Skip to main content
6 months 4 days ago

It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours: The desert of the real itself.

0
0
Source
source
"The Precession of Simulacra," p. 1
6 months 1 day ago

It is not sufficient to observe our mysteries in the seclusion of our lodge-we must act-act! We are drowsing, but we must act. (Pierre raised his notebook and began to read.) For the dissemination of pure truth and to secure the triumph of virtue," he read, "we must cleanse men from prejudice, diffuse principles in harmony with the spirit of the times, undertake the education of the young, unite ourselves in indissoluble bonds with the wisest men, boldly yet prudently overcome superstitions, infidelity, and folly, and form of those devoted to us a body linked together by unity of purpose and possessed of authority and power.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.

0
0
Source
source
Should he have spoken?, The New Criterion (September 2006), p. 22; also in The Roger Scruton Reader (2009) edited by Mark Dooley
8 months 3 days ago

A man who has no mental needs, because his intellect is of the narrow and normal amount, is, in the strict sense of the word, what is called a philistine.

0
0
Source
source
Personality; or, What a Man Is
8 months ago

There is a divergence between private and social accounting that the market fails to register. One essential task of law and government is to institute the necessary conditions.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter V, Section 42, p. 268
9 months 4 days ago
We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries' old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth.
0
0

Yes, I am so free. And what a superb absence is my soul.

0
0
Source
source
Orestes, Act 1
5 months 2 weeks ago

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

0
0
Source
source
p. 7
7 months 1 week ago

In anger we should refrain both from speech and action.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, "Pythagoras", Sect. 23-24, as translated in Dictionary of Quotations (1906) by Thomas Benfield Harbottle, p. 370
7 months 6 days ago

In America, conscription is unknown; men are enlisted for payment. Compulsory recruitment is so alien to the ideas and so foreign to the customs of the people of the United States that I doubt whether they would ever dare to introduce it into their law.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XIII.
7 months 3 weeks ago

Conquered Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought her arts into rustic Latium.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, epistle i, lines 156-157
9 months 2 days ago

If one prefers to have little with blessing, to have truth with concern, to suffer instead of exulting over imagined victories, then one presumably will not be disposed to praise the knowledge, as if what it bestows were at all proportionate to the trouble it causes, although one would not therefore deny that through its pain it educates a person, if he is honest enough to want to be educated rather than to be deceived, out of the multiplicity to seek the one, out of abundance to seek the one thing needful, as this is plainly and simply offered precisely according to the need for it.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

To be honest, I was somewhat disappointed... It's had effects around the margins, of course, but they have mostly been minor. When I wrote it, I really thought the book would change the world. I know it sounds a little grand now, but at the time the sixties still existed for us. It looked as if real changes were possible, and I let myself believe that this would be one of them. All you have to do is walk around the corner to McDonald's to see how successful I have been.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted by Michael Specter on the impact of the book Animal Liberation, "The Dangerous Philosopher", The New Yorker, 6 September 1999.
6 months 2 weeks ago

The child shows its individual tendencies in its plays, in its questions, in its association with people and things. But it has to struggle with everlasting external interference in its world of thought and emotion. It must not express itself in harmony with its nature, with its growing personality. It must become a thing, an object. Its questions are met with narrow, conventional, ridiculous replies, mostly based on falsehoods; and, when, with large, wondering, innocent eyes, it wishes to behold the wonders of the world, those about it quickly lock the windows and doors, and keep the delicate human plant in a hothouse atmosphere, where it can neither breathe nor grow freely.

0
0
3 months 4 weeks ago

In attempting to expose the views of another, one is forced to make one's own view appear infallible and absolute, which is a procedure altogether to be avoided if one is making a specifically non-evaluative investigation. The second possible approach is nevertheless to combine such a non-evaluative analysis with a definite epistemology. Viewed from the angle of this second approach there are two separate and distinct solutions to the problem of what constitutes reliable knowledge - the one solution may be termed relationism, and the other relativism.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

"To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature."
- Voltaire

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

Read Voltaire's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/66/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

0
0
3 months 4 weeks ago

But that which is useful is the better.

0
0
Source
source
III, 6
2 months 1 week ago

Does it? Maybe some places....

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes. Paraphrase of original text which reads "It does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

0
0
Source
source
The Way of Zen, Pt. 2, Ch. 2
7 months 2 days ago

One may observe, that men of all persuasions confine the word persecution, and all the ill ideas of injustice and violence which belong to it, solely to those severities which are exercised upon themselves, or upon the party they are inclined to favour. Whatever is inflicted upon others, is a just punishment upon obstinate impiety, and not a restraint upon conscientious differences.

0
0
Source
source
Volume II, p. 146
6 months 3 weeks ago

The revolution, Stahl declared, is the 'world-historic mark of our age.' It would found 'the entire State on the will of man instead of on the commandment and ordinance of God.'

0
0
Source
source
p. 364
7 months 2 weeks ago

Cato the elder wondered how that city was preserved wherein a fish was sold for more than an ox.

0
0
Source
source
Cato the Elder
8 months 2 days ago

What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; - show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; - and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.

0
0
Source
source
par. 40
6 months 3 weeks ago

The total victimization of the individual that takes place is encouraged for the specific benefit of the industrial and political bureaucracy. It therefore cannot be justified on the ground of the individual's true interest. National Socialist ideology simply states that true human existence consists in unconditional sacrifice, that it is of the essence of the individual's life to abbey and to serve-'service which never comes to an end because service and life coincide.'

0
0
Source
source
P. 416
7 months 2 days ago

A widow, the mother of a family, and from her heart she produces chords to which my whole being responds.

0
0
Source
source
Part 1, Chapter 12
8 months 2 days ago

A house sold by A to B does not wander from one place to another, although it circulates as a commodity.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. II, Ch. VI, p. 152.
8 months 2 weeks ago

My mother spoke of Christ to my father, by her feminine and childlike virtues, and, after having borne his violence without a murmur or complaint, gained him at the close of his life to Christ.

0
0
Source
source
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 351
4 months 1 week ago

My faith in human dignity consists in the belief that man is the greatest scamp on earth. Human dignity must be associated with the idea of a scamp and not with that of an obedient, disciplined and regimented soldier.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. I : The Awakening, p. 12
5 months 1 week ago

Nothing is too terrible to be true if it is consistent with the laws of nature.

0
0
Source
source
The Pinprick Argument, BLTC Research, 2005

How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

Might is that which makes a thing of anybody who comes under its sway. When exercised to the full, it makes a thing of man in the most literal sense, for it makes him a corpse.

0
0
Source
source
in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 153
6 months 3 weeks ago

Labor is a commodity, like any other, and its price is therefore determined by exactly the same laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of big industry or of free competition - as we shall see, the two come to the same thing - the price of a commodity is, on the average, always equal to its cost of production. Hence, the price of labor is also equal to the cost of production of labor. But, the costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

They would receive the same care and attention as those who belong to the establishment. Nor will there be any distinction made between the children of those parents who are deemed the worst, and of those who may be esteemed the best members of society: indeed I would prefer to receive the offspring of the worst, if they shall be sent at an early age; because they really require more of our care and pity and by well-training these, society will be more essentially benefited than if the like attention were paid to those whose parents are educating them in comparatively good habits. On educating children of the poor, and of neighboring communities.

0
0

Thus, Beauty is neither an appearance nor a being, but a relationship: the transformation of being into appearance

0
0
Source
source
p. 408
6 months 1 day ago

Do not resist the evil-doer and take no part in doing so, either in the violent deeds of the administration, in the law courts, the collection of taxes, or above all in soldiering, and no one in the world will be able to enslave you.

0
0
Source
source
V. "Do not resist the evil-doer" is an allusion to the words of Jesus Christ in Matthew 5:39.
9 months 4 days ago
One may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind.
0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Anybody can destroy. Building, ordering, preserving is what is difficult.

0
0
8 months 5 days ago

Nature has pointed out a mixed kind of life as most suitable to the human race, and secretly admonished them to allow none of these biases to draw too much, so as to incapacitate them for other occupations and entertainments. Indulge your passion for science, says she, but let your science be human, and such as may have a direct reference to action and society. Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit, and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you, and by the cold reception which your pretended discoveries shall meet with, when communicated. Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.

0
0
Source
source
Section 1 : Of The Different Species of Philosophy
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is the simple hypotheses of which one must be most wary; because these are the ones that have the most chances of passing unnoticed.

0
0
Source
source
Thermodynamique: Leçons professées pendant le premier semestre 1888-1889 (1892), Preface
8 months 3 days ago

With what consistency, or decency they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery; and annually enslave many thousands more, without any pretence of authority, or claim upon them?

0
0
8 months ago

It may be expedient but it is not just that some should have less in order that others may prosper.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter I, Section 3, pg. 15
2 weeks 1 day ago

I'm 53 now...my neighbor lives by herself at 101 (with visitors)....I'm thinking if you make it out of your late 70's you got a good genetic roll....

0
0
3 months 4 weeks ago

...be tolerant with others and strict with yourself. Remember, nothing belongs to you but your flesh and blood-and nothing else is under your control.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) V, 33
8 months 2 weeks ago

Cease therefore to be dismayed by the mere novelty and so to reject reason from your mind with loathing: weigh the questions rather with keen judgment and if they seem to you to be true, surrender, or if the thing is false, gird yourself to the encounter.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, lines 1040-1043 (tr. Munro)
6 months 1 week ago

The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period. This division is not very different from Marx's concept of "human nature in general", to be distinguished from "human nature as modified in each historical period". The same distinction exists in Marx when he distinguishes between "constant" or "fixed" drives and "relative" drives. The constant drives "exist under all circumstances and ... can be changed by social conditions only as far as form and direction are concerned". The relative drives "owe their origin only to a certain type of social organization".

0
0
8 months 1 day ago

Now, to-day, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, Chapter 5, "The Practical Conclusion"

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia