Skip to main content
4 months 3 weeks ago

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

0
0
Source
source
An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940), Introduction, p. 15
3 months 3 weeks ago

Word - that invisible dagger.

0
0
1 month 6 days ago

A new theory by the author has been added, which draws the physical inferences consequent on the extension of the foundations of geometry beyond Reimann... and represents an attempt to derive from world-geometry not only gravitational but also electromagnetic phenomena. Even if this theory is still only in its infant stage, I feel convinced that it contains no less truth than Einstein's Theory of Gravitation-whether this amount of truth is unlimited or, what is more probable, is bounded by the Quantum Theory.

0
0
Source
source
From the Author's Preface to Third Edition
3 months 3 weeks ago

The history of philosophical system is the picture gallery of reason.

0
0
Source
source
Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 68
1 month 2 weeks ago

I warmly second the advice of the wisest of men-"Don't be ambitious; don't be at all too desirous to success; be loyal and modest." Cut down the proud towering thoughts that you get into you, or see they be pure as well as high. There is a nobler ambition than the gaining of all California would be, or the getting of all the suffrages that are on the planet just now.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Explorers (1996) by Paolo Novaresio ISBN 1-55670-495-X
2 months 5 days ago

When Bernard Marx tells the Savage he will try to secure permission for him and his mother to visit the Other Place, John is initially pleased and excited. Echoing Miranda in The Tempest, he exclaims: "O brave new world that has such people in it." Heavy irony. Like innocent Miranda, he is eager to embrace a way of life he neither knows nor understands. And of course he comes unstuck. Yet if we swallow such fancy literary conceits, then ultimately the joke is on us. It is only funny in the sense there are "jokes" about Auschwitz. For it is Huxley who neither knows nor understands the glory of what lies ahead. A utopian society in which we are sublimely happy will be far better than we can presently imagine, not worse. And it is we, trapped in the emotional squalor of late-Darwinian antiquity, who neither know nor understand the lives of the god-like super-beings we are destined to become. "Brave New World? A Defence of Paradise-Engineering", BLTC Research, 1998

0
0
3 weeks 2 days ago

Yes, you can--if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You will find rest from vain fancies if you perform every act in life as though it were your last.

0
0
Source
source
II, 5
2 months 3 days ago

Human beings act, certainly. But none of them knows why they act as they do. There is a scattering of facts, which can be known and reported. Beyond these facts are the stories that are told. Human beings may behave like puppets, but no one is pulling the strings.

0
0
Source
source
In The Puppet Theatre: Puppetry, Conspiracy and Ouija Boards (p. 136)
1 month 4 days ago

I feel, like all modern Americans, no consciousness of sin and simply do not believe in it. All I know is that if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to Hell. That is a final fact of my inner consciousness, and for no religion could I deny its truth.

0
0
Source
source
p. 407
3 months 3 weeks ago

The wise will determine from the gravity of the case; the irritable from sensibility to oppression; the high-minded from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands.

0
0
4 months 4 weeks ago

Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity; and is independence on the will and co-action of every other in so far as this consists with every other person's freedom.

0
0
Source
source
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Ethics by Immanuel Kant, trans. J.W. Semple, ed. with Iintroduction by Rev. Henry Calderwood (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1886) (3rd edition). Chapter: GENERAL DIVISION OF JURISPRUDENCE.
1 month 2 weeks ago

My father's education was altogether of the worst and most limited. I believe he was never more than three months at any school. What he learned there showed what he might have learned. A solid knowledge of arithmetic, a fine antique handwriting - these, with other limited practical etceteras, were all the things he ever heard mentioned as excellent. He had no room to strive for more.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

As soon as the soul has been made to perceive that a thing can conduct it to that which it loves supremely, it must inevitably embrace it with joy.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Science is a systematic method for studying and working out those generalizations that seem to describe the behavior of the universe. It could exist as a purely intellectual game that would never affect the practical life of human beings either for good or evil, and that was very nearly the case in ancient Greece, for instance. Technology is the application of scientific findings to the tools of everyday life, and that application can be wise or unwise, useful or harmful. Very often, those who govern technological decisions are not scientists and know little about science.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

In former times the chief method of justifying the use of violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming a divine right for the rulers: the Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs, and other heads of states. But the longer humanity lived the weaker grew the belief in this peculiar, God-given right of the ruler. That belief withered in the same way and almost simultaneously in the Christian and the Brahman world, as well as in Buddhist and Confucian spheres, and in recent times it has so faded away as to prevail no longer against man's reasonable understanding and the true religious feeling. People saw more and more clearly, and now the majority see quite clearly, the senselessness and immorality of subordinating their wills to those of other people just like themselves, when they are bidden to do what is contrary not only to their interests but also to their moral sense.

0
0
Source
source
III
4 months 3 weeks ago

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Believe me, my friends, you are yet very deficient with regard to the best modes of training your children, or of arranging your domestic concerns.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

An ethos of freedom stops power from solidifying into domination and makes sure it remains an open game.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

This means that no state, howsoever democratic its forms, not even the reddest political republic - a people's republic only in the sense of the lie known as popular representation - is capable of giving the people what they need: the free organization of their own interests from below upward, without any interference, tutelage, or coercion from above. That is because no state, not even the most republican and democratic, not even the pseudo-popular state contemplated by Marx, in essence represents anything but government of the masses from above downward, by an educated and thereby privileged minority which supposedly understands the real interests of the people better than the people themselves.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

He wins every hand who mingles profit with pleasure, by delighting and instructing the reader at the same time.

0
0
Source
source
Line 343
3 months 3 weeks ago

I can prove now, for instance, that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, "Here is one hand," and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, "and here is another." And if, by doing this, I have proved ipso facto the existence of external things, you will all see that I can also do it now in numbers of other ways: there is no need to multiply examples.

0
0
Source
source
"Proof of an External World," Proceedings of the British Academy 25 (1939).
4 months 3 weeks ago

Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 24, Section 3, pg. 652.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us.

0
0
2 weeks 2 days ago

The standard bearers have grown weak in the defense of their priceless heritage, and the powers of darkness have been strengthened thereby. Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character; it becomes lack of power to act with courage proportionate to danger. All this must lead to the destruction of our intellectual life unless the danger summons up strong personalities able to fill the lukewarm and discouraged with new strength and resolution.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.

0
0
Source
source
Volume I; Part 1; "Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook"; Section A, "Idealism and Materialism".
4 months 2 weeks ago

Whatever the poverty of our knowledge in this respect, it is certain that the question of the sign is itself more or less, or in any event something other, than a sign of the times. To dream of reducing it to a sign of the times is to dream of violence.

0
0
Source
source
Force and Signification
4 months 3 weeks ago

This much is certain, the ERA OF REVOLUTION has now FAIRLY OPENED IN EUROPE once more. And the general state of affairs is good.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Friedrich Engels (13 February 1863), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 41. Letters 1860-64 (2010), p. 453
4 months 3 weeks ago

One must care about a world one will not see.

0
0
Source
source
Attributed to Russell in The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations (1997), p. 450, and in Robertson's Dictionary of Quotations (1998), p. 362, but no specific source is given.
4 months ago

Impenetrable in their dissimulation, cruel in their vengeance, tenacious in their purposes, unscrupulous as to their methods, animated by profound and hidden hatred for the tyranny of man - it is as though there exists among them an ever-present conspiracy toward domination, a sort of alliance like that subsisting among the priests of every country.

0
0
Source
source
"On Women" (1772), as translated in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker
2 months 3 weeks ago

All state obligations are against the conscience of a Christian: the oath of allegiance, taxes, law proceedings and military service.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter VII, Significance of Compulsory Service
5 months 4 days ago

Do not fight against these harmful spells. For you do not know what God wants with them. You do not know the greater divine plan behind it all.

0
0
Source
source
As attributed by Kai Lehmann, curator of the exhibition "Luther und die Hexen" ("Luther and the witches"). (2013) in "Interview with Dr. Kai Lehmann, curator of the exhibition "Luther und die Hexen" ("Luther and the witches")"
4 months 3 weeks ago

All traditional logic habitually assumes that precise symbols are being employed. It is therefore not applicable to this terrestial life but only to an imagined celestial existence... logic takes us nearer to heaven than other studies.

0
0
Source
source
Vagueness', first published in The Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, 1 June, 1923
3 weeks 2 days ago

The mind is the ruler of the soul. It should remain unstirred by agitations of the flesh--gentle and violent ones alike. Not mingling with them, but fencing itself off and keeping those feelings in their place. When they make their way into our thoughts, through the sympathetic link between mind and body, don't try to resist the sensation. The sensation is natural. But don't let the mind start in with judgments, calling it 'good' or 'bad.'

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) V, 26
3 months 3 weeks ago

To conceive a thought - just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

This is the contradiction of racism, colonialism, and all forms of tyranny: in order to treat a man like a dog, one must first recognize him as a man.

0
0
3 weeks 5 days ago

The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.

0
0
3 weeks 5 days ago

I congratulate you, fellow citizens, on the approach of the period at which you may interpose your authority constitutionally to withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the un-offending inhabitants of Africa, and which the morality, the reputation, and the best of our country have long been eager to proscribe. Although no law you may pass can take prohibitory effect until the first day of the year 1808, yet the intervening period is not too long to prevent by timely notice expeditions which can not be completed before that day.

0
0
Source
source
Thomas Jefferson's Sixth State of the Union Address
5 months ago

When the act of navigation was made, though England and Holland were not actually at war, the most violent animosity subsisted between the two nations. ... It is not impossible, therefore, that some of the regulations of this famous act may have proceeded from national animosity. They are as wise, however, as if they had all been dictated by the most deliberate wisdom. National animosity at that particular time aimed at the very same object which the most deliberate wisdom would have recommended, the diminution of the naval power of Holland, the only naval power which could endanger the security of England.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II
3 months 3 weeks ago

Among all my patients in the second half of life-that is to say, over thirty-five-there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.

0
0
Source
source
Chap. 11 (Psychotherapists or the Clergy), p. 229
3 weeks 5 days ago

I am not alone in my fear, nor alone in my hope, nor alone in my shouting. A tremendous host, an onrush of the Universe fears, hopes, and shouts with me. I am an improvised bridge, and when Someone passes over me, I crumble away behind Him.

0
0
4 months 4 weeks ago

The problem of establishing a perfect civic constitution is dependent upon the problem of a lawful external relation among states and cannot be solved without a solution of the latter problem.

0
0
Source
source
Seventh Thesis
1 month 1 week ago

We should become angels and not devils, that's why we have been created and born into the world. Therefore be and stick to what God has chosen you for.

0
0
5 months 5 days ago

Lucid intervals and happy pauses.

0
0
Source
source
History of King Henry VII, III

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia