Skip to main content
3 months 3 weeks ago

To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

The Grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods, with the vices of men, but in many important respects essentially of the divine race. In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead, as was rumored. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Everything of this sort is not anger, but the semblance of anger, like that of boys who want to beat the ground when they have fallen upon it, and who often do not even know why they are angry, but are merely angry without any reason or having received any injury, yet not without some semblance of injury received, or without some wish to exact a penalty for it.

0
0
2 months 2 days ago

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.

0
0
Source
source
Preface, Dover abridged edition (1952), p. xxii
1 month 3 weeks ago

Human or general needs can be satisfied through society; for satisfaction of unique needs you must do some seeking. A friend and a friendly service, or even an individual's service, society cannot procure you. And yet you will every moment be in need of such a service, and on the slightest occasions require somebody who is helpful to you. Therefore do not rely on society, but see to it that you have the wherewithal to - purchase the fulfilment of your wishes.

0
0
Source
source
Cambridge 1995, p. 243
6 months 6 days ago

Zeus, the god of gods, who rules according to law, and is able to see into such things, perceiving that an honourable race was in a woeful plight, and wanting to inflict punishment on them, that they might be chastened and improve, collected all the gods into their most holy habitation, which, being placed in the centre of the world, beholds all created things.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.

0
0
Source
source
Know thyself. As quoted in Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, I, 40 Variant
5 months 1 week ago

The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition. The experimental habit of mind is a difficult one for most people to maintain; indeed, the science of one generation has already become the tradition of the next...

0
0
Source
source
The Scientific Outlook, 1931
2 months 3 weeks ago

The student of development finds, not only that the chick commences its existence as an egg, primarily identical, in all essential respects, with that of the Dog, but that the yelk of this egg undergoes division-that the primitive groove arises, and that the contiguous parts of the germ are fashioned, by precisely similar methods into a young chick, which, at one stage of its existence, is so like the nascent Dog, that ordinary inspection would hardly distinguish the two.

0
0
Source
source
The history of the development of any other vertebrate animal, Lizard, Snake, Frog, or Fish, tells the same story. Ch.2, p. 79
1 month 2 weeks ago

It is very difficult to understand proletarian violence as long as we try to think in terms of the ideas disseminated by bourgeois philosophy; according to this philosophy, violence is a relic of barbarism which is bound to disappear under the progress of enlightenment.

0
0
Source
source
p. 65
1 month 6 days ago

Whoever is a truly good man seeks a renown not by means of an ornament that does not belong to him but by means of his own virtue.

0
0
Source
source
p. 151
3 months 4 days ago

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.

0
0
Source
source
An Apology for Idlers.
5 months 2 days ago

Reaching and understanding is the process of bringing about an agreement on the presupposed basis of validity claims that are mutually recognized.

0
0
Source
source
p. 23
2 months 2 weeks ago

As well as seriously - indeed exhaustively - researching everything that could conceivably go wrong, I think we should also investigate what could go right. The world is racked by suffering. The hedonic treadmill might more aptly be called a dolorous treadmill. Hundreds of millions of people are currently depressed, pain-ridden or both. Hundreds of billions of non-human animals are suffering too. If we weren't so inured to a world of pain and misery, then the biosphere would be reckoned in the throes of a global medical emergency. Thanks to breakthroughs in biotechnology, pain-thresholds, default anxiety levels, hedonic range and hedonic set-points are all now adjustable parameters in human and non-human animals alike. We are living in the final century of life on Earth in which suffering is biologically inevitable. As a society, we need an ethical debate about how much pain and misery we want to preserve and create. How do you break the hedonic treadmill?"

0
0
Source
source
, Quora, 6 Apr. 2019
5 months 1 week ago

A ruddy drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs, The world uncertain comes and goes; The lover rooted stays.

0
0
Source
source
Friendship
2 months 2 days ago

Everyone is sure of this [that errors are normally distributed], Mr. Lippman told me one day, since the experimentalists believe that it is a mathematical theorem, and the mathematicians that it is an experimentally determined fact.

0
0
Source
source
Calcul des probabilités (2nd ed., 1912), p. 171
5 months 1 week ago

Go into the London Stock Exchange - a more respectable place than many a court - and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker.

0
0
Source
source
Letters on England, letter 6, "On the Presbyterians" as quoted in Trust and Tolerance, Richard H. Dees, Routledge, London and New York, (2004) p. 92, published first in English in 1733.
4 months 4 days ago

Thought is as much a lie as love or faith.

0
0
4 months 3 days ago

From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say individuality vanishes.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

The best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mobs.

0
0
Source
source
Eloquence
4 months 4 days ago

Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

With silent strides Odysseus then shot back the bolt,passed lightly through the courtyard and sped down the street.Some saw him take the graveyard's zigzag mountain path,some saw him leap on rocks that edged the savage shore,some visionaries saw him in the dead of nightswimming and talking secretly with the sea-demons,but only a small boy saw him in a lonely dreamsit crouched and weeping by the dark sea's foaming edge.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, line 457
4 months 6 days ago

Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.

0
0
Source
source
The French Revolution, Bk. V, ch. 4
2 months 3 weeks ago

I've had letters from Chinese scientists at the peak of the SARS epidemic who said the problem is a hybridization between the viruses planted into GMO feed, which is then fed to animals, then the virus jumped from the animals to humans. We're going to see more and more of these kinds of risks. I think the whole issue of the H1N1 virus was the fact that it had genes for three influenza types--human, chicken, pig. All of these crossings are becoming possible because of the crossing of genes across species barriers.

0
0
Source
source
On the SARS epidemic, as quoted in "A Visit to My Kitchen: Vandana Shiva", The Huffington Post
4 months 4 weeks ago

Fame and wealth without wisdom are unsafe possessions.

0
0
5 months 3 days ago

One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.

0
0
Source
source
p. 98e
3 months 4 weeks ago

The ground of democratic ideas and practices is faith in the potentialities of individuals, faith in the capacity for positive developments if proper conditions are provided. The weakness of the philosophy originally advanced to justify the democratic movement was that it took individuality to be something given ready-made, that is, in abstraction from time, instead of as a power to develop.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

The life of the wealthy is one long Sunday.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

A man with two trades to his credit can easily learn another ten.

0
0
4 months 4 days ago

Consciousness is nature's nightmare.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

In the past human life was lived in a bullock cart; in the future it will be lived in an aeroplane; and the change of speed amounts to a difference in quality.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 6: "The Nineteenth Century", p. 137
4 months ago

Technical progress and more comfortable living permit the systematic inclusion of libidinal components into the realm of commodity production and exchange. But no matter how controlled the mobilization of instinctual energy may be (it sometimes amounts to a scientific management of libido), no matter how much it may serve as a prop for the status quo-it is also gratifying to the managed individuals, just as racing the outboard motor, pushing the power lawn mower, and speeding the automobile are fun.

0
0
Source
source
p. 75
4 months 1 week ago

The statue of Freedom has not been cast yet, the furnace is hot, we can all still burn our fingers.

0
0
Source
source
Act I.
1 month 5 days ago

Look at everything that exists, and observe that it is already in dissolution and change, and as it were putrefaction or dispersion, or that everything is so constituted in nature as to die.

0
0
Source
source
X, 18
3 months 3 weeks ago

Suffering is admittedly one of the central problems of human existence; but this is because we have a suspicion that it is all for nothing. If we had a certainty about meaning, the suffering would be bearable. With no certainty of meaning, even comfort begins to feel futile.

0
0
Source
source
p. 89
3 months 3 weeks ago

There is no getting around authority and power, and no getting around the intellectual's relationship to them. How does the intellectual address authority: as a professional supplicant or as its unrewarded, amateurish conscience?

0
0
Source
source
p. 83

To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great or rational whether in life or in science. Great achievement is assured, however, of subsequent recognition and grateful acceptance by public opinion, which in due course will make it one of its own prejudices.

0
0
Source
source
Sect. 318, as translated by T. M. Knox,, 1952
3 months 4 weeks ago

This new philosophy, however, was far from giving the temporal an inherent position and function in the constitution of things. Change was acting on the side of man but only because of fixed laws which governed the changes that take place. There was hope in change just because the laws that govern it do not change.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Experience is what you get while looking for something else.

0
0
Source
source
"Experience"
3 months 3 weeks ago

Just as eunuchs will never know aesthetics as applied to the selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is reasoned or defined.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

The representation of the self-sufficiency of the I can certainly co-exist with a representation of the self-sufficiency of the thing, though the self-sufficiency of the I itself cannot co-exist with that of the thing. Only one of these two can come first, only one can be the starting point; only one can be independent. The one that comes second, just because it comes second, necessarily becomes dependent upon the one that comes first, with which it is supposed to be connected. Which of these two should come first?

0
0
Source
source
p. 17-18.
5 months 1 week ago

If a man own land, the land owns him.

0
0
Source
source
Wealth
3 months 3 weeks ago

The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their simulation models.

0
0
Source
source
"The Precession of Simulacra," pp. 1-2

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia