Skip to main content
7 months 4 days ago

First of all, no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like. Nor, again, does anyone know his conception of the good, the particulars of his rational plan of life, or even the special features of psychology such as his aversion to risk or liability to optimism or pessimism. More than this, I assume that the parties do not know the particular circumstances of their own society. That is, they do not know its particular economic or political situation, or the level of civilization and culture it has been able to achieve. The persons in the original position have no information as to which generation they belong.

0
0
Source
source
p. 117
5 months 3 days ago

Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space...it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 13)
7 months 1 week ago

Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter x, Part II, p. 168.
3 months 4 days ago

That there is a common cause, an that it is either what we call material progress or something closely connected with material progress, becomes more than an inference when it is noted that the phenomena we class together and speak of as industrial depression are but intensifications of phenomena which always accompany material progress, and which show themselves more clearly and strongly as material progress goes on. Where the conditions to which material progress everywhere tends are the most fully realized-that is to say, where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed - we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most of enforced idleness.

0
0
Source
source
Introductory : The Problem
6 months 2 weeks 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
5 months 3 days ago

Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 113)
7 months 1 week ago

One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.

0
0
Source
source
Worship and Church Bells, 1797
5 months 1 day ago

The likelihood is that, in 100,000 years time, we shall either have reverted to wild barbarism, or else civilisation will have advanced beyond all recognition - into colonies in outer space, for instance. In either case, evolutionary extrapolations from present conditions are likely to be highly misleading.

0
0
5 months 4 weeks ago

Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.

0
0
Source
source
p. 65
7 months 4 days ago

"And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes."

0
0
Source
source
Hyoi, p. 76
6 months 2 weeks ago

Work at these things, practice them, these are the things you ought to desire; they are what will put you on the path of divine virtue - yes, by the one who entrusted our soul with the tetraktys, source of ever-flowing nature. Pray to the gods for success and get to work.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Divine Harmony: The Life and Teachings of Pythagoras by John Strohmeier and Peter Westbrook.
7 months 4 days ago

Justice does not require that men must stand idly by while others destroy the basis of their existence.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter IV, Section 35, p. 218
7 months 5 days ago

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.

0
0
Source
source
Quotation and Originality
8 months 3 days ago

Creationists make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

0
0
6 months 6 days ago

We want no foreign examples to rekindle in us the flame of liberty. The example of our own ancestors is abundantly sufficient to maintain the spirit of freedom in its full vigour, and to qualify it in all its exertions. The example of a wise, moral, well-natured, and well-tempered spirit of freedom, is that alone which can be useful to us, or in the least degree reputable or safe. Our fabric is so constituted; one part of it bears so much on the other, the parts, are so made for one another, and for nothing else, that to introduce any foreign matter into it, is to destroy it.

0
0
Source
source
p. 471
3 months 2 weeks ago

It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.

0
0
Source
source
Line 13
6 months 1 day ago

Of all that makes us suffer, nothing - so much as disappointment - gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.

0
0
6 months 1 day ago

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

0
0
Source
source
"Rights", 1771
6 months 1 day ago

No one has the audacity to exclaim: "I don't want to do anything!" - we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.

0
0
7 months 5 days ago

I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples. All these beliefs of mine put me firmly into the anti-military party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future toward which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

If the world should break and fall on him, it would strike him fearless.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, ode iii, line 7
6 months 2 days ago

It seems that I have spent my entire time trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Observer (17 August 1986).
7 months 1 week ago

For truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times and in all sorts.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 13. Of Experience
6 months 3 weeks ago

My cares and my inquiries are for decency and truth, and in this I am wholly occupied.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, epistle i, line 11
7 months 5 days ago

Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know.

0
0
Source
source
"The Test", as quoted in Emerson As A Poet (1883) by Joel Benton, p. 40
5 months 2 weeks ago

For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must be either new in itself or invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

When we leave you and assemble together by ourselves, we talk freely about his sayings and doings, treating them with the respect which they deserve: in your presence deep silence is observed about him, and thus you lose that greatest of pleasures, the hearing the praises of your son, which I doubt not you would be willing to hand down to all future ages, had you the means of so doing, even at the cost of your own life.

0
0
6 months 3 days ago

In order to touch the heart and gain the confidence, the assent, the adhesion, and the co-operation of the illiterate legions of the proletariat - and the vast majority of proletarians unfortunately still belong in this category - it is necessary to begin to speak to those workers not of the general sufferings of the international proletariat as a whole but of their particular, daily, altogether private misfortunes. It is necessary to speak to them of their own trade and the conditions of their work in the specific locality where they live; of the harsh conditions and long hours of their daily work, of the small pay, the meanness of their employer, the high cost of living, and how impossible it is for them properly to support and bring up a family.

0
0
Source
source
Founding of the Workers' International
7 months 6 days ago

Pi's face was masked, and it was understood that none could behold it and live. But piercing eyes looked out from the mask, inexorable, cold and enigmatic.

0
0
Source
source
"The Mathematician's Nightmare", Nightmares of Eminent Persons and Other Stories, 1954
5 months 2 weeks ago

Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not to-morrow be demonstrated truth.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 7: "Relativity", p. 161
3 months 5 days ago

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to John Sinclair
7 months 6 days ago

For passionate emotions of all sorts, and for everything which has been said or written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt. He regarded them as a form of madness. "The intense" was with him a bye-word of scornful disapprobation. He regarded as an aberration of the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients, the great stress laid upon feeling.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 49)
2 months 3 weeks ago

It is quite possible to be both. I look upon myself as a man. Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.

0
0
7 months 6 days ago

By quarrelling amongst themselves, instead of confederating, Germans and Scandinavians, both of them belonging to the same great race, only prepare the way for their hereditary enemy, the Slav. 

0
0
Source
source
The Eastern Question: A Reprint of Letters written 1853 -1856 dealing with the events of the Crimean War, edit., Eleanor Marx Aveling, London, Swan Sonnenschein & Co. (1897) p. 90
5 months 3 days ago

Never promise more than you can perform.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 528
6 months 3 weeks ago

Now his principal doctrines were these. That atoms and the vacuum were the beginning of the universe; and that everything else existed only in opinion.

0
0
Source
source
(trans. by Robert Drew Hicks 1925) Often paraphrased as "Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion."
6 months 1 week ago

The President ... may err ... Congress may decide amiss ... But if the Supreme Court is ever composed of imprudent or bad men, the Union may be plunged into anarchy or civil war.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XVIII.
3 months 4 weeks ago

I think I have already said somewhere that mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.

0
0
Source
source
Part I. Ch. 2 : The Future of Mathematics, p. 31
2 months 3 weeks ago

The longing for guidance, for love and succor, provides the stimulus for the growth of a social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence, who protects, decides, rewards and punishes. This is the God who, according to man's widening horizon, loves and provides for the life of the race, or of mankind, or who even loves life itself. He is the comforter in unhappiness and in unsatisfied longing, the protector of the souls of the dead. This is the social or moral idea of God.

0
0
7 months 6 days ago

Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

0
0
Source
source
The Scientific Outlook, 1931
6 months 5 days ago

All life, Omnipotent Father, is thy life! and the eye of religion alone penetrates to the realms of truth and beauty. I am related to thee, and what I behold around me is related to me; all is full of animation, and looks towards me with bright spiritual eyes, and speaks with spirit voices to my heart.

0
0
Source
source
Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p.125
3 months 3 weeks ago

There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser so terrible as the conscience that dwells in the heart of every man.

0
0
Source
source
Histories, XVIII, 43 (Bartlett's Familiar Quotations)
5 months 4 weeks ago

Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. IX.: Justification of Art
7 months 6 days ago

You, your families, your friends and your countries are to be exterminated by the common decision of a few brutal but powerful men. To please these men, all the private affections, all the public hopes, all that has been achieved in art, and knowledge and thought and all that might be achieved hereafter is to be wiped out forever. Our ruined lifeless planet will continue for countless ages to circle aimlessly round the sun unredeemed by the joys and loves, the occasional wisdom and the power to create beauty which have given value to human life.

0
0
Source
source
Leaflet issued while Russell was in Brixton Prison, 1961
3 months 2 days ago

Look within. Within is the fountain of the good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.

0
0
Source
source
VII, 59
7 months 1 week ago

In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural capacities which are directed to the use of his reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual.

0
0
Source
source
Second Thesis

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia