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6 months 4 days ago

I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can't help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That's why we've got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.

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On evolution vs. "intelligent design", interviewed by Jon Stewart, The Daily Show
4 months 3 weeks ago

But leaving this, let us remark one thing which is very plain: That whatever be the uses and duties, real or supposed, of a Secretary in Parliament, his faculty to accomplish these is a point entirely unconnected with his ability to get elected into Parliament, and has no relation or proportion to it, and no concern with it whatever.

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8 months 4 days ago

The husband who decides to surprise his wife is often very much surprised himself.

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La Femme Qui a Raison, Act 1, scene 2, 1759
7 months 1 week ago

Be charitable before Wealth makes thee covetous.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.

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(5) [tr. George Long (1888)].
7 months 3 weeks ago

I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being.

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Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault
9 months 3 days ago

Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. Both alike are concerned with such things as come, more or less, within the general ken of all men and belong to no definite science. Accordingly, all men make use, more or less, of both; for to a certain extent all men attempt to discuss statements and to maintain them, to defend themselves and to attack others.

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8 months 3 days ago

The method of "postulating" what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.

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Ch. 7: Rational, Real and Complex Numbers
7 months 1 week ago

Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology: why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?

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As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) by Alan Lindsay Mackay
7 months 3 weeks ago

Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"-- they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity.

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(p. 107-108)
8 months 2 weeks ago

No one is ignorant that there are two avenues by which opinions are received into the soul, which are its two principal powers: the understanding and the will.

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8 months 1 day ago

What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

He and his tyrannicide! I am in a mad fury about these explosions. If that is the new world! Damn O'Donovan Rossa; damn him behind and before, above, below, and roundabout; damn, deracinate, and destroy him, root and branch, self and company, world without end. Amen. I write that for sport if you like, but I will pray in earnest, O Lord, if you cannot convert, kindly delete him!

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Letter to Sidney Colvin, 2 August 1881. Quoted in Terrorism and Literature Chapter 12 - "Parliament Is Burning" by Deaglán Ó Donghaile ISBN 9781316987292
7 months 3 days ago

Law and arbitrary power are in eternal enmity. Name me a magistrate, and I will name property; name me power, and I will name protection. It is a contradiction in terms, it is blasphemy in religion, it is wickedness in politics, to say that any man can have arbitrary power. In every patent of office the duty is included. For what else does a magistrate exist? To suppose for power is an absurdity in idea. Judges are guided and governed by the eternal laws of justice, to which we are all subject. We may bite our chains, if we will, but we shall be made to know ourselves, and be taught that man is born to be governed by law; and he that will substitute will in the place of it is an enemy to God.

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Speech in opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings (16 February 1788), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Ninth (1899), p. 458
4 months 3 weeks ago

Thiel's Antichrist obsession is the rare religious position that unites the Vatican and the godless. When your eschatology makes secular humanists and the Catholic Church exchange uncomfortable glances, you've left Christianity behind and entered something else entirely.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Don't you know that a good and excellent person does nothing for the sake of appearances, but only for the sake of having acted right?

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Book III, ch. 24, 50.
8 months 2 days ago

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

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Ch. 4
8 months 1 week ago

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen.

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Statement in defense of his writings at the Diet of Worms (19 April 1521), as translated in The Nature of Protestantism (1963) by Karl Heim, p. 78
9 months ago

No matter how various the subject matter I write on, I was a science-fiction writer first and it is as a science-fiction writer that I want to be identified.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

This right which you have, is not founded any more than his upon any quality or any merit in yourself which renders you worthy of it. Your soul and your body are, of themselves, indifferent to the state of boatman or that of duke; and there is no natural bond that attaches them to one condition rather than to another.

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7 months 3 days ago

Yes, I dreamed a dream, my dream of the third of November. They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth? If once one has recognized the truth and seen it, you know that it is the truth and that there is no other and there cannot be, whether you are asleep or awake. Let it be a dream, so be it, but that real life of which you make so much I had meant to extinguish by suicide, and my dream, my dream - oh, it revealed to me a different life, renewed, grand and full of power!

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7 months 2 days ago

The essential trait in the moral consciousness, is the control of some feeling or feelings by some other feeling or feelings.

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Ch. 7, The Psychological View
8 months 6 days ago

Oatmeal indeed supplies the common people of Scotland with the greatest and best part of their food, which is in general much inferior to that of their neighbours of the same rank in England.

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Chapter VIII, p. 91 (Oatmeal in England makes for great horses, in Scotland Great Men).
6 months 4 weeks ago

Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.

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8 months 1 day ago

Of course a war is entertaining. The immediate fear and suffering of the humans is a legitimate and pleasing refreshment for our myriads of toiling workers. But what permanent good does it do us unless we make use of it for bringing souls to Our Father Below? When I see the temporal suffering of humans who finally escape us, I feel as if I had been allowed to taste the first course of a rich banquet and then denied all the rest. It is worse than not to have tasted it at all. The Enemy, true to His barbarous methods of warfare, allows us to see the short misery of His favourites only to tantalize and torment us - to mock the incessant hunger, which, during this present phase of great conflict, His blockade is admittedly imposing.

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Letter V
3 months 4 weeks ago

One is immediately struck with the obstinacy and rigid consistency with which Lenin and his comrades stuck to this slogan, a slogan which is in sharp contradiction to their otherwise outspoken centralism in politics as well as to the attitude they have assumed towards other democratic principles. Wile they showed a quite cool contempt for the Constituent Assembly, universal suffrage, freedom of press and assemblage, in short for the whole apparatus of basic democratic liberties of the people which, taken all together, constituted the "right of self-determination" inside Russia, they treated the right of self-determination of peoples as a jewel of democratic policy for the sake of which all practical considerations of real criticism had to be stilled.

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Chapter Three, "Nationalities Question"
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is the simple hypotheses of which one must be most wary; because these are the ones that have the most chances of passing unnoticed.

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Thermodynamique: Leçons professées pendant le premier semestre 1888-1889 (1892), Preface
4 months 1 week ago

The good effects that emanate from the same source are equally diffused upon the earth. Different regions become partakers in these benefits in different ways; so that neither their production comes to an end, nor does the Deity confer his blessings upon the recipient world with any degree of variation. For where the substance is the same, so is the action thereof, in the case of Divine Powers; especially with him who is king of them all, namely, the Sun; of whom the motion is the most simple amongst all the bodies that move in a contrary direction to the world, which fact that most excellent philosopher, Aristotle, adduces to prove the superiority of that luminary to the others.

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9 months ago

Victories over ingrained patterns of thought are not won in a day or a year.

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7 months 1 week ago

We indeed, who are beings of finite powers, are forced to make use of instruments. And the use of an instrument sheweth the agent to be limited by rules of another's prescription, and that he cannot obtain his end but in such a way, and by such conditions. Whence it seems a clear consequence, that the supreme unlimited agent useth no tool or instrument at all. The will of an Omnipotent Spirit is no sooner exerted than executed, without the application of means; which, if they are employed by inferior agents, it is not upon account of any real efficacy that is in them, or necessary aptitude to produce any effect, but merely in compliance with the laws of nature, or those conditions prescribed to them by the First Cause, who is Himself above all limitation or prescription whatsoever.

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Philonous to Hylas. The Second Dialogue
6 months 2 weeks ago

In a general way, the literature of the twentieth century is essentially psychological; and psychology consists of describing states of the soul by displaying them all on the same plane, without any discrimination of value, as though good and evil were external to them, as though the effort toward the good could be absent at any moment from the thought of any man.

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"The responsibility of writers," p. 168
6 months 1 day ago

Is attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, which is a non-canonical early Christian text

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7 months 2 days ago

Evolution is definable as a change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.

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Pt. II, The Knowable; Ch. XV, The Law of Evolution (continued)
8 months 3 days ago

It is the duty of all who care for their country or for civilisation to point out that we cannot further any of our ideals by participation in the next war, and that we ought therefore to resist all measures based upon the assumption that we shall take part in it. In the late war it was arguable that victory, being possible, might do some good. With the modern technique of gas attack, no belligerent can hope for victory. Absolute pacifism, therefore, in every country, in which it is politically possible, is the only sane policy both for Governments and individuals.

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Letter to The New Statesman and Nation (10 August 1935), quoted in Yours Faithfully, Bertrand Russell
8 months 3 days ago

A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies.

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8 months 1 day ago

For man holds his ground only by surpassing himself, in the same sense in which it is said that one ceases to love if one does not love increasingly everyday.

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p. 238
7 months ago

The pistol and dagger may as easily be made the auxiliaries of vice, as of virtue.

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Book IV, "Of Tyrannicide"
8 months 1 day ago

Then he tried to recall the lessons of Mr. Wisdom. "it is I myself, eternal Spirit, who drives this Me, the slave, along that ledge. I ought not to care whether he falls and breaks his neck or not. It is not he that is real, it is I - I - I.

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Pilgrim's Regress 137
4 months 1 week ago

Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.

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"Atomic Physics and the Description of Nature"
7 months 2 days ago

Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs none.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The role of philosophy might be said to be to extend and deepen the self-awareness of mankind.

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Ch. 9, p. 137
3 months 4 weeks ago

Ancient philosophy will always hold its own among those who are worthy to judge it, because it forms... a system that is solid and well articulated like the body, whereas all these scattered members of modern philosophy form no system.

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Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter
8 months 3 days ago

Every man would like to be God, if it were possible; some few find it difficult to admit the impossibility.

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Ch. 1: The Impulse to Power
8 months 2 days ago

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

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1841
5 months 1 week ago

Philosophy in its very act is a process of translation!

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Chapter 4, Philosophy As Writing: The Case Of Hegel, p. 81

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