Skip to main content
3 months 2 weeks ago

The errors of the times of superstition and bigotry still hold some sway, and compel those who wish to preserve a regard to their respectability in society to an over strained demeanor; and this demeanor sometimes degenerates into hypocrisy, and is often the cause of great inconsistency. It is destructive of every open, honest, generous, and manly feeling. It disgusts many, and drives them to the opposite extreme. It is sometimes the cause of insanity. It is founded in ignorance. While erroneous customs prevail in any country, it would evince an ignorance of human nature in any individual to offend against them, until he has convinced the community of their error.

0
0
Source
source
Essay Third
5 months 4 weeks ago

Divorce is probably of nearly the same age as marriage. I believe, however, that marriage is some weeks the more ancient.

0
0
Source
source
"Divorce", 1771
4 months 5 days ago

Most of the propositions that make up the body of administrative theory today share, unfortunately, this defect of proverbs. For almost every principle one can find an equally plausible and acceptable contradictory principle.

0
0
Source
source
Simon, Herbert A. "The proverbs of administration." Public Administration Review 6.1 (1946): 53-67.
3 months 1 week ago

There is no such thing as gratitude in international politics.

0
0
Source
source
Abridgement of Vols. 7-10 by D. C. Somervell
6 months 4 days ago

So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination. ..And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do no bring forth in the agitation.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast.

0
0
Source
source
Interview between Californian Governor Jerry Brown and Marshall McLuhan, 1977
2 months 1 week ago

It is always right that a man should be able to render a reason for the faith that is within him.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, ch. 3, p. 91
4 months 3 weeks ago

An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.

0
0
Source
source
Speech on the sixth article of charge in the impeachment of Warren Hastings (5 May 1789), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Tenth (1899), p. 306

First we have to believe, and then we believe.

0
0
Source
source
K 55
6 months 4 days ago

A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9
3 months 3 weeks ago

The likelihood is that, in 100,000 years time, we shall either have reverted to wild barbarism, or else civilisation will have advanced beyond all recognition - into colonies in outer space, for instance. In either case, evolutionary extrapolations from present conditions are likely to be highly misleading.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

"They must understand that we can only lose by taking the offensive. Patience and time are my warriors, my champions," thought Kutúzov. He knew that an apple should not be plucked while it is green. It will fall of itself when ripe, but if picked unripe the apple is spoiled, the tree is harmed, and your teeth are set on edge.

0
0
Source
source
Bk XIII, Ch. 17
1 month 3 weeks ago

Note that Unitarianism rejects concepts such as Hell, the Trinity, Original Sin, the infallability of the Bible, as well as claims that any one religion has a monopoly on theological truth and the Holy Spirit. At the same time, it accepts the notion that reason, rational thought, science, and philosophy can coexist with faith in God.

0
0
Source
source
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Benjamin Waterhouse (26 June 1822), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12, pp. 241-243.
2 months 1 week ago

Just as no thing or organism exists on its own, it does not act on its own. Furthermore, every organism is a process: thus the organism is not other than its actions. To put it clumsily: it is what it does. More precisely, the organism, including its behavior, is a process which is to be understood only in relation to the larger and longer process of its environment. For what we mean by "understanding" or "comprehension" is seeing how parts fit into a whole, and then realizing that they don't compose the whole, as one assembles a jigsaw puzzle, but that the whole is a pattern, a complex wiggliness, which has no separate parts. Parts are fictions of language, of the calculus of looking at the world through a net which seems to chop it up into bits. Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.

0
0
Source
source
p. 73
3 months 1 week ago

To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.

0
0
Source
source
On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences (1854) p. 29
6 months 1 week ago

All those of you who rejoice in peace, now it is time to judge the truth....Undoubtedly in days gone by there were holy men as Scripture tells,For God stated that he left behind seven thousand men in safety,And there are many priests and kings who are righteous under the law,There you find so many of the prophets, and many of the people too.Tell me which of the righteous of that time claimed an altar for himself?That wicked nation perpetrated a very large number of crimes,They sacrificed to idols and may prophets were put to death,Yet not a single one of the righteous withdrew from unity.The righteous endured the unrighteous while waiting for the winnower:They all mingled in one temple but were not mingled in their hearts;They said such things against them yet they had a single altar.

0
0
Source
source
Early Christian Latin Poets, 2000, Carolinne White, Routledge, London, ISBN 0415187826 ISBN 9780415187824 p. 55.
4 months 2 weeks ago

The concept of freedom, as the Philosophy of Right has shown, follows the pattern of free ownership. As a result, the history of the world that Hegel looks out upon exalts and enshrines the history of the middle-class, which based itself on this pattern. There is a stark truth in Hegel's strangely certain announcement that history has reached its end. But it announces the funeral of a class, not of history.

0
0
Source
source
P. 227
3 months 4 weeks ago

The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referentials, these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation. Whereas so many generations, and particularly the last, lived in the march of history, in the euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolution-today one has the impression that history has retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but emptied of references. It is into this void that the phantasms of a past history recede, the panoply of events, ideologies, retro fashions-no longer so much because people believe in them or still place some hope in them, but simply to resurrect the period when at least there was history, at least there was violence (albeit fascist), when at least life and death were at stake.

0
0
Source
source
"History: A Retro Scenario," pp. 43-44
3 months 2 weeks ago

Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.

0
0
Source
source
Humboldt's Gift (1975), p. 265
5 months 3 weeks ago

What modern apologists call 'true' Christianity is something depending upon a very selective process. It ignores much that is to be found in the Gospels: for example, the parable of the sheep and the goats, and the doctrine that the wicked will suffer eternal torment in Hell fire. It picks out certain parts of the Sermon on the Mount, though even these it often rejects in practice. It leaves the doctrine of non-resistance, for example, to be practised only by non-Christians such as Gandhi. The precepts that it particularly favours are held to embody such a lofty morality that they must have had a divine origin. And yet ... these precepts were uttered by Jews before the time of Christ.

0
0
Source
source
"Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?", in Stockholm newspaper Dagens Nyheter, part II., 11/11/1954
2 months 5 days ago

The world I believe is far too serious, and being far too serious, is it has need of a wise and merry philosophy.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. I : The Awakening, p. 13
6 months 3 weeks ago

Dogmatics must be designed in this way. Above all, every science must vigorously lay hold of its own beginning and not live in complicated relations with other sciences. If dogmatics begins by wanting to explain sinfulness or by wanting to prove its actuality, no dogmatics will come out of it, but the entire existence of dogmatics will become problematic and vague.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

He who must still exhort himself, and be exhorted, to will the good, has as yet no firm and ever-ready will, but wills a will anew every time he needs it. But he who has such a stable will, wills what he wills for ever, and cannot under any circumstances will otherwise than he always wills. For him freedom of the will is destroyed and swallowed up in necessity.

0
0
Source
source
General Nature of New Eduction p 21
1 month 3 weeks ago

Nothing can come out of nothing, any more than a thing can go back to nothing.

0
0
Source
source
IV, 4
1 month 3 weeks ago

I hold in fact(1) That small portions of space are in fact of a nature analogous to little hills on a surface which is on the average flat; namely, that the ordinary laws of geometry are not valid in them.(2) That this property of being curved or distorted is continually being passed on from one portion of space to another after the manner of a wave.(3) That this variation of the curvature of space is what really happens in that phenomenon which we call the motion of matter, whether ponderable or etherial.(4) That in the physical world nothing else takes place but this variation, subject possibly to the law of continuity.

0
0
Source
source
Abstract
2 months 1 week ago

Anger, as we have said, is eager to punish; and that such a desire should exist in man's peaceful breast is least of all according to his nature; for human life is founded on benefits and harmony and is bound together into an alliance for the common help of all, not by terror, but by love towards one another.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.

0
0
Source
source
p. 32
3 months 2 weeks ago

Many Britons...feel strongly about something which was once called "the alien wedge". And surely it cannot be doubted, even by those who profess allegiance to the "multicultural society", that our society, unlike America, is not of that kind, and therefore that immigration cannot be an object of merely passive contemplation on the part of the present citizenship. There is perhaps no greater sign of the strength of liberalism (a strength which issues, not from popular consensus, but from the political power of the liberal elite) than that it has made it impossible for any but the circumlocutory to argue that the English, the Scots and the Welsh have a prior claim to the benefits of the civilization that their ancestors created, which entitles them to reserve its benefits for themselves.

0
0
Source
source
The Meaning of Conservatism: Third Edition (2001), p. 62
4 months 2 weeks ago

The primary meaning of the words "modern," "modernity," with which recent times have baptised themselves, brings out very sharply that feeling of "the height of time" which I am at present analysing. "Modern" is what is "in the fashion, "that is to say, the new fashion or modification which has arisen over against the old traditional fashions used in the past. The word "modern" then expresses a consciousness of a new life, superior to the old one, and at the same time an imperative call to be at the height of one's time. For the "modern" man, not to be "modern" means to fall below the historic level.

0
0
Source
source
Chap. III: The Height Of The Times
5 months 3 weeks ago

""You do not love the mind of your race, nor the body. Any kind of creature will please you if only it is begotten by your kind as they now are. It seems to me, Thick One, what you really love is no completed creature but the very seed itself: for that is all that is left".

0
0
Source
source
Oyarsa
2 months 1 week ago

For sometimes it is an act of bravery even to live.

0
0
Source
source
Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales, transl. Richard M. Gummere, 1920 ed., Epistle LXXVIII, pp. 181-182
3 months 3 weeks ago

Universality is the highest principle....

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

He was one of those who wished for the abolition of the Slave Trade. He thought it ought to be abolished on principles of humanity and justice.

0
0
Source
source
Speech in the House of Commons (9 May 1788), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXVII (1816), column 502
4 months 1 week ago

A man, in so far as he is an individual, may be very sharply detached from others, a sort of spiritual crustacean, and yet be very poor in differentiating content. And further, it is true on the other hand that the more personality a man has and the greater his interior riches and the more he is a society within himself, the less brusquely he is divided from his fellows.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Why, reader, truly, if they asked thee or me, Which way we meant to vote?-were it not our likeliest answer: Neither way! I, as a Tenpound Franchiser, will receive no bribe; but also I will not vote for either of these men. Neither Rigmarole nor Dolittle shall, by furtherance of mine, go and make laws for this country. I will have no hand in such a mission. How dare I! If other men cannot be got in England, a totally other sort of men, different as light is from dark, as star-fire is from street-mud, what is the use of votings, or of Parliaments in England?

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

The regeneration of the inferior or bastard races by the superior ones is consistent with God's plans for humanity. The man of the people, in our countries, is always a fallen aristocrat; his hands are made to handle the sword rather than the laborer's tools. He prefers warring to working, that is, he returns to his original calling.

0
0
Source
source
93, as translated by Asselin Charles, in "Colonial Discourse Since Christopher Columbus," Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2 (November 1995), 147
1 week 3 days ago

"If it is my interest to have a farm, it is my interest to take it away from my neighbour; if it is my interest to have a cloak, it is my interest also to steal it from a bath. This is the source of wars, seditions, tyrannies, plots."
- Epictetus

See biography for Epictetus:
https://civilsimian.com/Epictetus

Read Epictetus's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/46/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

0
0
6 months 4 days ago

I would take to be quite a fool any man who would make a book full of laws and statutes for an apple tree telling it how to bear apples and not thorns, when the tree is able by its own nature to do this better than the man with all his books can describe and demand.

0
0
Source
source
p. 89
6 months 2 weeks ago

Fortitude, the virtue which enables us to endure pain, and to banish fear, is of great use in producing tranquility. Philosophy instructs us to pay homage to the gods, not through hope or fear, but from veneration of their superior nature. It moreover enables us to conquer the fear of death, by teaching us that it is no proper object of terror; since, whilst we are, death is not, and when death arrives, we are not: so that it neither concerns the living nor the dead.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world - intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 14, p. 333 [2012 reprint]
4 months 1 week ago

The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls.

0
0
Source
source
Modes of Thought (1938).
3 months 1 week ago

So dazzling was the spread of constellations that it had the impact of a vision, of some hidden insight. I drove home saying to myself: The dead, too, are like this, blazing within us - invisibly.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in No More Words : A Journal of My Mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh (2001) by Reeve Lindbergh, p. 41
6 months 6 days ago

You venerate the saints, and you take pleasure in touching their relics. But you disregard their greatest legacy, the example of a blameless life. No devotion is more pleasing to Mary than the imitation of Mary's humility. No devotion is more acceptable and proper to the saints than striving to imitate their virtues.

0
0
Source
source
The Erasmus Reader (1990), p. 144.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)
5 months 1 week ago

It is difficult to walk at one and the same time many paths of life.

0
0
Source
source
Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
5 months 3 weeks ago

It would seem that common sense and reason ought to find a way to reach agreement in every conflict of honest interests. I myself think it our bounden duty to believe in such international rationality as possible. But, as things stand, I see how desperately hard it is to bring the peace-party and the war-party together, and I believe that the difficulty is due to certain deficiencies in the program of pacifism which set the military imagination strongly, and to a certain extent justifiably, against it. In the whole discussion both sides are on imaginative and sentimental ground. It is but one utopia against another, and everything one says must be abstract and hypothetical.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Women are never supposed to have any occupation of sufficient importance not to be interrupted, except "suckling their fools "; and women themselves have accepted this, have written books to support it, and have trained themselves so as to consider whatever they do as not of such value to the world or to others, but that they can throw it up at the first "claim of social life." They have accustomed themselves to consider intellectual occupation as a merely selfish amusement, which it is their " duty " to give up for every trifler more selfish than themselves.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia