Skip to main content
2 months 3 weeks ago

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

0
0
Source
source
Act 1
1 month 2 weeks ago

All religions so far have been the expression of historical stages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples. But communism is the stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and brings about their disappearance.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.

0
0
Source
source
p. 125
3 weeks 1 day ago

Treat your friend as if he might become an enemy.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 401
2 months 3 weeks ago

The death of dogma is the birth of morality.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Faith Or Fact (1897) by Henry Moorehouse Taber, p. 86
1 month 1 week ago

As more and more women acquired prestige, fame, or money from feminist writings or from gains from feminist movement for equality in the workforce, individual opportunism undermined appeals for collective struggle. Women who were not opposed to patriarchy, capitalism, classism, or racism labeled themselves "feminist." Their expectations were varied. Privileged women wanted social equality with men of their class; some women wanted equal pay for equal work; others wanted an alternative lifestyle. Many of these legitimate concerns were easily co-opted by the ruling capitalist patriarchy.

0
0
Source
source
p. 7.
2 months 3 weeks ago

I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago
In Germany there is much complaining about my "eccentricities." But since it is not known where my center is, it won't be easy to find out where or when I have thus far been "eccentric." That I was a philologist, for example, meant that I was outside my center (which fortunately does not mean that I was a poor philologist). Likewise, I now regard my having been a Wagnerian as eccentric. It was a highly dangerous experiment; now that I know it did not ruin me, I also know what significance it had for me — it was the most severe test of my character.
0
0
3 months 3 weeks 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
2 months 2 weeks ago

That is what is meant, I think by the allegation that it is good simply to be alive, even if one is undergoing terrible experiences. The situation is roughly this: There are elements which, if added to one's experience, make life better; there are other elements which, if added to one's experience, make life worse. But what remains when these are set aside is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive. Therefore life is worth living even when the bad elements of experience are plentiful, and the good ones too meager to outweigh the bad ones on their own. The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its contents.

0
0
Source
source
"Death", p. 2. This passage not present in the 1970 version (Nous, IV, no. 1), but present in the 1979 version.
2 months 2 weeks ago

In... "The Education of Children"... Plutarch gives an anecdote of Theocritus, a sophist, as an example of athuroglossos... he is... "a giant in impudence"... strong not because of his reason, or his rhetorical ability... or his ability to pronounce the truth, but only because he is arrogant. ...His fourth trait is... "putting his confidence in bluster." He is confident in thorubos... the noise made by a strong voice, by a scream, a clamor, or uproar. ...The final characteristic ...his confidence in ..."ignorant outspokenness..." ... it lacks mathesis ...-learning or wisdom.

0
0
Source
source
Ref: Plutarch, "The Education of Children", Moralia (1927) Vol. 1, Tr. Frank Cole Babbit, p. 4, The Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Generally speaking, all the authorities exercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive assignment, of differential distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized' how he is to be recognized' how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in a individual way, etc.).

0
0
Source
source
Part Four, Complete and austere institutions
2 months 3 weeks ago

"A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmān, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The séroni could say it better than I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure, as the crah is the last part of a poem. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then-that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it."

0
0
Source
source
Hyoi, p. 73
2 months 3 weeks ago

From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and saga of the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer's bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, p. 31.
2 months 2 weeks ago

The less somebody knows and understands himself the less great he is, however great may be his talent. For this reason our scientists are not great.

0
0
Source
source
p. 51e
2 months 3 weeks ago

To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

0
0
Source
source
(6.522) Original German: Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches. Dies zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische.
2 months 3 weeks ago

The rich man... is always sold to the institution which makes him rich.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

The very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.

0
0
Source
source
"The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna," Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 7 November 1848.
1 month 3 weeks ago

In effect, to follow, not to force the public inclination; to give a direction, a form, a technical dress, and a specific sanction, to the general sense of the community, is the true end of legislature.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

It is wrong to think that belief in freedom always leads to victory; we must always be prepared for it to lead to defeat. If we choose freedom, then we must be prepared to perish along with it. Poland fought for freedom as no other country did. The Czech nation was prepared to fight for its freedom in 1938; it was not lack of courage that sealed its fate. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 - the work of young people with nothing to lose but their chains - triumphed and then ended in failure. ... Democracy and freedom do not guarantee the millennium. No, we do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things - and above all on ourselves.

0
0
3 weeks 1 day ago

My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Robert Fulford, 1964. Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 300
2 weeks 6 days ago

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1. Why Are People?
2 months 3 weeks ago

"...faith and repentance, i. e. believing Jesus to be the Messiah, and a good life, are the indispensable conditions of the new covenant, to be performed by all those who would obtain eternal life. (The reasonableness, or rather necessity of which, that we may the better comprehend, we must a little look back to what was said in the beginning"

0
0
Source
source
§ 106
2 months 3 weeks ago

Giving then to matter all the properties which philosophy knows it has, or all that atheism ascribes to it, and can prove, and even supposing matter to be eternal, it will not account for the system of the universe or of the solar system, because it will not account for motion, and it is motion that preserves it. When, therefore, we discover a circumstance of such immense importance, that without it the universe could not exist, and for which neither matter, nor any, nor all, the properties of matter can account, we are by necessity forced into the rational and comfortable belief of the existence of a cause superior to matter, and that cause man calls, God.

0
0
Source
source
A Discourse, &c. &c.
3 months 3 days ago

The human understanding is moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination; and then it feigns and supposes all other things to be somehow, though it cannot see how, similar to those few things by which it is surrounded.

0
0
Source
source
Aphorism 47
1 month 1 week ago

The jargon makes it seem that ... the pure attention of the expression to the subject matter would be a fall into sin.

0
0
Source
source
p. 9
2 months 3 weeks ago

For the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.

0
0
Source
source
"Lying in Politics"
2 months 3 weeks ago

The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in the Communist Manifesto (1848) p. 7
3 months 1 week ago

So potent was Religion in persuading to do wrong.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, line 101 (tr. Alicia Stallings) H. A. J. Munro's translation: So great the evils to which religion could prompt! W. H. D. Rouse's translation: So potent was Superstition in persuading to evil deeds.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated, can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date on which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not to be encountered in private life.

0
0
1 month 4 weeks ago

To understand a science it is necessary to know its history.

0
0
Source
source
A Course of Positive Philosophy (1832 - 1842) [Six volumes]
2 months 3 weeks ago

It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

0
0
Source
source
Zadig, 1747

People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.

0
0
Source
source
According to Kenneth Owen Morgan (The Illustrated History of Britain (1984) p. 421) this was said by Macaulay in 1832. If so, he was quoting a letter written by Edmund Burke in 1777.
2 months 6 days ago

If thou intend to do any good; tarry not till to-morrow! for thou knowest not what may chance thee this night.

0
0
3 weeks 3 days ago

The unhappiness of our life; patch up our false way of life as we will, propping it up by the aid of the sciences and arts - that life becomes feebler, sicklier, and more tormenting every year; every year the number of suicides and the avoidance of motherhood increases; every year the people of that class become feebler; every year we feel the increasing gloom of our lives. Evidently salvation is not to be found by increasing the comforts and pleasures of life, medical treatments, artificial teeth and hair, breathing exercises, massage, and so forth;...It is impossible to remedy this by any amusements, comforts, or powders - it can only be remedied by a change of life.

0
0
1 month 4 days ago

Instead of gambling on the eternal impossibility of the revolution and on the fascist return of a war-machine in general, why not think that a new type of revolution is in the course of becoming possible, and that all kinds of mutating, living machines conduct wars, are combined and trace out a plane of consistence which undermines the plane of organization of the World and the States?

0
0
Source
source
from Dialogues with Claire Parnet, p. 147 [emphasis in original].
1 month 6 days ago

What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine - they are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine - they are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior, jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.

0
0
Source
source
Letter (5 May 1855), published in Florence Nightingale : An Introduction to Her Life and Family (2001), edited by Lynn McDonald, p. 141
1 month 2 weeks ago

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. VIII: Ideal Society
1 month 2 weeks ago

Hegel's philosophy was an integral part of the culture which authoritarianism had to overcome. It is therefore no accident that the National Socialist assault on Hegel begins with the repudiation of his political theory.

0
0
Source
source
P. 411

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after. Variant: Good communication is just as stimulating as...

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what's the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

The Greeks follow a wrong usage in speaking of coming into being and passing away; for nothing comes into being or passes away, but there is mingling and separation of things that are. So they would be right to call coming into being mixture, and passing away separation.

0
0
Source
source
Frag. B 17, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective physical theory will abandon that point of view.

0
0
Source
source
p. 167.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Without some redistribution of wealth and power, downward mobility and debilitating poverty will continue to drive people into desperate channels. And without principled opposition to xenophobias from above and below, these desperate channels will produce a cold-hearted and mean-spirited America no longer worth fighting for or living in.

0
0
Source
source
(p79)
3 weeks 1 day ago

The present is always invisible because it's environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

0
0
Source
source
Mademoiselle: the magazine for the smart young woman, Volume 64, 1966, p. 114
2 months 3 weeks ago

As if our birth had at first sundered things, and we had been thrust up through into nature like a wedge, and not till the wound heals and the scar disappears, do we begin to discover where we are, and that nature is one and continuous everywhere.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 26, sect. 311a

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia