Skip to main content
7 months 2 weeks ago

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. III: Industry, Government, the peasants
6 months 3 weeks ago

We don't need fossils - the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution.

0
0
Source
source
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009) (p. 164)
9 months 3 days ago

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 5
8 months 3 weeks ago

A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.

0
0
Source
source
Grey Eminence, 1940
4 months 3 weeks ago

The various philosophies of life presented themselves as a conquest of materialism, or in any case, they readily claimed it. That does not change anything: their valuations, revaluations, and explanations of disvalue have been emptied into the over-all secularization stream, where they have only hastened the tendency to unlearn, which is a neutralizing process, after all.

0
0
9 months 3 days ago

I live from day to day, and content myself with having enough to meet my present and ordinary needs; for the extraordinary, all the provision in the world could not suffice.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 14
5 months 6 days ago

Whenever the therapist stands with society, he will interpret his work as adjusting the individual and coaxing his 'unconscious drives' into social respectability. But such 'official psychotherapy' lacks integrity and becomes the obedient tool of armies, bureaucracies, churches, corporations, and all agencies that require individual brainwashing. On the other hand, the therapist who is really interested in helping the individual is forced into social criticism. This does not mean that he has to engage directly in political revolution; it means that he has to help the individual in liberating himself from various forms of social conditioning, which includes liberation from hating this conditioning - hatred being a form of bondage to its object.

0
0
Source
source
p. 8
8 months 3 weeks ago

I did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.

0
0
Source
source
p. 488
5 months 2 weeks ago

Liberal values like tolerance and individual freedom are prized most intensely when they are denied: People who live in brutal dictatorships want the simple freedom to speak, associate, and worship as they choose. But over time life in a liberal society comes to be taken for granted and its sense of shared community seems thin.

0
0
8 months 4 weeks ago

The commodities of Europe were almost all new to America, and many of those of America were new to Europe. A new set of exchanges, therefore, began..and which should naturally have proved as advantageous to the new, as it certainly did to the old continent. The savage injustice of the Europeans rendered an event, which ought to have been beneficial to all, ruinous and destructive to several of those unfortunate countries.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter I, p. 481.
8 months 3 weeks ago

The prospect for the human race is sombre beyond all precedent. Mankind are faced with a clear-cut alternative: either we shall all perish, or we shall have to acquire some slight degree of common sense. A great deal of new political thinking will be necessary if utter disaster is to be averted.

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.

0
0
Source
source
Means by Which the Fund Is to Be Created
4 months 3 weeks ago

All pain is a punishment, and every punishment is inflicted for love as much as for justice.

0
0
Source
source
"Fifth Dialogue," p. 149
8 months 4 weeks ago

In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.

0
0
Source
source
Chap. I.
8 months 3 weeks ago

We Britons should rejoice that we have contrived to reach much legal democracy (we still need more of the economic) without losing our ceremonial Monarchy. For there, right in the midst of our lives, is that which satisfies the craving for inequality, and acts as a permanent reminder that medicine is not food. Hence a man's reaction to Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be "debunked", but watch the faces, mark well the accents of the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot in Eden has been cut - whom no rumor of the polyphony, the dance, can reach - men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honor a king they honor millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead - even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served - deny it food and it will gobble poison.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.

0
0
Source
source
"The Education of an Englishman" in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 138 (1926), p. 192.
7 months 1 week ago

The dressing up and puffing up of the individual erases the lineaments of protest.

0
0
Source
source
p. 283
6 months 4 weeks ago

I have studied these things - you have not.

0
0
Source
source
Reported as Newton's response, whenever Edmond Halley would say anything disrespectful of religion, by Sir David Brewster in The Life of Sir Isaac Newton (1831)
8 months 2 weeks ago

Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"-- they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 107-108)
8 months 3 weeks ago

The problems are dissolved in the actual sense of the word - like a lump of sugar in water.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 183
8 months 3 weeks ago

This world belongs to the energetic.

0
0
Source
source
Resources
9 months 3 days ago

When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12 (tr. Donald M. Frame) , tr. David Wills, 2008
7 months 2 weeks ago

...whoever is not against us is for us.

0
0
Source
source
9:40
7 months 2 weeks ago

Hegel's philosophy revolved about the universality of reason; it was a rational system with its every part (the subjective as well as the objective spheres) integrated into a comprehensive whole. Marx shows that capitalist society first put such a universality into practice.

0
0
Source
source
P. 286-287
8 months 3 weeks ago

But ordinary language is all right.

0
0
Source
source
p. 28
6 months 3 weeks ago

In the upper, rich, more educated classes of European society doubt arose as to the truth of that understanding of life which was expressed by Church Christianity. When, after the Crusades and the maximum development of papal power and its abuses, people of the rich classes became acquainted with the wisdom of the classics and saw, on the one hand, the reasonable lucidity of the teachings of the ancient sages, and on the other hand, the incompatibility of the Church doctrine with the teaching of Christ, they found it impossible to continue to believe the Church teaching.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.

0
0
Source
source
p. 82
8 months 3 weeks ago

Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.

0
0
Source
source
p. 64e
7 months 2 weeks ago

Either one defines "personality" and "individuality" in terms of their possibilities within the established form of civilization, in which case their realization is for the vast majority tantamount to successful adjustment. Or one defines them in terms of their transcending content, including their socially denied potentialities beyond (and beneath) their actual existence; in this case, their realization would imply transgression, beyond the established form of civilization, to radically new modes of "personality" and "individuality" incompatible with the prevailing ones. Today, this would mean "curing" the patient to become a rebel or (which is saying the same thing) a martyr.

0
0
Source
source
"Critique of Neo-Freudian Revisionism"
7 months 3 weeks ago

The normal present connects the past and the future through limitation. Contiguity results, crystallization by means of solidification. There also exists, however, a spiritual present that identifies past and future through dissolution, and this mixture is the element, the atmosphere of the poet.

0
0
Source
source
Fragment No. 109
6 months 4 days ago

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and the rest of it.

0
0
Source
source
Artistic Freedom
4 months 3 weeks ago

When we consider that labor is the producer of all wealth, is it not evident that the impoverishment and, dependence of labor are abnormal conditions resulting from restrictions and usurpations, and that instead of accepting protection, what labor should demand is freedom. That those who advocate any extension of freedom choose to go no further than suits their own special purpose is no reason why freedom itself should be distrusted.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2
9 months 4 days ago

There is a great difference between the Idols of the human mind and the Ideas of the divine. That is to say, between certain empty dogmas, and the true signatures and marks set upon the works of creation as they are found in nature.

0
0
Source
source
Aphorism 23
6 months 5 days ago

The serpent, the king, the tiger, the stinging wasp, the small child, the dog owned by other people, and the fool: these seven ought not to be awakened from sleep.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

0
0
Source
source
Bk. III, ch. 11.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Man, little as he may suppose it, is necessitated to obey superiors. He is a social being in virtue of this necessity; nay he could not be gregarious otherwise. He obeys those whom he esteems better than himself, wiser, braver; and will forever obey such; and even be ready and delighted to do it.

0
0
9 months 3 days ago

Virtue refuses facility for her companion ... the easy, gentle, and sloping path that guides the footsteps of a good natural disposition is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 11. Of Cruelty (tr. Donald M. Frame)
7 months 3 weeks ago

I see not the shadow of a reason to conclude that their [the sexes'] virtues should differ in respect to their nature. In fact, how can they, if virtue has only one eternal standard? I must therefore, if I reason consequentially, as strenuously maintain that they must have the same simple direction as that there is a God.

0
0
Source
source
-26
9 months 3 days ago

Christ ought to be preached with this goal in mind - that we might be moved to faith in him so that he is not just a distant historical figure but actually Christ for you and me.

0
0
Source
source
p. 69
9 months 2 weeks ago

Where without any change in circumstances the things held to be just by law are seen not to correspond with the concept of justice in actual practice, such laws are not really just; but wherever the laws have ceased to be advantageous because of a change in circumstances, in that case the laws were for that time just when they were advantageous for the mutual dealings of the citizens, and subsequently ceased to be just when they were no longer advantageous.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

And since these things are so, we must suppose that there are contained many things and of all sorts in the things that are uniting, seeds of all things, with all sorts of shapes and colours and savours.

0
0
Source
source
Frag. B 4, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.
5 months 2 weeks ago

[after quoting from Lucretius] In the face of warfare and inevitable death, there is no wisdom but in ataraxia, "to look on all things with a mind at peace"." Here, clearly, the old pagan joy of life is gone, and an almost exotic spirit touches a broken lyre. History, which is nothing if not humorous, was never so facetious as when she gave to this abstemious and epic pessimist the name of Epicurean.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

A man, in so far as he is an individual, may be very sharply detached from others, a sort of spiritual crustacean, and yet be very poor in differentiating content. And further, it is true on the other hand that the more personality a man has and the greater his interior riches and the more he is a society within himself, the less brusquely he is divided from his fellows.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

When reason rules, money is a blessing.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 50
9 months 3 days ago

Tell your master that if there were as many devils at Worms as tiles on its roofs, I would enter.

0
0
Source
source
Psalm. Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (translated by Frederic H. Hedge), Reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia