
5 months 2 weeks ago

Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

If you know these things, happy you are if you do them.

0
0
Source
source
13:17, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures
5 months 2 weeks ago

The irony of world history turns everything upside down. We, the "revolutionaries," the "rebels"-we are thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and revolt. The parties of order, as they call themselves, are perishing under the legal conditions created by themselves. They cry despairingly with Odilon Barrot: la légalité notes tue, legality is the death of us; whereas we, under this legality, get firm muscles and rosy cheeks and look like eternal life.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction (1895) to Marx's The Class Struggles in France (1848-50), p. 27
4 months 6 days ago

Rollers on the beach, wind in the pines, the slow flapping of herons across sand dunes, drown out the hectic rhythms of city and suburb, time tables and schedules. One falls under their spell, relaxes, stretches out prone. One becomes, in fact, like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea; bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today's tides of all yesterday's scribblings.

0
0
6 months 5 days ago

Hear gladly!

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

I agree with you that it is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities, which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Hugh P. Taylor
2 months 2 weeks ago

Without the collapse of capitalism the expropriation of the capitalist class is impossible.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9
5 months 1 week ago

Consciousness, the craving for more, more, always more, hunger of eternity and thirst of infinity, appetite for God - these are never satisfied. Each consciousness seeks to be itself and all other consciousnesses without ceasing to be itself; it seeks to be God. And matter, unconsciousness, tends to be less and less, tends to be nothing, its thirst being a thirst for repose. Spirit says: I wish to be! and matter answers: I wish not to be!

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Once in his early youth a man allowed himself to be so far carried away in an overwrought irresponsible state as to visit a prostitute. It is all forgotten. Now he wants to get married. Then anxiety stirs. He is tortured day and night with the thought that he might possibly be a father, that somewhere in the world there could be a created being who owed his life to him. He cannot share his secret with anyone; he does not even have any reliable knowledge of the fact. –For this reason the incident must have involved a prostitute and taken place in the wantonness of youth; had it been a little infatuated or an actual seduction, it would be hard to imagine that he could know nothing about it, but now this this very ignorance is the basis of his agitated torment. On the other hand, precisely because of the rashness of the whole affair, his misgivings do not really start until he actually falls in love.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 1, bk. 1 : Of the Powers of Man Considered in his Social Capacity, ch. 2
2 months 2 weeks ago

Whatever is in any way beautiful hath its source of beauty in itself, and is complete in itself; praise forms no part of it. So it is none the worse nor the better for being praised. Variant: That which is really beautiful has no need of anything.

0
0
Source
source
(trans. George Long) IV, 20
3 months 3 weeks ago

Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state?

0
0
Source
source
Preface, p. ix
6 months 3 weeks ago

Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.

0
0
Source
source
Existentialism and Human Emotions
4 months 2 days ago

Like nonhuman animals in human factory farms, free-living nonhumans who are starving - or being disembowelled, asphyxiated or eaten alive - cannot console themselves by chanting the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. The moral case for helping other sentient beings, regardless or race or species, does not rest on the distress their plight does (or doesn't) cause spectators.

0
0
Source
source
Reply to Meet the people who want to turn predators into herbivores, TreeHugger, 2 Apr. 2015
6 months 3 weeks ago

No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress. Men who think and have correct judgment, and people who treat their subject earnestly, are all exceptions only. Vermin is the rule everywhere in the world: it is always at hand and busily engaged in trying to improve in its own way upon the mature deliberations of the thinkers.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrasemongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot.

0
0
4 months ago

Much in the study of the paranormal was what we would now call pseudo-science. But the line between science and pseudo-science is smudged and shifting; where it lies seems clear only in retrospect. There is no pristine science untouched by the vagaries of faith.

0
0
Source
source
Foreword: Two Attempts to Cheat Death (p. 5)
6 months 2 weeks ago

The world is all that is the case.

0
0
Source
source
(1) Original German: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.
3 months 3 days ago

If wandering is the liberation from every given point in space, and thus the conceptional opposite to fixation at such a point, the sociological form of the "stranger" presents the unity, as it were, of these two characteristics.

0
0
Source
source
p. 402; Opening line.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.

0
0
Source
source
"Man has no nature"
5 months 2 weeks ago

I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Profile of Sir Alfred Ayer (June 1971) by Euro-Television, quoted in A.J. Ayer: A Life (1999), p. 2
6 months 3 weeks ago

A process which led from the amœba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress - though whether the amœba would agree with this opinion is not known.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
6 months 2 weeks ago

If I had to lay bets, my bet would be that everything is going to go to hell, but, you know, what else have we got except hope?

0
0
Source
source
"Richard Rorty Interviewed by Gideon Lewis-Kraus." The Believer, June 2003.
3 months 2 weeks ago

There is an unquestionable relationship between economic development and liberal democracy, which one can observe simply by looking around the world. But the exact nature of that relationship is more complicated than it first appeared, and is not adequately explained by any of the theories presented up to this point. The logic of modern natural science and the industrialization process it fosters does not point in a single direction in the sphere of politics, as it does in the sphere of economics. Liberal democracy is compatible with industrial maturity, and is preferred by the citizens of many industrially advanced states, but there does not appear to be a necessary connection between the two. The Mechanism underlying our directional history leads equally well to a bureaucratic-authoritarian future as to a liberal one. We will therefore have to look elsewhere in trying to understand the current crisis of authoritarianism and the worldwide democratic revolution.

0
0
Source
source
p. 125
5 months 5 days ago

You must go to Mahometanism, to Buddhism, to the East, to the Sufis & Fakirs, to Pantheism, for the right growth of mysticism.

0
0
Source
source
Letter (2 March 1853), quoted in Suggestions for Thought : Selections and Commentaries (1994), edited by Michael D. Calabria and Janet A. MacRae, p. xiii
6 months 3 weeks ago

He was often, and much beyond reason, provoked by my failures in cases where success could not have been expected; but in the main his method was right, and it succeeded. I do not believe that any scientific teaching ever was more thorough, or better fitted for training the faculties, than the mode in which logic and political economy were taught to me by my father. Striving, even in an exaggerated degree, to call forth the activity of my faculties, by making me find out everything for myself, he gave his explanations not before, but after, I had felt the full force of the difficulties; and not only gave me an accurate knowledge of these two great subjects, as far as they were then understood, but made me a thinker on both.

0
0
Source
source
(pp. 28-29)
2 months 3 weeks ago

We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

In obedience to the feeling of reality, we shall insist that, in the analysis of propositions, nothing "unreal" is to be admitted. But, after all, if there is nothing unreal, how, it may be asked, could we admit anything unreal? The reply is that, in dealing with propositions, we are dealing in the first instance with symbols, and if we attribute significance to groups of symbols which have no significance, we shall fall into the error of admitting unrealities, in the only sense in which this is possible, namely, as objects described.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 16: Descriptions
4 months 3 weeks ago

Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

When you make the two into one, you will become children of Adam, and when you say, 'Mountain, move from here!' it will move.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

For Warre, consisteth not in Battell onely, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of Time, is to be considered in the nature of Warre; as it is in the nature of Weather.

0
0
Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 13, p. 62

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia