Skip to main content
6 months 1 week ago

Any ethics that needs religion is bad ethics, and any religion that tries to do so is bad religion. Of course, there are plenty of both around.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Citizens of a Jeffersonian democracy can be as religious or irreligious as they please as long as they are not "fanatical." That is, they must abandon or modify opinion on matters of ultimate importance, the opinions that may hitherto have given sense and point to their lives, if these opinions entail public actions that cannot be justified to most of their fellow citizens.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.

0
0
Source
source
15:28 (KJV)
4 months 2 weeks ago

Keep this thought handy when you feel a bit of rage coming on - it isn't manly to be enraged. Rather, gentleness and civility are more human, and therefore manlier. A real person doesn't give way to anger and discontent, and such a person has strength, courage, and endurance - unlike the angry and complaining. The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength.

0
0
Source
source
XI 11.18.5b:41
8 months 3 weeks ago

The Clergy is the greatest hindrance to faith.

0
0
Source
source
58
8 months 2 weeks ago

Whenever I have read any part of the Vedas, I have felt that some unearthly and unknown light illuminated me. In the great teaching of the Vedas, there is no touch of sectarianism. It is of all ages, climes and nationalities and is the royal road for the attainment of the Great Knowledge. When I am at it, I feel that I am under the spangled heavens of a summer night.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Bansi Pandit, The Hindu Mind (B & V Enterprises, 1996) p. 307
2 weeks 3 days ago

There are deterministic factors...

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Before Christianity suicide was not in any way troubling. Our lives were our own, and when we tired of them we were at liberty to end them. One might think that as Christianity has declined, this freedom would be reclaimed. Instead secular creeds have sprung up, in which each person's life belongs to everyone else. To hand back the gift of life because it does not please is still condemned as a kind of blasphemy, though the offended deity is now humanity instead of God.

0
0
Source
source
Sweet Morality (p. 231-2)
7 months 2 weeks ago

Maybe suffering has no more justification than life.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

It seems as if marriage were the royal road through life, and realised, on the instant, what we have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They think it will sober and change them. Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy it needs but an act to be out of the coil and clamour for ever. But this is a wile of the devil's. To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep calling and calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in this - that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

0
0
Source
source
Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 1.
7 months 1 week 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.
7 months 2 weeks ago

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.

0
0
9 months 2 days ago

Know, first, who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, ch. 1, 25.
8 months 2 weeks ago

In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination, about whose weird successes and eventual failures we know perhaps more than any generation before us. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.

0
0
Source
source
On Violence
9 months 2 weeks ago

Hope is the dream of a waking man.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

There is a left wing version of this longing for community... because in a liberal society we never move as quickly as we should towards full equality, and therefore there are many marginalized groups who feel that the liberal society is... hypocritical, that it's promising an equality of recognition, and of rights, but it is not delivering... and therefore the very concept of liberal universalism is challenged in favor of a definition of rights that is tied to the specific groups.

0
0
Source
source
18:44
7 months 2 weeks ago

Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. VII, par. 547
4 months 3 weeks ago

The Americans' "open-mindedness", which is sometimes cited in their favor, is the other side of their interior formlessness. The same goes for their "individualism". Individualism and personality are not the same: the one belongs to the formless world of quantity, the other to the world of quality and hierarchy. The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. The American "mind", puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization.

0
0
Source
source
American "Civilization" (1945) · Excerpts
7 months 1 week ago

De Lubac discusses an atheism which means to suppress this searching, he says, "even including the problem as to what is responsible for the birth of God in human consciousness."

0
0
Source
source
p. 45
7 months 2 days ago

The term many presupposes the term one, and the term one presupposes the term many.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. I, ch. 2, sec. 2.
5 months 3 days ago

I commend you and rejoice in the fact that you are persistent in your studies, and that, putting all else aside, you make it each day your endeavour to become a better man.

0
0
7 months 2 days ago

For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must be either new in itself or invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance.

0
0
9 months 6 days ago

The highest perfection of human life consists in the mind of man being detached from care, for the sake of God.

0
0
Source
source
III, 130, 3
7 months 2 weeks ago

"Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?"

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

All names of God remain hallowed because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

A criminal who, having renounced reason ... hath, by the unjust violence and slaughter he hath committed upon one, declared war against all mankind, and therefore may be destroyed as a lion or tyger, one of those wild savage beasts with whom men can have no society nor security. And upon this is grounded the great law of Nature, "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed."

0
0
Source
source
Second Treatise of Civil Government, Ch. II, sec. 11
4 months 2 weeks ago

The more devils we have within us, the more chance we have to form angels.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 10
8 months 3 weeks ago

Never any good came out of female domination. God created Adam master and lord of living creatures, but Eve spoiled it all.

0
0
Source
source
-- Table Talk, quoted in Luther On "Woman"
5 months 1 week ago

The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind.

0
0
Source
source
The life of Friedrich Schiller: Comprehending an examination of his works (1825).
8 months 2 weeks ago

The national debt has given rise to joint stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage, in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 31, pg. 827.
7 months 1 week ago

The masses are our masters; and for every one who looks facts in the face his existence has become dependent on them, so that the thought of them must control his doings, his cares, and his duties. Even an articulated mass always tends to become unspiritual and inhuman. It is life without existence, superstitions without faith. It may stamp all flat; it is disinclined to tolerate independence and greatness, but prone to constrain people to become as automatic as ants.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

There are two distinct classes of men in the nation, those who pay taxes, and those who receive and live upon the taxes.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.

0
0
Source
source
The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the House with the Green Blinds.
4 months 2 weeks ago

In the morning, when thou art sluggish at rousing thee, let this thought be present; "I am rising to a man's work."

0
0
Source
source
Meditations. v. 1.
8 months 2 weeks ago

Justice as fairness provides what we want.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Section 30, pg. 190
9 months 2 weeks ago

Parmenides: If the one is not, nothing is. Then, and we may add, whether the one is or is not, the one and the others in relation to themselves and to each other all in every way are and are not and appear and do not appear.

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

States as great engines move slowly.

0
0
Source
source
Book II
6 months 3 weeks ago

We are organization watchers in our role as citizens. Increasing attention has been fixed in recent years upon the functioning of society's organizations: its large corporations and its governments. Hence this could also be described as a book for Everyman-for it proposes a way of thinking about organizational issues that concern us all.

0
0
Source
source
Simon (1975, p. ix); As cited in Stefano Franchi(2006) "Herbert simon, anti-philosopher." Computing and Philosophy. p. 34.
8 months 2 weeks ago

It is obvious that "obscenity" is not a term capable of exact legal definition; in the practice of the Courts, it means "anything that shocks the magistrate."

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 10: Recrudescence of Puritanism
8 months 2 weeks ago

The average man's opinions are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself: in science, at least, his respect for authority is on the whole beneficial.

0
0
Source
source
On Education, Especially in Early Childhood (1926), Ch. 2: The Aims of Education, p. 63
5 months 1 week ago

Civil government does by its nature include much that is mechanical, and must be treated accordingly. We term it indeed, in ordinary language, the Machine of Society, and talk of it as the grand working wheel from which all private machines must derive, or to which they must adapt, their movements.

0
0
4 months 4 weeks ago

Don't let your hearts grow numb. Stay alert. It is your soul which matters.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

If there is a kind of "proof" of the sincerity of the parrhesiastes, it is his courage... Saying something dangerous-different from what the majority believes-is a strong indication that he is a parrhesiastes.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

And the cost of a thing it will be remembered as the amount of life it requires to be exchanged for it.

0
0
Source
source
After December 6, 1845
8 months 2 weeks ago

Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 3 (p. 19)
8 months 1 week ago

To Xeniades, who had purchased Diogenes at the slave market, he said, "Come, see that you obey orders."

0
0
Source
source
Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 36

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia