Skip to main content
3 months 1 week ago

Marriage is encouraged in China, not by the profitableness of children, but by the liberty of destroying them.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter VIII, p. 87.
1 month 4 weeks ago

If it were not for the founder of the school, Charles S. Pierce, who has told us that he 'learned philosophy out of Kant,' one might be tempted to deny any philosophical pedigree to a doctrine that holds not that our expectations are fulfilled and our actions successful because our ideas are true, but rather that our ideas are true because our expectations are fulfilled and our actions successful. describing the pragmatist view,

0
0
Source
source
p. 42.
4 months 5 days ago

Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results.

0
0
Source
source
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
1 month 2 weeks ago

Individual expression of undefined universality leads to the murder of innocents through misdirected personal responsibility. Life is true value and consequence true guidance.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

The human soul has need of disciplined participation in a common task of public value, and it has need of personal initiative within this participation. The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul.

0
0
4 months 6 days ago

Often, writers on historical events tend to consider ... a loss of willingness to fight as a sign of "decadence," as though there were something despicable about not being a bully and not being willing to engage in mass murder. Perhaps we ought to feel instead that to cease to be warlike means to begin to be civilized and decent.

0
0
Just now

Most precious are the people; next come the spirits of land and grain; and last, the kings.

0
0
Source
source
7B:14.
2 months 4 days ago

Do not block the way of inquiry.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, par. 135
3 months 1 week ago

I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are his will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless he bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?

0
0
3 months 4 days ago

It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.

0
0
Source
source
Journal entry
3 months 1 week ago

Is it reasonable to assume a purposiveness in all the parts of nature and to deny it to the whole?

0
0
Source
source
Seventh Thesis
3 months 1 week ago

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

0
0
Source
source
Idea for a General History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784), Proposition 6.
2 months 1 week ago

They had no temples, but they had a real living and uninterrupted sense of oneness with the whole of the universe; they had no creed, but they had a certain knowledge that when their earthly joy had reached the limits of earthly nature, then there would come for them, for the living and for the dead, a still greater fullness of contact with the whole of the universe. They looked forward to that moment with joy, but without haste, not pining for it, but seeming to have a foretaste of it in their hearts, of which they talked to one another.

0
0

A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) edited by Alan Lindsay Mackay, p. 154
4 months 6 days ago

If one thing goes without saying, almost anything can.

0
0

Agricultural association, which in all ages has been deemed impossible, would produce results of unbounded magnificence the rigorous demonstrations, the mathematical calculations by which these results will be verified, will not, however, prevent the picture of the future harmony and happiness which they present from repelling minds habituated to the miseries and wretchedness of our present civilization. The Theory of Social Organization.

0
0
Source
source
Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier, p. 5.
3 months 1 week ago

I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: The Value of Scepticism
3 months 1 week ago

The beauty or uncomeliness of many things, in good and ill breeding, will be better learnt, and make deeper impressions on them, in the examples of others, than from any rules or instructions can be given about them.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 82
4 months 6 days ago

I don't say it was deliberate fraud. He was probably madly sincere, and sincerely mad.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

It lays down, as is generally known, that our speculations upon all subjects whatsoever, pass necessarily through three successive stages: a Theological stage, in which free play is given to spontaneous fictions admitting of no proof; the Metaphysical stage, characterized by the prevalence of personified abstractions or entities; lastly, the Positive stage, based upon an exact view of the real facts of the case.

0
0
Source
source
p. 36
3 months 1 week ago

At the age of five years to enter a spinning-cotton or other factory, and from that time forth to sit there daily, first ten, then twelve, and ultimately fourteen hours, performing the same mechanical labour, is to purchase dearly the satisfaction of drawing breath. But this is the fate of millions, and that of millions more is analogous to it.

0
0
Source
source
Vol II: "On the Vanity and Suffering of Life", as translated by R. B. Haldane, and J. Kemp in The World as Will and Idea (1886), p. 389
1 month 4 weeks ago

It is as if thinking itself had been reduced to the level of industrial processes, subjected to a close schedule-in short, made part and parcel of production.

0
0
Source
source
p. 21.
1 month 3 weeks ago

The case is a good example of what Van Vogt came to call "the violent man" or the "Right Man." He is a man driven by a manic need for self-esteem - to feel that he is a "somebody." He is obsessed by the question of "losing face," so will never, under any circumstances, admit that he might be in the wrong.

0
0
Source
source
p. 211
3 months 4 weeks ago

Thus intrigues and conspiracies do not arise, and thievery and robbery do not occur; therefore doors need never be locked.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.

0
0
1 month 4 days ago

The river of my title is a river of DNA, and it flows through time, not space. It is a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.

0
0
Source
source
Déclaration de Voltaire, note to his secretary, Jean-Louis Wagnière, 28 February 1778
3 months 1 week ago

The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 25
4 months 5 days ago

Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about.

0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

Nor word for word too faithfully translate.

0
0
Source
source
Line 133 (tr. John Dryden)
1 month 3 weeks ago

I do not regard the late Carl Sagan as any kind of authority. On the contrary, as this book will show, I regard him in many ways as a dubious publicity seeker and careerist, more concerned to maintain his reputation as the brilliant and sceptical representative of hard-headed science than to look squarely and honestly at the facts.

0
0
Source
source
In short, a bit of a crook. pp. xix-xx
2 months 4 weeks ago

Human social institutions can effect the course of human evolution. Just as climate-change, food supply, predators, and other natural forces of selection have molded our nature, so too can our culture.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 6, A New Understanding Of Ethics, p. 172
1 month 6 days ago

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 26)
1 month 4 days ago

An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

0
0
Source
source
Richard Dawkins on militant atheism,
3 months 1 week ago

I fancy I need more than another to speak (rather than write), with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Thomas Carlyle, 30 October 1841
2 months 1 day ago

Technical progress and more comfortable living permit the systematic inclusion of libidinal components into the realm of commodity production and exchange. But no matter how controlled the mobilization of instinctual energy may be (it sometimes amounts to a scientific management of libido), no matter how much it may serve as a prop for the status quo-it is also gratifying to the managed individuals, just as racing the outboard motor, pushing the power lawn mower, and speeding the automobile are fun.

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

The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then is what? The sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: Of the Principle of Utility
2 months 4 weeks ago

Of all things the worst to teach the young is dalliance, for it is this that is the parent of those pleasures from which wickedness springs.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Revolution is like the daughters of Pelias: it cuts humanity to pieces in order to rejuvenate it.

0
0
Source
source
Act II.
2 months 4 days ago

What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.

0
0

Some economists also use the terms Fordism and pos-Fordism to mark the shift from an economy characterized by the stable-long-term employment typical of factory workers to one marked by flexible, mobile, and precarious labor relations: flexible because workers have to adapt to different tasks, mobile because workers have to move frequently between jobs, and precarious because no contracts guarantee stable, long-term employment. Whereas economic modernization, which developed Fordist labor relations, centered on the conomies of scale and larga systems of production and exchange, economic postmodernization, with its post-Fordist labor relations, develops smaller-scale, flexible systems.

0
0
Source
source
112
2 months 1 day ago

Who is my mother? and who are my brethren? And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.

0
0
Source
source
12:48-50 (KJV)
1 month 3 weeks ago

Myth is depoliticized speech.

0
0
Source
source
p. 145
4 months 1 week ago

Confession should be only in secret before God, who knows everything anyway, and thus it could remain hidden in one's innermost being. But at a dinner and a woman! A dinner-it is not some hidden, remote place, nor is the lighting dim, nor is the mood like that among graves, nor are the listeners silent or invisibly present.

0
0
1 month 4 weeks ago

The specialist serves as a striking concrete example of the species, making clear to us the radical nature of the novelty. For, previously, men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories. He is not learned , for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his speciality; but neither is he ignorant, because he is "a scientist," and "knows" very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with an the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XII: The Barbarism Of "Specialisation"
3 months 1 week ago

One thing I have frequently observed in children, that when they have got possession of any poor creature, they are apt to use it ill: they often torment, and treat it very roughly, young birds, butterflies, and such other poor animals which fall into their hands, and that with a seeming kind of pleasure. This I think should be watched in them, and if they incline to any such cruelty, they should be taught the contrary usage. For the custom of tormenting and killing of beasts, will, by degrees, harden their minds even towards men; and they will delight in the suffering and destruction of inferior creatures, will not be apt to be very compassionate or benign to those of their own kind. Our practice takes notice of this in the exclusion of butchers from juries of life and death.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 116
2 months ago

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

0
0
Source
source
The Message to the Planet (1989) p. 43.
3 months 1 week ago

It seems to me now that mathematics is capable of an artistic excellence as great as that of any music, perhaps greater; not because the pleasure it gives (although very pure) is comparable, either in intensity or in the number of people who feel it, to that of music, but because it gives in absolute perfection that combination, characteristic of great art, of godlike freedom, with the sense of inevitable destiny; because, in fact, it constructs an ideal world where everything is perfect and yet true.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Gilbert Murray, April 3, 1902

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia