Skip to main content
6 months 1 day ago

Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life. The aim of politics should be to make the lives of individuals as good as possible.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Have you really looked at a seashell? There's not an aesthetic fault in it anywhere - it's absolutely perfect. Now, do you think that shells look at each other and critique each other's appearance? "Well, your markings are a little crooked and not very well spaced." Of course not, but that's what we do. Every one of us is marvellous and complicated and interesting and gorgeous just as we are. Really take a look at another person's eyes. They are jewelry beyond compare - just beautiful!

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

The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter VII, Part Second, p. 619.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.

0
0
Source
source
An Inland Voyage (1878).
4 months 3 weeks ago

Facing a landscape annihilated by the light, to remain serene supposes a temper I do not have. The sun is my purveyor of black thoughts; and summer the season when I have always reconsidered my relations with this world and with myself, to the greatest prejudice of both.

0
0
5 months 1 day ago

There is something beautiful about virtue, Captain. But I am just a poor guy.

0
0
Source
source
Scene VI.
6 months 1 week ago

And I must speak plainly. If I were a judge, I would have such a poisonous, syphilitic whore tortured by being broken on the wheel and having her veins lacerated, for it is not to be denied what damage such a filthy whore does to young blood, so that it is unspeakably damaged before it is even fully grown and destroyed in the blood.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 552-554 (1566); cited in Susan C. Karant-Nunn & Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks [editors and translators], Luther on Women: a Sourcebook, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 157-158)
2 months 2 weeks ago

We are weak, watery beings standing in the midst of unrealities; therefore let us turn our minds to the things that are everlasting.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

The general fellowship of our human situation has been rendered even more dubious than before, inasmuch as, though the old ties of caste have been loosened, a new restriction of the individual to some prescribed status in society is manifest. Less than ever, perhaps, is it possible for a man to transcend the limitations imposed by his social origins.

0
0
4 months 4 weeks ago

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Quote, Unquote‎ (1989) by Jonathan Williams, p. 136
2 weeks 5 days ago

"The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature."
- Karl Marx

See biography for Karl Marx:
https://civilsimian.com/KarlMarx

Read Karl Marx's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/72/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

The superior man thinks of virtue; the small man thinks of comfort. The superior man thinks of the sanctions of law; the small man thinks of favors which he may receive.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks 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
2 months 2 weeks ago

What we should be after death, we have to attain in life, i.e. holiness and bliss. Here on earth the Kingdom of God begins.

0
0
6 months 4 weeks ago

By 1204, the only place where the entire body of Greek learning existed, still intact, was Constantinople. As a result of the crusaders' conquest, however, Constantinople was ruthlessly pillaged and destroyed and almost all the great treasures of ancient Greek learning were lost forever. It is because of that sack, for instance, that we have only seven plays left out of the better than one hundred written by Sophocles. The tragedy of 1204 can never be undone and for all of time, only bits and pieces of the marvelous Greek world can be known to us.

0
0
6 months 4 weeks ago

Q. You do not consider your statement a disloyal one? A. No, sir. Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty. Q. You are sure that your statement represents scientific truth? A. I am.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Harvard now, I think, suffers from a kind of self-idolatry, that it needs to be critical of itself in order to grow. And again, if you can be in contact with the best of its past, then it's got a chance. But if it just remains well adjusted to the status quo, generating careerist and opportunist students rather than critically oriented students who have a heart and soul, concerned about suffering here and around the world - then Harvard has a chance. I'm not giving up on Harvard, but I am making my way to New York.

0
0
Source
source
Speaking in Too Radical for Harvard? Cornel West on Failed Fight for Tenure, Biden's First 50 Days & More, Democracy Now!
4 months 3 weeks ago

In which the technical apparatus of production and distribution (with an increasing sector of automation) functions, not as the sum-total of mere instruments which can be isolated from their social and political effects, but rather as a system which determines a priori the product of the apparatus as well as the operations of servicing and extending it. In this society, the productive apparatus tends to become totalitarian to the extent to which it determines not only the socially needed occupations, skills, and attitudes, but also individual needs and aspirations. It thus obliterates the Opposition between the private and public existence, between individual and social needs.

0
0
Source
source
p. xlvii
4 months 2 weeks ago

The aim is to replace economic oligarchies by the State, which has a will-to-power of its own and is quite as little concerned with the public good; and a will-to-power, moreover, which is not economic but military and therefore much more dangerous to any good folk who have a taste for staying alive. And on the bourgeois side what on earth is the sense of objecting to State control in economic affairs if one accepts private monopolies which have all the economic and technical disadvantages of State monopolies and possibly some others as well?

0
0
Source
source
p. 230
5 months 4 weeks ago

Listen to me: a family man is never a real family man. An assassin is never entirely assassin. They play a role, you understand. While a dead man, he is really dead. To be or not to be, right?

0
0
Source
source
Hugo, Act 4, sc. 6
4 months 2 weeks ago

It is not in a person's nature to desire what he already has. Desire is a tendency, the start of a movement toward something, toward a point from which one is absent. If, at the very outset, this movement doubles back on itself toward its point of departure, a person turns round and round like a squirrel in a cage or a prisoner in a condemned cell. Constant turning soon produces revulsion. All workers, especially though not exclusively those who work under inhumane conditions, are easily the victims of revulsion, exhaustion and disgust and the strongest are often the worst affected.

0
0
Source
source
p. 245
1 month 3 weeks ago

Of the life of man the duration is but a point.

0
0
Source
source
II. 17, trans. C.R. Haines
5 months 4 weeks ago

One always dies too soon - or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

0
0
Source
source
Inès, Act 1, sc. 5
3 months 1 week ago

Our present-day neurochemical cocktail, we are asked to believe, is the medium through which alien realms of consciousness can be grasped and neutrally appraised from a third-person perspective. Empirical research suggests this optimism is at best naïve.

0
0
Source
source
Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, BLTC Research
4 months 2 weeks ago

Haikus allow the whole world to appear within things.

0
0
5 months 6 days ago

I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret Magic of numbers.

0
0
Source
source
Section 12
3 months 3 weeks ago

However long Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians struggle to find multiple meanings in this text, the dominant seems to be this: Abraham's unquestioning willingness to heed gods command to sacrifice the thing he loved most is what qualified him to become the father of what are called still the Abrahamic faiths.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

The simple point which I am concerned to make is that where ultimate values are irreconcilable, clear-cut solutions cannot, in principle, be found. To decide rationally in such situations is to decide in the light of general ideals, the overall pattern of life pursued by a man or a group or a society.

0
0
6 months 1 day ago

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

0
0

A man has a right to use a saw, an axe, a plane, separately; may he not combine their uses on the same piece of wood? He has a right to use his knife to cut his meat, a fork to hold it; may a patentee take from him the right to combine their use on the same subject? Such a law, instead of enlarging our conveniences, as was intended, would most fearfully abridge them, and crowd us by monopolies out of the use of the things we have.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Oliver Evans (16 January 1814); published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1905) Vol. 13, p. 66
5 months 4 weeks ago

...wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong - only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him. in other words badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, Chapter 2, "The Invasion"
1 month 3 weeks ago

The happiness and unhappiness of the rational, social animal depends not on what he feels but on what he does; just as his virtue and vice consist not in feeling but in doing.

0
0
Source
source
IX, 16
4 months 3 weeks ago

We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface...

0
0
5 months 4 weeks ago

Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.

0
0
Source
source
Act 5, sc. 3
3 months 4 weeks ago

Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.

0
0
Source
source
p. 71
5 months 4 weeks ago

The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter I, Section 3, pg. 12
2 months 3 weeks ago

He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction to Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (1845).
3 months 4 weeks ago

Familiarity breeds contempt.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were on the heights; they have developed this 'defeat' into one of the historical defeats which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And that is why the future victory will bloom from this 'defeat'. 'Order reigns in Berlin!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I will be!

0
0
Source
source
"Order reigns in Berlin", Last written words. Collected Works 4
4 months 2 weeks ago

For the mockers are those who die comically, and God laughs at their comic ending, while the nobler part, the part of tragedy, is theirs who endured the mockery.

0
0
5 months 5 days ago

Social positivism only accepts duties, for all and towards all. Its constant social viewpoint cannot include any notion of rights, for such notion always rests on individuality. We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. These obligations then increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service. ... Any human right is therefore as absurd as immoral. Since there are no divine rights anymore, this concept must therefore disappear completely as related only to the preliminary regime and totally inconsistent with the final state where there are only duties based on functions.

0
0
Source
source
Le Catéchisme positiviste
6 months 1 day ago

Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.

0
0
Source
source
Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League in London, March 1850
4 months 3 weeks ago

For I came to cause division, with a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. 36 Indeed, a man's enemies will be those of his own household.

0
0
Source
source
10:35,36, New World Translation
4 months 3 weeks ago

Desire, to know why, and how, CURIOSITY; such as is in no living creature but Man; so that Man is distinguished, not only by his Reason; but also by this singular Passion from other Animals; in whom the appetite of food, and other pleasures of Sense, by predominance, take away the care of knowing causes; which is a Lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of Knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnal Pleasure.

0
0
Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 6, p. 26
1 month 4 weeks ago

Too many French scholars were the principal authors of the Revolution, too many approved and gave their support so long as the Revolution, like Tarquinius' sceptre, struck down only the tallest heads. Like so many others, they said, It is impossible to make a great revolution without incurring misfortunes. But when a philosopher justifies evil by the end in view, when he says in his heart, Let there be a hundred thousand murders, provided we are free, and Providence replies, I accept your offer, but you must be included in the number, where is the injustice?

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, pp. 9-10
5 months 4 weeks ago

Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.

0
0
Source
source
Foreword to Joy Davidman's Smoke on the Mountain, 1954
6 months 1 day ago

I should say that the universe is just there, and that is all.

0
0
Source
source
BBC Radio Debate on the Existence of God, Bertrand Russell v. Frederick Copleston, 1948
2 months 2 weeks ago

Apart from any other basis which might justify a superiority, education, as a power, raised him who possessed it over the weak, who lacked it, and the educated man counted in his circle, however large or small it was, as the mighty, the powerful, the imposing one: for he was an authority.

0
0
Source
source
p. 12

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia