Skip to main content
5 months 2 days ago

Complete, at the same time, was his confidence in his own judgment when it spoke to him decisively. He was one of those few that could believe and know as well as inquire and be of opinion. When I remember how much he admired intellectual force, how much he had of it himself, and yet how unconsciously and contentedly he gave others credit for superiority, I again see the healthy spirit of the genuine man.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

The irony of the post-Cold War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology. In American and Britain, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, a type of market fundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of American power that is underway is the predictable upshot.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

I possess no weapon but love. With that I have come to do battle. Help me!

0
0
9 months 1 week ago

Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.

0
0
7 months 4 days ago

Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain without being uncovered.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in B. F. Skinner : The Man and His Ideas (1968) by Richard Isadore Evans, p. 73
8 months 6 days ago

This investigation aims to analyze the type "bourgeois public sphere". Its particular approach is required, to begin with, by the difficulties specific to an object whose complexity precludes exclusive reliance on the specialized methods of a single discipline. Rather, the category. "public sphere" must be investigated within the broad field formerly reflected in the perspective of the traditional science of "politics."' When particular social-scientific discipline, this object disintegrates. The problems that result from fusing aspects of sociology and economics, of constitutional law and political science, and of social and intellectual history are obvious: given the present state of differentiation and specialization in the social sciences, scarcely anyone will be able to master several, let alone all, of these disciplines.

0
0
Source
source
p.xvii
8 months 2 weeks ago

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, vii, 5
8 months 2 weeks ago

Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.

0
0
Source
source
Letters
8 months 1 week ago

Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought.

0
0
Source
source
"On Noise"
9 months 1 week ago

There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to E.L. Godkin, 24 December 1895
8 months 1 week ago

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Part 1.
7 months 1 week ago

Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Virtue is the death of conscience because it is the habit of Good, and yet the ethic of the honest man infinitely prefers virtue to the noblest agonies of conscience. Thus, being poses nonbeing and eliminates it. There is only being.

0
0
Source
source
p. 402
8 months 1 week ago

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure...

0
0
Source
source
A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42 (1996), p. 443
9 months 1 week ago

The whole business is the crudest sort of stratagem, since we have no way of foreseeing it to the end. It is a mere paying out of rope on the chance that somewhere along the length of it will be a noose.

0
0
8 months 2 days ago

Contemporary intellectuals have given up the Enlightenment assumption that religion, myth, and tradition can be opposed to something ahistorical, something common to all human beings qua human.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Let us cultivate our garden.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Our lives are guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes. Our words, our phrases, our forms and processes and modes of thought, are common property, fashioned and perfected from age to age; an heirloom which every succeeding generation inherits as a precious deposit and a sacred trust to be handled on to the next one, not unchanged but enlarged and purified, with some clear marks of its proper handiwork. Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. An awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Sometimes they do things wrong repeatedly and initiate the apology at their convenience....or not....sometimes just silence....

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

A new moral outlook is called for in which submission to the powers of nature is replaced by respect for what is best in man. It is where this respect is lacking that scientific technique is dangerous.

0
0
Source
source
Attributed to Russell at the end of Isaac Asimov's short story Franchise with no specific source given.
6 months 1 week ago

Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.

0
0
Source
source
Cambridge 1995, p. 114
9 months 1 week ago

But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

This realistic image, however, does not catch at all what really is, but what should not be - death and misery - what should not exist, from our moral and humanistic point of view. And at the same time making an aesthetic and commercial, perfectly immoral use and abuse of this misery. Images that actually testify, behind their pretended "objectivity", of a deep denial of the real, and of an equal denial of the image - assigned to present what does not even want to be represented, assigned to the rape of the real by burglary.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Not only does the action of Governments not deter men from crimes; on the contrary, it increases crime by always disturbing and lowering the moral standard of society. Nor can this be otherwise, since always and everywhere a Government, by its very nature, must put in the place of the highest, eternal, religious law (not written in books but in the hearts of men, and binding on every one) its own unjust, man-made laws, the object of which is neither justice nor the common good of all but various considerations of home and foreign expediency.

0
0
Source
source
The Meaning of the Russian Revolution (1906), a work about the 1905 Russian Revolution.
4 months 1 week ago

Trial by jury, the best of all safeguards for the person, the property, and the fame of every individual.

0
0
5 months 5 days ago

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Angels in the workplace: stories and inspirations for creating a new world of work (1999) by Melissa Giovagnoli
8 months 2 weeks ago

The annual produce of the land and labour of any nation can be increased in its value by no other means, but by increasing either the number of its productive labourers, or the productive powers of those labourers who had before been employed.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, p. 377.

If we demonstrate this moving principle, if we show that matter, far from being as indifferent as it is supposed to be, to movement and to rest, ought to be regarded as an active, as well as a passive substance, what resource can be left to those who have made its essence consist in extension?

0
0
Source
source
Ch. V Concerning the Moving Force of Matter
8 months 3 weeks ago

Be not swept off your feet by the vividness of the impression, but say, "Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are and what you represent. Let me try you."

0
0
Source
source
Book II, ch. 18, § 24, Reported in Bartlett's Quotations (1919) as "Be not hurried away by excitement, but say, "Semblance, wait for me a little".
4 months 1 week ago

The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

He dies twice who perishes by his own hand.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 97
5 months 2 days ago

What you see, yet can not see over, is as good as infinite.

0
0
Source
source
Bk. II, ch. 1.
8 months 1 week ago

Only a neutral, who is indifferent to the stake and perhaps to all stakes, can appreciate aesthetically the grandeur of a fine disaster

0
0
Source
source
p. 212
8 months 1 week ago

I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.

0
0
Source
source
June 27, 1839
6 months 3 weeks ago

Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication; today, however, communication without community prevails.

0
0
8 months 2 days ago

Speciesism-the word is not an attractive one, but I can think of no better term-is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: All Animals Are Equal
4 months 3 weeks ago

"He is a slave." His soul, however, may be that of a freeman. "He is a slave." But shall that stand in his way? Show me a man who is not a slave; one is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, and all men are slaves to fear.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

As these people are not convicted of forfeiting freedom, they have still a natural, perfect right to it; and the Governments whenever they come should, in justice set them free, and punish those who hold them in slavery.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

God!' said the Ghost, glancing around the landscape. 'God what?' asked the Spirit. 'What do you mean, "God what"?' asked the Ghost. 'In our grammar God is a noun' said the Spirit.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9
8 months 2 weeks ago

And to bring in a new word by the head and shoulders, they leave out the old one.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 5. Upon some Verses of Virgil
8 months 1 day ago

Men have made an idol of luck as an excuse for their own thoughtlessness. Luck seldom measures swords with wisdom. Most things in life quick wit and sharp vision can set right.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

In reading Jung's account of his cases, it is impossible not to be aware that his success was due partly to an element of ruthlessness; he was dominated by curiosity rather than compassion.

0
0
Source
source
p. 36
3 weeks 4 days ago

Thought I'd share one of these old ones for you guys...this is like 15 years old....I used to do all this before....

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

When a person inflates his own importance, he does not see his own sins; and his sins get bigger right along with him.

0
0
Source
source
p. 108

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia