Skip to main content
4 months 3 weeks ago

Power is more 'spacious' than violence. And violence becomes power if it 'gives itself more time.' Looked at from this perspective, power rests on an excess of space and time.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Consider all that you've gone through, all that you've survived. And that the story of your life is done, your assignment complete. How many good things have you seen? How much pain and pleasure have you resisted? How many honors have you declined? How many unkind people have you been kind to?

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) V, 31
6 months 1 week ago

The fault of the utilitarian doctrine is that it mistakes impersonality for impartiality.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Section 30, pg. 190
4 months 1 week ago

Seduction is the world's elementary dynamic... All this has changed significantly for us, at least in appearance. For what has happened to good and evil? Seduction hurls them against one another, and unites them beyond meaning, in a paroxysm [sudden outbreak of emotion] of intensity and charm.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 59)
2 months 3 weeks ago

If you have been given a talent, exercise it freely and happily like the sun: give everyone from your splendour.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Do not allow your dreams of a beautiful world to lure you away from the claims of men who suffer here and now.

0
0
Source
source
p. 485
5 months 3 days ago

When you make the two into one, you will become children of Adam, and when you say, 'Mountain, move from here!' it will move.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Through the fortunate effect of my frankness, I had the rarest and surest opportunity to know a man well, which is to study him at leisure in his private life and living, so to speak, with himself. For he share himself without reservation and made me feel as much at home in his house as in mine. I had almost no other abode than his own.

0
0
Source
source
Second Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
6 months 1 week ago

In a really equal democracy, every or any section would be represented, not disproportionately, but proportionately. ... Unless they are, there is not equal government, but a government of inequality and privilege: one part of the people rule over the rest: there is a part whose fair and equal share of influence in the representation is withheld from them, contrary to all just government, but, above all, contrary to the principle of democracy, which professes equality as its very root and foundation.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. VII: Of True and False Democracy; Representation of All, and Representation of the Majority only (p. 248)
6 months 3 weeks ago

Love all men, even your enemies; love them, not because they are your brothers, but that they may become your brothers. Thus you will ever burn with fraternal love, both for him who is already your brother and for your enemy, that he may by loving become your brother. Even he that does not as yet believe in Christ, love him, and love him with fraternal love. He is not yet thy brother, but love him precisely that he may be thy brother.

0
0
Source
source
p.436
5 months 2 weeks ago

Obstinacy in a bad cause, is but constancy in a good.

0
0
Source
source
Section 25
4 months 3 weeks ago

Capitalism dislikes silence.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away.... To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.

0
0
Source
source
Part 2
2 months 2 weeks ago

Human history is not the product of the wise direction of human reason, but is shaped by the forces of emotion-our dreams, our pride, our greed, our fears, and our desire for revenge.

0
0
Source
source
Confucius Saw Nancy and Essays about Nothing (1936), p. 95
5 months 1 week ago

The endeavor to keep alive any hoary establishment beyond its natural date is often pernicious and always useless.

0
0
Source
source
The French Revolution, Bk. V, ch. 4
5 months 1 day ago

When we desire to lead men to God, we must not simply overthrow their idols. In each of these images we must seek to discover what divine quality he who carved it sought.

0
0
Source
source
p. 117
5 months 1 week ago

To live classically and to realize antiquity practically within oneself is the summit and goal of philology.

0
0
Source
source
Philosophical Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991) § 147
2 months 1 week ago

Every soul, the philosopher says, is involuntarily deprived of truth; consequently in the same way it is deprived of justice and temperance and benevolence and everything of the kind. It is most necessary to keep this in mind, for thus thou wilt be more gentle towards all.

0
0
Source
source
VII, 63
4 months 3 weeks ago

Radical black feminists have never confined their vision to just the emancipation of black women or women in general, or all black people for that matter. Rather, they are the theorists and proponents of a radical humanism committed to liberating humanity and reconstructing social relations across the board. When bell hooks says "Feminism is for everybody," she is echoing what has always been a basic assumption of black feminists. We are not talking about identity politics but a constantly developing often contested, revolutionary conversation about how all of us might envision and remake the world.

0
0
Source
source
Robin Kelley Freedom Dreams
5 months 6 days ago

The ego involved in responsibility is me and no one else, me with whom one whould have liked to pair up a sister soul, from whom one would have substitution and sacrifice.

0
0
Source
source
The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 116
6 months 1 week ago

Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, p. 10.
1 month 4 weeks ago

Exactly. Paradox of tolerance. This is why culture itself is not above universal judgement.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Mr. Galton ...in his English Men of Science, has given ...cases showing individual variations in the type of memory... Some have it verbal. Others... for facts and figures, others for form. Most say... [it] must first be rationally conceived and assimilated.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 16
3 months 4 days ago

Two difficulties: (1) Can we transform psychologic time, which is qualitative, into a quantitative time? (2) Can we reduce to one and the same measure facts which transpire in different worlds [of conscious beings]!

0
0
5 months 3 days ago

The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory... I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.

0
0
Source
source
24:29-34 (NIV)
6 months 1 week ago

If good music has charms to soothe the savage breast, bad music has no less powerful spells for filling the mildest breast with rage, the happiest with horror and disgust. Oh, those mammy songs, those love longings, those loud hilarities! How was it possible that human emotions intrinsically decent could be so ignobly parodied.

0
0
Source
source
"Silence is Golden," p. 59
5 months 6 days ago

In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity. What will be the course of this revolution? Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat.

0
0
5 months 6 days ago

"Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?" - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

God is surrounded with people full of love who demand of him the benefits of love which are in his power: thus he is properly the king of love.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

The capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world-or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality.

0
0
Source
source
p. 198; Cited in: P. Slovic (1972) From Shakespeare to Simon: Speculations - And Some Evidence About Man's Ability to Process Information. Oregon Research Institute Monograph, 1972. p. 1.
6 months 6 days ago

A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

The problem with all this--the problem I discussed in the first lecture--is that if the causes/background conditions distinction is fundamentally subjective, not descriptive of the world in itself, then current philosophical explanations of the metaphysical nature of reference are bankrupt.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture II: Realism and Reasonableness
5 months 3 days ago

It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs.

0
0
Source
source
15:26 (KJV)
5 months 1 day 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.
7 months 1 week ago

Once you've dissected a joke, you're about where you are when you've dissected a frog. It's dead. 

0
0
Source
source
Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984), p. 49; comparable to "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."
2 months 1 week ago

The lot assigned to every man is suited to him, and suits him to itself.

0
0
Source
source
III, 4
6 months 1 day ago

Almost as soon as I began to study philosophy, I was impressed by the way in which philosophical problems appeared, disappeared, or changed shape, as a result of new assumptions or vocabularies.

0
0
Source
source
Preface
5 months 6 days ago

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

There cannot be a greater rudeness, than to interrupt another in the current of his discourse... To which, if there be added, as is usual, a correcting of any mistake, or a contradiction of what has been said, it is a mark of yet greater pride and self-conceitedness, when we thus intrude our selves for teachers, and take upon us either to set another right in his story, or shew the mistakes of his judgement.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 145
5 months 6 days ago

When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the "meaning" of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Continuously thou wilt look at human things as smoke and nothing at all; especially if thou reflectest at the same time, that what has once changed will never exist again in the infinite duration of time. But thou, in what a brief space of time is thy existence? And why art thou not content to pass through this short time in an orderly way?

0
0
Source
source
X, 31
7 months 1 week ago
Most men are too concerned with themselves to be malicious.
0
0
2 months 1 week ago

We took the liberty to make some enquiries concerning the ground of their pretentions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

...the more a subject is understood, the more briefly it may be explained.

0
0
5 months 1 day ago

Even to-day, in spite of some signs which are making a tiny breach in that sturdy faith, even to-day, there are few men who doubt that motorcars will in five years' time be more comfortable and cheaper than to-day. They believe in this as they believe that the sun will rise in the morning. The metaphor is an exact one. For, in fact, the common man, finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes that it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly-endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice.... These traits together make up the well-known psychology of the spoilt child. Chap.

0
0
Source
source
VI: The Dissection Of The Mass-Man Begins
3 months 2 weeks ago

The populist rant about greedy banks that is being loudly ventilated in Congress is a distraction from the true causes of the crisis. The dire condition of America's financial markets is the result of American banks operating in a free-for-all environment that these same American legislators created. It is America's political class that, by embracing the dangerously simplistic ideology of deregulation, has responsibility for the present mess.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

No doubt markets transmit information in the way that Hayek claimed. But what reason is there to believe that - unlike any other social institution - they have a built-in capacity to correct their mistakes? History hardly supports the supposition. Moods of irrational exuberance and panic can, and often do, swamp the price-discovery functions of markets.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia