Skip to main content
2 months 1 week ago

Natural selection is an extremely simple process, in the sense that very little machinery needs to be set up in order for it to work. Of course the effects and consequences of natural selection are complex in the extreme. But in order to set natural selection going on a real planet, all that is required is the existence of inherited information.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 2, "Silken Fetters" (p. 68)
3 months 1 week ago

He who has thought most deeply loves what is most alive.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Simplify the social system, in the manner which every motive, but those of usurpation and ambition, powerfully recommends; render the plain dictates of justice level to every capacity; remove the necessity of implicit faith; and we may expect the whole species to become reasonable and virtuous.

0
0
Source
source
Portable Enlightenment Reader, p. 477
8 months 2 weeks ago

I found there, on the central square (Václavské náměstí), a café that miraculously worked through this emergency. I remember they had wonderful strawberry cakes, and I was sitting there eating strawberry cakes and watching Russian tanks against demonstrators. It was perfect.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

If a king is energetic, his subjects will be equally energetic. If he is reckless, they will not only be reckless likewise, but also eat into his works. Besides, a reckless king will easily fall into the hands of his enemies. Hence the king shall ever be wakeful.

0
0
Source
source
Book I : "Concerning Discipline" Chapter 19 "The Duties of a King"
1 week ago

And that you may know... what kind of writings I mean, I shall name to you the learned Gassendus his little Syntagma of Epicurus's philosophy, and that most ingenious gentleman Monsieur Descartes his principles of philosophy. For though I purposely refrained, though not altogether from transiently consulting about a few particulars, yet from seriously and orderly reading over those excellent (though disagreeing) books, or so much as Sir Francis Bacon's Novum Organum, that I might not be prepossessed with any theory or principles, till I had spent some time in trying what things themselves would incline me to think; yet beginning now to allow myself to read those excellent books, I find by the little I have read in them already, that if I had read them before I began to write, I might have enriched the ensuing essays with divers truths, which they now want, and have explicated divers things much better than I fear I have done.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

Neither will the horse be adjudged to be generous, that is sumptuously adorned, but the horse whose nature is illustrious; nor is the man worthy who possesses great wealth, but he whose soul is generous.

0
0
Source
source
Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
1 month 2 days ago

An intellectual dapperling of these times boasts chiefly of his irresistible perspicacity, his "dwelling in the daylight of truth," and so forth; which, on examination, turns out to be a dwelling in the rush-light of "closet logic," and a deep unconsciousness that there is any other light to dwell in or any other objects to survey with it.

0
0
5 months 1 day ago

Men all say, "We are wise"; but being driven forward and taken in a net, a trap, or a pitfall, they know not how to escape. Men all say, "We are wise"; but happening to choose the course of the Mean, they are not able to keep it for a round month.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction.

0
0
Source
source
"What is Mathematical Truth?"
4 months 6 days ago

This legible lesson, this ritual recording, must be repeated as often as possible; the punishments must be a school rather than a festival; an ever-open book rather than a ceremony. The duration that makes the punishment effective for the guilty is also useful for the spectators. They must be able to consult at each moment the permanent lexicon of crime and punishment. A secret punishment is a punishment half wasted. Children should be allowed to come to the places where the penalty is being carried out; there they will attend their classes in civics. And grown men will periodically relearn the laws. Let us conceive of places of punishment as a Garden of the Laws that families would visit on Sundays.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter Three, The Gentle Way in Punishment
3 weeks 5 days ago

Would not anyone who is a man have his slumbers broken by a war-trumpet rather than by a chorus of serenaders?

0
0
3 months 2 days ago

The State is always, whatever be its form - primitive, ancient, medieval, modern - an invitation issued by one group of men to other human groups to carry out some enterprise in common. That enterprise, be its intermediate processes what they may, consists in the long run in the organisation of a certain type of common life. ... [As Renan says,] "To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together; to wish to do greater; these are the essential conditions which make up a people.... In the past, an inheritance of glories and regrets; in the future, one and the same programme to carry out.... The existence of a nation is a daily plebiscite."

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XIV: Who Rules The World?
4 months 1 week ago

Society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it, that is, who have deserved equally well absolutely. This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens, should be made in the utmost degree to converge.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 5
1 month 5 days ago

As we can not give a general definition of energy, the principle of the conservation of energy signifies simply that there is something which remains constant.

0
0
3 months 2 days ago

The great man, whether we comprehend him in the most intense activity of his work or in the restful equipoise of his forces, is powerful, involuntarily and composedly powerful, but he is not avid for power. What he is avid for is the realization of what he has in mind, the incarnation of the spirit.

0
0
Source
source
p. 151
4 months 2 weeks ago

Tis the sharpness of our mind that gives the edge to our pains and pleasures.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, Ch. 14
3 months 1 week ago

I can prove now, for instance, that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, "Here is one hand," and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, "and here is another." And if, by doing this, I have proved ipso facto the existence of external things, you will all see that I can also do it now in numbers of other ways: there is no need to multiply examples.

0
0
Source
source
"Proof of an External World," Proceedings of the British Academy 25 (1939).
3 months 1 week ago

Whenever our neighbour's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own.

0
0
1 week 4 days ago

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to William Charles Jarvis
3 months 4 days ago

The range of socially permissible and desirable satisfaction is greatly enlarged, but through this satisfaction, the Pleasure Principle is reduced-deprived of the claims which are irreconcilable with the established society. Pleasure, thus adjusted, generates submission.

0
0
Source
source
p. 75
2 months 2 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.
3 months 1 week ago

Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. V, par. 265
2 months 4 weeks ago

And above all, we must feel and act as if an endless continuation of our earthly life awaited us after death; and if it be that nothingness is the fate that awaits us we must not, in the words of Obermann, so act that it shall be a just fate.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Whether or no it be for the general good, life is robbery. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robber requires justification.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,- congestion of the brain, apoplexy, and strangulation.

0
0
Source
source
"The Natural History of Intellect", p. 30
2 weeks 5 days ago

Truth and clarity are complementary.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism : Philosophical Responses to Quantum Mechanics (2000) by Christopher Norris, p. 234
3 months 1 week ago

The political freedom of conscience and of the press, so far from being as it is commonly supposed an extension, is a new case of the limitation of rights and discretion. Conscience and the press ought to be unrestrained, not because men have a right to deviate from the exact line that duty prescribes, but because society, the aggregate of individuals, has no right to assume the prerogative of an infallible judge, and to undertake authoritatively to prescribe to its members in matters of pure speculation.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 1, bk 2 : Principles of Society , Ch. 5 : Of Rights
3 months 3 weeks ago

Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Theaetetus by Plato section 152a
5 months 1 day ago

There are two kinds of pleasure: one consisting in a state of rest, in which both body and mind are undisturbed by any kind of pain; the other arising from an agreeable agitation of the senses, producing a correspondent emotion in the soul. It is upon the former of these that the enjoyment of life chiefly depends. Happiness may therefore be said to consist in bodily ease, and mental tranquility.

0
0
2 months 5 days ago

To train and educate the rising generation will at all times be the first object of society, to which every other will be subordinate.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

There is a freemasonry among the dull by which they recognize and are sociable with the dull, as surely as a correspondent tact in men of genius.

0
0
Source
source
1827
1 week 4 days ago

I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government can not be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world's best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not.

0
0

As an eminent pioneer in the realm of high frequency currents... I congratulate you on the great successes of your life's work.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

We were halves throughout, and to that degree that, methinks, by outliving him I defraud him of his part.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 27. Of Friendship, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
3 months 1 week ago

Arms are not yet taken up; but virtually, you are in a civil war. You are not people of differing opinions in a public council;-you are enemies, that must subdue or be subdued, on the one side or the other. If your hands are not on your swords, their knives will be at your throats. There is no medium,-there is no temperament,-there is no compromise with Jacobinism.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to William Windham (30 December 1794), quoted in R. B. McDowell (ed.)
3 months 1 week ago

Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. II, Ch. 16 : The Rights of Women
4 months 2 weeks ago

The woman wants to dominate, the man wants to be dominated.

0
0
Source
source
Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 220
3 months 1 week ago

The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another, for the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product. ... The proletarian liberates himself by abolishing competition, private property, and all class differences.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

To be in touch with senses and emotions beyond conquest is to enter the realm of the mysterious.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 2, Altars of Sacrifice
3 months 1 week ago

It was the case of common soldiers deserting from their officers, to join a furious, licentious populace. It was a desertion to a cause, the real object of which was to level all those institutions, and to break all those connexions, natural and civil, that regulate and hold together the community by a chain of subordination; to raise soldiers against their officers; servants against their masters; tradesmen against their customers; artificers against their employers; tenants against their landlords; curates against their bishops; and children against their parents. That this cause of theirs was not an enemy to servitude, but to society.

0
0
Source
source
Speech in the House of Commons (9 February 1790), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXVIII (1816), column 359
3 months 1 week ago

The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The New Christianity (1967) edited by William Robert Miller
5 months 1 day ago

Time is a game played beautifully by children.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Necessity gives the law without itself acknowledging one.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 444
4 months 1 week ago

We boil at different degrees.

0
0
Source
source
Eloquence
2 months 1 week ago

Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia