Skip to main content
4 months 1 week ago

It is a most important social act; nay, at bottom, the one important social act. Given the men a People choose, the People itself, in its exact worth and worthlessness, is given. A heroic people chooses heroes, and is happy; a valet or flunkey people chooses sham-heroes, what are called quacks, thinking them heroes, and is not happy.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

And whereas many men, by accident unevitable, become unable to maintain themselves by their labour; they ought not to be left to the Charity of private persons; but to be provided for, (as far-forth as the necessities of Nature require,) by the Lawes of the Common-wealth. For as it is Unchariablenesse in any man, to neglect the impotent; so it is in the Soveraign of a Common-wealth, to expose them to the hazard of such uncertain Charity.

0
0
Source
source
The Second Part, Chapter 30, p. 181
5 months 2 weeks ago

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1. Why Are People?
8 months 1 week ago

Why dost thou not retire like a guest sated with the banquet of life, and with calm mind embrace, thou fool, a rest that knows no care?

0
0
Source
source
Book III, lines 938-939 (tr. Bailey)
6 months 6 days ago

Hooks is a contentious writer, and I don't always agree with her contentions, but Ain't I a Woman has an intellectual vitality and daring that should set new standards for the discussion of race and sex.

0
0
Source
source
Ellen Willis in No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays
6 months 1 week ago

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

0
0
Source
source
John Cumming trans., p. 7.
7 months 2 weeks ago

The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

We may assume the existence of an aether; only we must give up ascribing a definite state of motion to it, i.e. we must by abstraction take from it the last mechanical characteristic which Lorentz had still left it. ... But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable media, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Human beings are not born identical. There are many different temperaments and constitutions; and within each psycho-physical class one can find people at very different stages of spiritual development. Forms of worship and spiritual discipline which may be valuable for one individual maybe useless or even positively harmful for another belonging to a different class and standing, within that class, at a lower or higher level of development.

0
0
8 months 1 day ago

The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.

0
0
Source
source
Essex's Device
5 months 2 days ago

Whoever imposes severe punishment becomes repulsive to the people; while he who awards mild punishment becomes contemptible. But whoever imposes punishment as deserved becomes respectable. For punishment when awarded with due consideration, makes the people devoted to righteousness and to works productive of wealth and enjoyment; while punishment, when ill-awarded under the influence of greed and anger or owing to ignorance, excites fury even among hermits and ascetics dwelling in forests, not to speak of householders.

0
0
Source
source
Book I : "Concerning Discipline" Chapter 4 "Determination of the Place of Varta and of Dandaniti"
6 months 2 weeks ago

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. VI: Free Society
7 months 3 weeks ago

The hopes which inspire communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount, but they are held as fanatically and are as likely to do as much harm.

0
0
Source
source
Part I, The Present Condition of Russia, Ch. 1: What Is Hoped From Bolshevism
7 months 3 weeks ago

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Library of Living Philosophers: The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, 1944
7 months 3 weeks ago

The best is the enemy of the good.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to James Madison (30 January 1787); referring to Shays' Rebellion Lipscomb & Bergh ed. 6:65
6 months 2 weeks ago

Be ye therefore ready also: for the Son of man cometh at an hour when ye think not.

0
0
Source
source
12:40
4 months 1 week ago

He who boasts of his descent, praises the deeds of another.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.

0
0
Source
source
Access, Issues 165-176, National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting, 1984, p. xxiii
7 months 3 weeks ago

Sophistry is only fit to make men more conceited in their ignorance.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

My enemy is not the man who wrongs me, but the man who means to wrong me.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches.

0
0
Source
source
p. 61
3 months 2 weeks ago

Everything is the work of imagination, and... all the faculties of the soul can be correctly reduced to pure imagination...

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Just as an enemy is more dangerous to a retreating army, so every trouble that fortune brings attacks us all the harder if we yield and turn our backs.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist.

0
0
Source
source
Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault
6 months 1 week ago

Regressive listeners behave like children. Again and again and with stubborn malice, they demand the one dish they have once been served.

0
0
Source
source
p. 290
7 months 3 weeks ago

Tis evident, that sympathy, or the communication of passions, takes place among animals, no less than among men. Fear, anger, courage and other affections are frequently communicated from one animal to another [...] And 'tis remarkable, that tho' almost all animals use in play the same member, and nearly the same action as in fighting; a lion, a tyger, a cat their paws; an ox his homs; a dog his teeth; a horse his heels: Yet they most carefully avoid harming their companion, even tho' they have nothing to fear from his resentment; which is an evident proof of the sense brutes have of each other's pain and pleasure.

0
0
Source
source
Part 2, Section 12
6 months 1 week ago

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

0
0
Source
source
The Authoritarian Personality (1950), p. 976, co-written with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford
5 months 2 weeks ago

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!

0
0
Source
source
When asked how the world had changed following the September 11, 2001 attacks Has the world changed?, The Guardian
7 months 3 weeks ago

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer. I am surprised, as well as delighted, when this happens, it is such a rare use he would make of me, as if he were acquainted with the tool.

0
0
Source
source
p. 484
4 months 3 weeks ago

When I was 15 years old, or 16, I carried around on the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato's Republic, front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful.

0
0
Source
source
The Examined Life
4 months 2 weeks ago

This shows, perhaps, why we have tried to put all physical phenomena into the same frame. But that can not pass for a definition of simultaneity, since this hypothetical intelligence, even if it existed, would be for us impenetrable. It is... necessary to seek something else.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Much of junk culture has a core of crisis - shoot-outs, conflagrations, bodies weltering in blood, naked embracers or rapist-stranglers. The sounds of junk culture are heard over a ground bass of extremism. Our entertainments swarm with specters of world crisis. Nothing moderate can have any claim to our attention.

0
0
Source
source
A Second Half Life (1991), p. 326
8 months 1 week ago

I too have sworn heedlessly and all the time, I have had this most repulsive and death-dealing habit. I'm telling your graces; from the moment I began to serve God, and saw what evil there is in forswearing oneself, I grew very afraid indeed, and out of fear I applied the brakes to this old, old, habit.

0
0
Source
source
180:10:1
8 months 2 weeks ago

I consider one of the most important duties of any scientist the teaching of science to students and to the general public.

0
0
5 months 1 day ago

If we already lived in a cruelty-free world, the notion of re-introducing suffering, exploitation and creatures eating each other would seem not so much frightful as unimaginable - no more seriously conceivable than reverting to surgery without anaesthesia today.

0
0
Source
source
Reprogramming Predators, BLTC Research, 2009
4 months 3 days ago

It must be obvious... that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, p. 31.
6 months 2 weeks ago

But, braggart demons, we postpone our end: how could we renounce the display of our freedom, the show of our pride?

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

The original thinking force of the universe progresses and develops itself in all possible determinations of which it is capable, just as the other original natural forces progress and assume all possible configurations. I am a particular determination of the formative force, like the plant; a particular determination of the peculiar motive force, like the animal; and in addition to this a determination of the thinking force: and the union of these three basic forces into one force, into one harmonious development, is the distinguishing characteristic of my species.

0
0
Source
source
P. Preuss, trans. (1987), p. 12
8 months 1 week ago

Chi Wan thought thrice, and then acted. When the Master was informed of it, he said, "Twice may do."

0
0
3 weeks 1 day ago

The Ten Commandments are a weak attempt to capture what you can know through universality and humanistic thinking.

0
0
6 months 1 day ago

In the process of decision those alternatives are chosen which are considered to be appropriate means of reaching desired ends. Ends themselves, however, are often merely instrumental to more final objectives. We are thus led to the conception of a series, or hierarchy, of ends. Rationality has to do with the construction of means-ends chains of this kind.

0
0
Source
source
p. 62.
8 months 3 weeks ago

Seek first God's Kingdom, that is, become like the lilies and the birds, become perfectly silent - then shall the rest be added unto you.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia