Skip to main content

Main navigation

☰ ˟
  • Home
  • Articulation
  • Contact
  • Shop
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 6 days ago
Natural religion supplies still all the...

Natural religion supplies still all the facts which are disguised under the dogma of popular creeds. The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 223
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
4 days ago
Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed...

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
6 days ago
The Churches as Churches have always...

The Churches as Churches have always been and cannot fail to be institutions not only alien to, but directly hostile towards, Christ's teaching.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Chapter III, Christianity Misunderstood by Believers
Philosophical Maxims
Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte
1 month 1 week ago
Thus the social position of women...

Thus the social position of women is in this respect very similar to that of philosophers and of the working classes. And we now see why these three elements should be united. It is their combined action which constitutes the moral or modifying force of society.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 235
Philosophical Maxims
Epicurus
Epicurus
2 months 3 weeks ago
Those who were best able to...

Those who were best able to provide themselves with the means of security against their neighbors, being thus in possession of the surest guarantee, passed the most agreeable life in each other's society; and their enjoyment of the fullest intimacy was such that, if one of them died before his time, the survivors did not mourn his death as if it called for sympathy.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month 1 week ago
You talk of Paine with more...

You talk of Paine with more respect than he deserves: He is utterly incapable of comprehending his subject. He has not even a moderate portion of learning of any kind. He has learnd the instrumental part of literature, a style, and a method of disposing his ideas, without having ever made a previous preparation of Study or thinking-for the use of it. ... [Paine] possesses nothing more than what a man whose audacity makes him careless of logical consequences, and his total want of honour and morality makes indifferent as to political consequences, may very easily write. They indeed who seriously write upon a principle of levelling ought to be answerd by the Magistrate-and not by the Speculatist.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Letter to William Cusac Smith (22 July 1791), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), pp. 303-304
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
3 weeks 5 days ago
Notwithstanding their attacks on the basic...

Notwithstanding their attacks on the basic conception of rationalism, on synthetic a priori judgments, that is, material propositions that cannot be contradicted by any experience, the empiricist posits the forms of being as constant.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 146.
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
4 weeks ago
For thought and speech are of...

For thought and speech are of a thinking and speaking subject, and if the life of the latter depends on the performance of a superimposed function, it depends on fulfilling the requirements of this function - thus it depends on those who control these requirements.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 128
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 weeks 5 days ago
Man should possess an infinite appetite...

Man should possess an infinite appetite for life. It should be self-evident to him, all the time, that life is superb, glorious, endlessly rich, infinitely desirable. At present, because he is in a midway position between the brute and the truly human, he is always getting bored, depressed, weary of life. He has become so top-heavy with civilisation that he cannot contact the springs of pure vitality. Control of the prefrontal cortex will change all of this. He will cease to cast nostalgic glances towards the womb, for he will realise that death is no escape. Man is a creature of life and the daylight; his destiny lies in total objectivity.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
pp. 317-318
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
2 months 1 week ago
Two things fill the mind with...

Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Translated by Lewis White Beck Two things fill the heart with renewed and increasing awe and reverence the more often and the more steadily that they are meditated on: the starry skies above me and the moral law inside me.
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
2 weeks 6 days ago
The more Lil' Kim distorted her...

The more Lil' Kim distorted her natural beauty to become a cartoonlike caricature of whiteness, the larger her success.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
1 month 3 weeks ago
To have good sense…

To have good sense, is the first principle and fountain of writing well.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Line 309
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 weeks 1 day ago
Alexander is to a peasant proprietor...

Alexander is to a peasant proprietor what Don Juan is to a happily married husband.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 78,
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 6 days ago
Each to each a looking-glass, Reflects...

Each to each a looking-glass, Reflects his figure that doth pass. Every wayfarer he meets What himself declared repeats, What himself confessed records, Sentences him in his words; The form is his own corporal form, And his thought the penal worm. Yet shine forever virgin minds, Loved by stars and the purest winds, Which, o'er passion throned sedate, Have not hazarded their state; Disconcert the searching spy, Rendering to a curious eye The durance of a granite ledge To those who gaze from the sea's edge. It is there for benefit; It is there for purging light; There for purifying storms; And its depths reflect all forms; It cannot parley with the mean,- Pure by impure is not seen. For there's no sequestered grot, Lone mountain tarn, or isle forgot, But Justice, journeying in the sphere, Daily stoops to harbour there.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Astræa
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
2 weeks 5 days ago
The methods of coping with crime...

The methods of coping with crime have no doubt undergone several changes, but mainly in a theoretic sense. In practice, society has retained the primitive motive in dealing with the offender; that is, revenge.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 days ago
Natural selection is like artificial selection,...

Natural selection is like artificial selection, but without the human chooser. Instead of a human deciding which offspring shall die in which shall reproduce, nature 'decides'. The quotation marks are vital because nature doesn't consciously decide. This might seem too obvious to emphasize, but you'd be surprised by the number of people who think natural selection implies some kind of personal choice. They couldn't be more wrong. It just is the case that some offspring are more likely to die while others have what it takes to survive and reproduce. Therefore, as the generations go by, the average, typical creature in the population becomes ever better at the arts of surviving and reproducing. Ever better, I should specify, when, when measured against some absolute standard.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Chapter 1, "Facing Mount Rushmore" (p. 34)
Philosophical Maxims
Peter Singer
Peter Singer
1 month 3 weeks ago
Speciesism is an attitude of prejudice...

Speciesism is an attitude of prejudice towards beings because they're not members of our species, so just as racism means that you're prejudiced against beings who are not members of your race and sexism means you're prejudiced against people of the other sex. So we humans tend to be speciesist in we think that any being that is a member of the species homo sapien just automatically has a higher moral status and is more important than any being that is a member of any other species, irrespective of the actual characteristics of those beings.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Peter Singer - The Genius of Darwin: The Uncut Interviews - Richard Dawkins, 2009.
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
2 months 5 days ago
Persecution of powerless or power-losing groups...

Persecution of powerless or power-losing groups may not be a very pleasant spectacle, but it does not spring from human meanness alone. What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use. Even exploitation and oppression still make society work and establish some kind of order. Only wealth without power or aloofness without a policy are felt to be parasitical, useless, revolting, because such conditions cut all the threads which tie men together. Wealth which does not exploit lacks even the relationship which exists between exploiter and exploited; aloofness without policy does not imply even the minimum concern of the oppressor for the oppressed.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Part 1, Ch. 1, § 1
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
2 months 2 weeks ago
Dear rulers ... I maintain that...

Dear rulers ... I maintain that the civil authorities are under obligation to compel the people to send their children to school. ... If the government can compel such citizens as are fit for military service to bear spear and rifle, to mount ramparts, and perform other martial duties in time of war, how much more has it a right to compel the people to send their children to school, because in this case we are warring with the devil, whose object it is secretly to exhaust our cities and principalities of their strong men.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
letter to the German rulers (1524), as quoted in The History of Compulsory Education in New England, John William Perrin, 1896
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 5 days ago
What then did you expect when...

What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus)" preface, Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poésie Nègre et Malgache
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 2 days ago
The flesh spreads, further and further,...

The flesh spreads, further and further, like a gangrene upon the surface of the globe. It cannot impose limits upon itself, it continues to be rife despite its rebuffs, it takes its defeats for conquests, it has never learned anything. It belongs above all to the realm of the Creator, and it is indeed in the flesh that He has projected His maleficent instincts.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
4 days ago
Until writing was invented, man lived...

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
(p. 48)
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 weeks 1 day ago
If we love God while thinking...

If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 260
Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
2 weeks 5 days ago
The eros-driven soul produces beautiful things,...

The eros-driven soul produces beautiful things, and, above all, beautiful actions, which have a universal value.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 week ago
It is entirely clear....
0
⚖0
Main Content / General
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
2 months 1 week ago
There is only one man who...

There is only one man who gets his own way-he who can get it single-handed; therefore freedom, not power, is the greatest good. That man is truly free who desires what he is able to perform, and does what he desires. This is my fundamental maxim. Apply it to childhood, and all the rules of education spring from it. Society has enfeebled man, not merely by robbing him of the right to his own strength, but still more by making his strength insufficient for his needs. This is why his desires increase in proportion to his weakness; and this is why the child is weaker than the man. If a man is strong and a child is weak it is not because the strength of the one is absolutely greater than the strength of the other, but because the one can naturally provide for himself and the other cannot. Thus the man will have more desires and the child more caprices, a word which means, I take it, desires which are not true needs, desires which can only be satisfied with the help of others.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
3 weeks 1 day ago
The concept of positivity in itself,...

The concept of positivity in itself, in abstracto, has become part and parcel of the ideology today. ... Critique has started to become suspect, regardless of its content.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 23
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
1 month 3 weeks ago
Rather, we heirs of Enlightenment think...

Rather, we heirs of Enlightenment think of enemies of liberal democracy like Nietzsche or Loyola as, to use Rawls's word, "mad." We do so because there is no way to see them as fellow citizens of our constitutional democracy, people whose life plans might, given ingenuity and good will, be fitted in with those of other citizens. They are crazy because the limits of sanity are set by what we can take seriously. This, in turn, is determined by our upbringing, our historical situation.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
3 months 1 week ago
When people are friends, they have...

When people are friends, they have no need of justice, but when they are just, they need friendship in addition.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
3 months 1 week ago
The roots of education ... are...

The roots of education ... are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
2 months 5 days ago
Clearly when the liberties are left...

Clearly when the liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Chapter IV, Section 32, p. 203
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
3 months 1 week ago
A tragedy, then, is the imitation...

A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language ... not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
4 weeks ago
Gentile himself call his doctrine 'absolute...

Gentile himself call his doctrine 'absolute formalism': there is no; 'matter' apart from the pure 'form' of acting. 'The only matter there is in the spiritual act is the form itself, as activity.'

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
P. 407
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
2 months 2 weeks ago
A doubtful balance is made between...

A doubtful balance is made between truth and pleasure, and... the knowledge of one and the feeling of the other stir up a combat the success of which is very uncertain, since, in order to judge of it, it would be necessary to know all that passes in the innermost spirit of the man, of which man himself is scarcely ever conscious.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
2 months 5 days ago
History teaches us that war is...

History teaches us that war is not inevitable. Once again, it is for us to choose whether we use war or some other method of settling the ordinary and unavoidable conflicts between groups of men.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
What Are You Going To Do About It? , The case for constructive peace, 1936
Philosophical Maxims
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
2 months 1 week ago
All poetry is misrepresentation…

All poetry is misrepresentation.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
An Aphorism attributed to him according to John Stuart Mill (see Mill's essay On Bentham and Coleridge in Utilitarianism edt. by Mary Warnock p. 123).
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 weeks 1 day ago
One cannot demand of a scholar...

One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
J 85
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
2 months 2 weeks ago
Concerning the female sorcerer. Roman law...

Concerning the female sorcerer. Roman law also prescribes this. Why does the law name women more than men here, even though men are also guilty of this? Because women are more susceptible to those superstitions of Satan; take Eve, for example. They are commonly called "wise women." Let them be killed.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Sermon on Exodus, 1526, WA XVI, p. 551 as quoted in Luther on Women: A Sourcebook, edited by Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, (2003), p. 231
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months 6 days ago
Exchange value forms the substance of...

Exchange value forms the substance of money, and exchange value is wealth.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Notebook II, The Chapter on Money, p. 141.
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
2 weeks 4 days ago
I have been taught that the...

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
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel
1 month 3 weeks ago
Ethics increases the range of what...

Ethics increases the range of what it is about ourselves that we can will-extending it from our actions to the motives and character traits and dispositions from which they arise. We want to be able to will the sources of our actions down to the very bottom.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 135.
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
3 months 3 days ago
What will be left of the...

What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
3 months 4 days ago
Then we may begin by assuming...

Then we may begin by assuming that there are three classes of men—lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, lovers of gain?

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 2 weeks ago
The only good histories are those...

The only good histories are those that have been written by the persons themselves who commanded in the affairs whereof they write.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Book II, Ch. 10. Of Books
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
2 months 1 week ago
There cannot be a greater rudeness,...

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
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
1 month 2 days ago
Third, consider the insistency of an...

Third, consider the insistency of an idea. The insistency of a past idea with reference to the present is a quantity which is less, the further back that past idea is, and rises to infinity as the past idea is brought up into coincidence with the present.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
2 months ago
[W]hen a philosopher addresses himself to......

[W]hen a philosopher addresses himself to... a tyrant, and tells him... tyranny is incompatible with justice, then the philosopher speaks... [and] believes he is speaking the truth, and... takes a risk...

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
[T]hat was Plato's situation with Dionysius in Syracuse... reference... Plato's Seventh Letter, and... The Life of Dion by Plutarch. Ref: 1) Ludwig Edelstein, Plato's seventh letter (1966) 2) Plutarch, Life of Dion
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
2 months 2 weeks ago
Whence we see spiders, flies, or...

Whence we see spiders, flies, or ants entombed and preserved forever in amber, a more than royal tomb.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Historia Vitæ et Mortis; Sylva Sylvarum, Cent. i. Exper. 100, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed.
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
4 weeks 1 day ago
Verily I say unto you, All...

Verily I say unto you, All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme: But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Mark 3:28-29 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
4 days ago
We now live in a technologically...

We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 276
Philosophical Maxims
  • Load More

User login

  • Create new account
  • Reset your password

Social

☰ ˟
  • Main Feed
  • Philosophical Maxims

Civic

☰ ˟
  • Propositions
  • Issue / Solution

Who's new

  • Søren Kierkegaard
  • Jesus
  • Friedrich Nietzsche
  • VeXed
  • Slavoj Žižek

Who's online

There are currently 1 users online.
  • comfortdragon

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia