Skip to main content

As a violin string or a harpsichord key vibrates and gives forth sound, so the cerebral fibres, struck by waves of sound, are stimulated to render or repeat the words that strike them.

0
0
4 months 4 days ago

The Soldier is perhaps one of the most difficult things to realise; but Governments, had they not realised him, could not have existed: accordingly he is here.

0
0
4 months 4 days ago

I called it a small light shining and shaping in the huge vortex of Norse darkness. Yet the darkness itself was alive; consider that. It was the eager inarticulate uninstructed Mind of the whole Norse People, longing only to become articulate, to go on articulating ever farther!

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

In order to be able to meet a general combination of the banks against us in a critical emergency, could we not make a beginning towards an independent use of our own money, towards holding our own bank in all the deposits where it is received, and letting the treasurer give his draft or note for payment at any particular place, which, in a well-conducted government, ought to have as much credit as any private draft or bank note or bill, and would give us the same facilities which we derive from the banks?

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1803. ME 10:439
3 months 3 weeks ago

I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content. From a knowledge of those limitations and its richness of experience emerges a symphony of colours, richer than all, its green speaking of life and strength, its orange speaking of golden content and its purple of resignation and death.

0
0
Source
source
Epilogue, p. 328
6 months 1 week ago

The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Buddhism is the most colossal example in the history of applied metaphysics.

0
0
Source
source
in Verhoeven, Martin J. 2001. "Buddhism and Science: Probing the Boundaries Of Faith and Reason." Religion East and West (1): 77-97.
6 months 1 week ago

"No human laws are of any validity if contrary to the law of nature; and such of them as are valid derive all their force and all their authority mediately or immediately from this original." Thus writes Blackstone, to whom let all honour be given for having so far outseen the ideas of his time; and, indeed, we may say of our time. A good antidote, this, for those political superstitions which so widely prevail. A good check upon that sentiment of power-worship which still misleads us by magnifying the prerogatives of constitutional governments as it once did those of monarchs. Let men learn that a legislature is not "our God upon earth," though, by the authority they ascribe to it, and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is. Let them learn rather that it is an institution serving a purely temporary purpose, whose power, when not stolen, is at the best borrowed.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. III, Ch. 19 : The Right to Ignore the State, § 2
5 months 3 weeks ago

By necrophilia is meant love for all that is violence and destruction; the desire to kill; the worship of force; attraction to death, to suicide, to sadism; the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic by means of "order." The necrophile, lacking the necessary qualities to create, in his impotence finds it easy to destroy because for him it serves only one quality: force.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

Justice, however, never was in reality administered gratis in any country. Lawyers and attornies, at least, must always be paid by the parties; and, if they were not, they would perform their duty still worse than they actually perform it.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter I, Part II, p. 778.
5 months 4 weeks ago

"God does not think, He creates; He does not exist, He is eternal," wrote Kierkegaard (Afslutende uvidenskabelige Efterskrift); but perhaps it is more exact to say with Mazzini, the mystic of the Italian city, that "God is great because his thought is action" (Ai giovani d'Italila), because with Him to think is to create, and He gives existence to that which exists in His thought by the mere fact of thinking it, and the impossible is unthinkable by God. It is not written in the Scriptures that God creates with His word - that is to say, with His thought - and that by this, by His Word, He made everything that exists? And what God has once made does He ever forget? May it not be that all the thoughts that have ever passed through the Supreme Consciousness still subsist therein? In Him, who is eternal, is not all existence eternalized?

0
0
6 months 5 days ago

The historical approach, with its aim of detecting how things began and arriving from these origins at a knowledge of their nature, is certainly perfectly legitimate; but it also has its limitations. If everything were in continual flux, and nothing maintained itself fixed for all time, there would no longer be any possibility of getting to know about the world, and everything would be plunged into confusion.

0
0
Source
source
Translation J. L. Austin (Oxford, 1950) as quoted by Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (1972) Vol. 1, p. 55.
5 months 4 weeks ago

Nothing is lost, nothing wholly passes away, for in some way or another everything is perpetuated; and everything, after passing through time, returns to eternity.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be, pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XV.
7 months 1 week ago

But capitalist production begets,with the inexorability of a law of Nature,its own negation. It is the negation of negation.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 32, p. 837.
5 months 1 week ago

The civilized pagan recognizes life not in himself alone, but in societies of men-in the tribe, the clan, the family, the kingdom -and sacrifices his personal good for these societies. The motive power of his life is glory. His religion consists in the exaltation of the glory of those who are allied to him-the founders of his family, his ancestors, his rulers-and in worshiping gods who are exclusively protectors of his clan, his family, his nation, his government.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter IV, Christianity Misunderstood by Men of Science
6 months 3 days ago

Life, in that it is life, necessarily entails justice.

0
0
Source
source
"Politics and Morality" in Be'ayot (April 1945), as published in A Land of Two Peoples : Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs (1983) edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr, p. 169
8 months 1 week ago

He could almost wish he were superstitious. He could then console himself with the thought that the casual meaningless meeting had really been directed by a knowing and purposeful Fate.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

Did you ever hear my definition of marriage? It is, that it resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they can not be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, ch. 11, p. 415; paraphrased variant: "Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they can not be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them."
7 months 1 week ago

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.

0
0
Source
source
Culture
5 months 3 weeks ago

The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

When we assume God to be a guiding principle-well, sure enough, a god is usually characteristic of a certain system of thought or morality. For instance, take the Christian God, the summum bonum: God is love, love being the highest moral principle; and God is spirit, the spirit being the supreme idea of meaning. All our Christian moral concepts derive from such assumptions, and the supreme essence of all of them is what we call God.

0
0
Source
source
Nietzsche's Zarathustra (1988), p. 40
4 months 4 days ago

Paganism we recognized as a veracious expression of the earnest awe-struck feeling of man towards the Universe; veracious, true once, and still not without worth for us. But mark here the difference of Paganism and Christianism; one great difference. Paganism emblemed chiefly the Operations of Nature; the destinies, efforts, combinations, vicissitudes of things and men in this world; Christianism emblemed the Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law of Man. One was for the sensuous nature: a rude helpless utterance of the first Thought of men,-the chief recognized virtue, Courage, Superiority to Fear. The other was not for the sensuous nature, but for the moral. What a progress is here, if in that one respect only-!

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Cursed be all those on land and sea who eat their fill,cursed be all those who starve yet raise no hand in protest,cursed be all the bread, the wine, the meat which day by daydescends deep in the entrails of the exploited manand turns not into freedom's cry, the murderer's ruthless knife!

0
0
Source
source
Prayer of three revolutionaries, Book X, line 391
3 months 3 days ago

What the inventive genius of mankind has bestowed upon us in the last hundred years could have made human life care free and happy if the development of the organizing power of man had been able to keep step with his technical advances. As it is, the hardly bought achievements of the machine age in the hands of our generation are as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a three-year-old child. The possession of wonderful means of production has not brought freedom-only care and hunger.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Yes, you can--if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You will find rest from vain fancies if you perform every act in life as though it were your last.

0
0
Source
source
II, 5
7 months 2 weeks ago

We must calm the mind of the common man, and tell him to abstain from the words and even the passions which lead to insurrection.

0
0
Source
source
p. 62
6 months 5 days ago

The judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can and ought to be made worth living, ... underlies all intellectual effort; it is the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical) rejects theory itself.

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

To me it seems clear that the descriptions of human life we find in the novels of Tolstoy or George Eliot are not mere entertainment; they teach us to perceive what goes on in social and individual life. And such descriptions require the many subtle distinctions that ordinary language has made available to us. The question of the relevance or irrelevance of "how we speak" is not just a question for philosophers, although it is that too. It is a question for philosophers because once ordinary language is laughed out of the room, philosophical theories are no longer held responsible at all to the ways we actually speak and actually live; but it is a question for more than just philosophers because, at bottom, contempt for ordinary language is contempt for all the humanities.

0
0
Source
source
"Science and Philosophy"
7 months 1 week ago

There are various, nay, incredible faiths; why should we be alarmed at any of them? What man believes, God believes.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Now, in the solemn silence before God with the lilies and the birds, where accordingly there is nobody at all present, where accordingly there is no other intercourse for thee but with God-there indeed the rule holds good: either hold to Him/or despise Him. There is no excuse, for no one else is present, in any case no one is present in such a wise that thou canst hold to him without despising God; for precisely there in the silence it is clear how close God is to thee.

0
0
4 months 4 days ago

The young generations of the world, who had in them the freshness of young children, and yet the depth of earnest men, who did not think that they had finished off all things in Heaven and Earth by merely giving them scientific names, but had to gaze direct at them there, with awe and wonder: they felt better what of divinity is in man and Nature; they, without being mad, could worship Nature, and man more than anything else in Nature.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

No nation which has sunk into this state of dependence can raise itself out of it by the means which have usually been adopted hitherto. Since resistance was useless to it when it was still in possession of all its powers, what can such resistance avail now that it has been deprived of the greater part of them?

0
0
Source
source
Introduction p. 9-10
5 months 3 weeks ago

The unbeliever walks for a quadrillion miles, yet one moments of reality makes up for it.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter Seven, The Great Synthesis…
6 months 1 week ago

Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.

0
0
7 months 2 days ago

It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, ode ii, line 13
3 months 3 weeks ago

Over the years it has become my firm opinion that sexual activity (even if only through masturbation) is "requisite and necessary, as well for the body as for the soul"; for men and women alike. It stimulates your glands, exercises your pelvis, thrills your nerves, brings mind and body together as one, and culminates in an ecstasy in which there is neither past nor future nor separation between self and other. We need that as we need vitamins, proteins, water, and air.

0
0
Source
source
p. 122
5 months 3 weeks ago

Power is not opposed to freedom. It is precisely freedom that distinguishes power from violence or coercion.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

I have been taught that the land should belong to those who till the soil. With all of his deep-seated sympathies with the Arabs, our comrade cannot possibly deny that the Jews in Palestine have tilled the soil. Tens of thousands of them, young and deeply devout idealists, have flocked to Palestine, there to till the soil under the most trying pioneer conditions. They have reclaimed wastelands and have turned them into fertile fields and blooming gardens. Now I do not say that therefore Jews are entitled to more rights than the Arabs, but for an ardent socialist to say that the Jews have no business in Palestine seems to me rather a strange kind of socialism.

0
0

To the Whigs of the seventeenth century we owe it that we have a House of Commons. To the Whigs of the nineteenth century we owe it that the House of Commons has been purified. The abolition of the slave trade, the abolition of colonial slavery, the extension of popular education, the mitigation of the rigour of the penal code, all, all were effected by that party; and of that party, I repeat, I am a member. I look with pride on all that the Whigs have done for the cause of human freedom and of human happiness. I see them now hard pressed, struggling with difficulties, but still fighting the good fight. At their head I see men who have inherited the spirit and the virtues, as well as the blood, of old champions and martyrs of freedom... While one shred of the old banner is flying, by that banner will I at least be found.

0
0
Source
source
Speech in Edinburgh (29 May 1839), quoted in Speeches of the Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay, M.P. (1854), pp. 183-184
5 months 1 week ago

Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 133)
8 months 1 week ago

Of all the cultural aspects of humanity, the only one which is not broken up into national or regional splinters is science. Different nations have different languages, they may have different religions, may have different dietaries, may have different holidays, different ways of thinking, but here's only one science. 

0
0
Source
source
Interview by Richard Heffner on The Open Mind (19 June 1988); video (25:31)
7 months 2 weeks ago

Much more naturally than you do: because flight is a much more natural consequence of fear than of hate. He doesn't flee men because he hates them, but because he is afraid of them. He doesn't flee them in order to harm them, but to try o escape the harm they wish to do to him. They, on the contrary, don't seek him through friendship, but through hate. They seek him and he flees from them just as in the wilderness of Africa, where there are few men and many tigers, the men flee the tigers, the men flee the tigers, and the tigers seek the men.

0
0
Source
source
Second Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia