Skip to main content
3 months 3 days ago

I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

The poor are thought to be dangerous, either morally dangerous because they are unproductive social parasites - thieves, prostitutes, drug addicts, and the like - or potentially dangerous because they are disorganized, unpredictable, and tendentially reactionary. In fact the term lumpenproletariat (or rad proletariat) has functioned for times to demonize the poor as a whole. ... The industrial reserve army is a constant threat hanging over the heads of the existing working class because, first of all, its misery serves as a terrifying example to workers of what could happen to them, and, second, the excess supply of labor it represents lowers the costs of labor and undermines workers' power against employers (by serving potentially as strike breakers, for example).

0
0
Source
source
130
5 months 2 days ago

A mother gave her children Aesop's fables to read, in the hope of educating and improving their minds; but they very soon brought the book back, and the eldest, wise beyond his years, delivered himself as follows: This is no book for us; it's much too childish and stupid. You can't make us believe that foxes and wolves and ravens are able to talk; we've got beyond stories of that kind! In these young hopefuls you have the enlightened Rationalists of the future.

0
0
Source
source
"Similes, Parables and Fables" Parerga and Paralipomena
4 months 3 weeks ago

Indulge in no wrathfulness, for a man when he indulges in wrath becomes then forgetful of his duty and good works . . . and sin and crime of every kind occur unto his mind, and until the subsiding of the wrath he is said to be just like Ahareman.

0
0

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.

0
0
Source
source
D 70
3 months 3 weeks ago

The vicious circle of dread of war which leads the nations to arm themselves for self-protection, with the result that bloated armaments ultimately lead to the war which they were intended to avert, can be broken in either of two conceivable ways. There might arise a unique world power, brought into being by the unification of all those now in possession of weapons, and equipped with the capacity to forbid the lesser and unarmed nations to make war. On the other hand, it may arise by the working of a fate to us still inscrutable which, out of ruin, will disclose a way towards the development of a new human being. To will the discovery of this way would be blind impotence, but those who do not wish to deceive themselves will be prepared for the possibility.

0
0
6 months 3 days ago
Where there have been powerful governments, societies, religions, public opinions, in short wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated; for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force it way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart.
0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Jesus Christ raised women above the condition of mere slaves, mere ministers to the passions of the man, raised them by His sympathy, to be Ministers of God. He gave them moral activity. But the Age, the World, Humanity, must give them the means to exercise this moral activity, must give them intellectual cultivation, spheres of action.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

Unconscious assumptions or opinions are the worst enemy of woman; they can even grow into a positively demonic passion that exasperates and disgusts men, and does the woman herself the greatest injury by gradually smothering the charm and meaning of her femininity and driving it into the background. Such a development naturally ends in profound psychological disunion, in short, in a neurosis.

0
0
Source
source
P.245
5 months 1 day ago

Belief in God and a future life makes it possible to go through life with less of stoic courage than is needed by skeptics. A great many young people lose faith in these dogmas at an age at which despair is easy, and thus have to face a much more intense unhappiness than that which falls to the lot of those who have never had a religious upbringing. Christianity offers reasons for not fearing death or the universe, and in so doing it fails to teach adequately the virtue of courage. The craving for religious faith being largely an outcome of fear, the advocates of faith tend to think that certain kinds of fear are not to be deprecated. In this, to my mind, they are gravely mistaken. To allow oneself to entertain pleasant beliefs as a means of avoiding fear is not to live in the best way. In so far as religion makes its appeal to fear, it is lowering to human dignity.

0
0
Source
source
p. 107
5 months ago

There can be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference elsewhere - no difference in abstract truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture II, What Pragmatism Means
4 months 1 week ago

When the end comes, you will be esteemed by the world and rewarded by God, not because you have won the love and respect of the princes of the earth, however powerful, but rather for having loved, defended and cherished one such as I ... what you receive from others is a testimony to their virtue; but all that you do for others is the sign and clear indication of your own.

0
0
Source
source
Dedication
3 months ago

To say that the activity of science and art helps humanity's progress, if by that activity we mean the activity which now calls itself by those names, is as though one said that the clumsy, obstructive splashing of oars in a boat moving down stream assists the boat's progress. It only hinders it... The proof of this is seen in the confession made by men of science that the achievements of the arts and sciences are inaccessible to the labouring masses on account of the unequal distribution of wealth.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

The Master said, "He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it."

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

A dangerous form of psychological splitting had to have taken place, and it continues to take place, in the psyches of many African Americans who can on one hand oppose racism, and then on the other hand passively absorb ways of thinking about beauty that are rooted in white supremacist thought.

0
0
4 months 4 weeks ago

The doctrine that there is as much science in a subject as... mathematics in it, or as much... measurement or 'precision' in it, rests upon... misunderstanding.

0
0
5 months 1 day ago

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand.

0
0
5 months 4 weeks ago

Parmenides: I was pleased with you, Socrates, because you would not discuss the doubtful question in terms of visible objects or in relation to them, but only with reference to what we conceive most entirely by the intellect and may call ideas… But if you wish to get better training, you must do something more than that; you must consider not only what happens if a particular hypothesis is true, but also what happens if it is not true.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons?

0
0
Source
source
p. 17
5 months 2 weeks ago

The light will not shame you, if it shows you your own ugliness, and that ugliness so offends you that you perceive the beauty of the light.

0
0
Source
source
First Homily, as translated by John Burnaby (1955), p. 262
4 months 4 weeks ago

The safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

0
0
Source
source
Letter XII
5 months 1 week ago

What would you say of that man who was made king by the error of the people, if he had so far forgotten his natural condition as to imagine that this kingdom was due to him, that he deserved it, and that it belonged to him of right? You would marvel at his stupidity and folly. But is there less in the people of rank who live in so strange a forgetfulness of their natural condition?

0
0
4 months 4 weeks ago

The devil...the prowde spirit...cannot endure to be mocked.

0
0
Source
source
Thomas More, quoted at the beginning of The Screwtape Letters
4 months 1 week ago

Dispose thy Soul to all good and necessary things!

0
0

The governing principles of chemical affinity are, that it is elective ; that it is definite ; that it determines the properties of the compound; and that analysis is possible.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

[Successful meditation brings about realizations:] That we are no longer this poor little stranger and afraid in a world it never made. But that you are this universe and you are creating it in every moment... Because you see it starts now, it didn't begin in the past, there was no past. See, if the universe began in the past when that happened it was now; see, but it's still now - and the universe is still beginning now, and it's trailing off like the wake of a ship from now, and that wake fades out so does the past. You can look back there to explain things, but the explanation disappears. You'll never find it there. ... Things are not explained by the past, they are explained by what Happens Now. That Creates the past, and it begins here... That's the birth of responsibility.

0
0
Source
source
On deep meditation and enlightenment that transcends temporal experiences and most notions of selfhoody

We may say with truth and meaning that governments are more or less republican, as they have more or less of the element of popular election and control in their composition; and believing, as I do, that the mass of the citizens is the safest depository of their own rights, and especially, that the evils flowing from the duperies of the people are less injurious than those from the egoism of their agents, I am a friend to that composition of government which has in it the most of this ingredient. And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to John Taylor (28 May 1816) ME 15:23

He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp.

0
0
Source
source
L 70
5 months 4 weeks ago

I shall have to test the theory of my father Parmenides, and contend forcibly that after a fashion not-being is and on the other hand in a sense being is not. For unless these statements are either disproved or accepted, no one who speaks about false words, or false opinion whether images or likenesses or imitations or appearances about the arts which have to do with them, can ever help being forced to contradict himself and make himself ridiculous.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Contrary to earlier prejudices, there is nothing inherently progressive about evolution.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 7 "Constructive Evolution" (p. 178)
5 months 4 days ago

The natural price, therefore, is, as it were, the central price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter VII, p. 69.
5 months 1 week ago

He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 13
1 month 1 week ago

Awakening of Western thought will not be complete until that thought steps outside itself and comes to an understanding with the search for a world-view as this manifests itself in the thought of mankind as a whole. We have too long been occupied with the developing series of our own philosophical systems, and have taken no notice of the fact that there is a world-philosophy of which our Western philosophy is only a part. If, however, one conceives philosophy as being a struggle to reach a view of the world as a whole, and seeks out the elementary convictions which are to deepen it and give it a sure foundation, one cannot avoid setting our own thought face to face with that of the Hindus, and of the Chinese in the Far East. ... Our Western philosophy, if judged by its own latest pronouncements, is much naiver than we admit to ourselves, and we fail to perceive this only because we have acquired the art of expressing what is simple in a pedantic way.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

It is the fate of 'little faiths' of truth that they, true followers of Peter, whether they be Roman or the Protestant observance, cry out and sink in the sea of ideas, where the followers of Paul, believing in the Spirit, walk secure and undismayed.

0
0
Source
source
p. 32

Go where he will, the wise man is at home, His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.

0
0
Source
source
Wood-notes, st. 3
5 months 4 weeks ago

To the rest of the Galaxy, if they are aware of us at all, Earth is but a pebble in the sky. To us it is home, and all the home we know.

0
0
5 months ago

A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.

0
0
Source
source
Lectures XI, XII, and XIII, "Saintliness"
2 months 3 weeks ago

Conquered people tend to be witty.

0
0
Source
source
Mr. Sammler's Planet, (1976), p. 98
3 months 3 weeks ago

Calvin's theocentric irrationalism eventually revealed itself as the cunning to technocratic reason which had to shape its human material. Misery and the poor laws did not suffice to drive men into the workshops of the early capitalistic era. The new spirit helped to supplement external pressures with a concern for wife and child to which the moral autonomy of the introverted subject in reality was tantamount.

0
0
Source
source
p. 34.

The equal rights of man, and the happiness of every individual, are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government. Modern times have the signal advantage, too, of having discovered the only device by which these rights can be secured, to wit: government by the people, acting not in person, but by representatives chosen by themselves, that is to say; by every man of ripe years and sane mind, who either contributes by his purse or person to the support of his country.

0
0
3 weeks 6 days ago

People try to get away from it all-to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: you can get away from it anytime you like. By going within. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful-more free of interruptions-than your own soul.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) IV, 4
3 months 3 weeks ago

The words of the world want to make sentences.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 5, sect. 4
2 months 3 weeks ago

Those who cannot find moral clarity are likely to settle for the far more dangerous simplicity, or purity, instead.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.

0
0
4 months 4 weeks ago

Justice is happiness according to virtue.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter V, Section 48, p. 310

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia