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4 months 2 weeks ago

During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in -- and which we lost -- every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.

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Vonnegut at 80 Interview with David Hoppe Alternet
2 months 2 weeks ago

If a due participation of office is a matter of right, how are vacancies to be obtained? Those by death are few; by resignation, none.

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Letter to Elias Shipman and others of New Haven (12 July 1801). Often misquoted as, "few die and none resign".
6 months 2 weeks ago

Virtue is harder to be got than knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered.

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Sec. 70
5 months 1 week ago

Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.

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7 months 3 days ago

It must be said that charity can, in no way, exist along with mortal sin.

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Disputed Questions: On Charity, c. 1270
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

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Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1752) Fontenelle Note: The most frequently attributed variant of this quote is: It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

Eh...you can know....becoming less and less of a fan of his. Some of these writers create existential problems where resolution is possible.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Demonstrating is therefore only the means through which I strip my thought of the form of "mine-ness" so that the other person may recognize it as his own.

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Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 66
6 months 2 weeks ago

I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.

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1688-1690
4 months 1 week ago

The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.

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quoted in "Marshall McLuhan, Author, Dies; Declared 'Medium Is the Message'" by Alden Whitman, The New York Times, January 1, 1981
6 months 3 weeks ago

... a penny saved is better than a penny earned.

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The Duty of a Husband and Wife (17 March 1539), No. 4408. LW 54:337
5 months 6 days ago

Form may then be defined as the operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfillment.

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6 months 1 week ago

The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one's sex, but, rather, to use one's sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships. And, no doubt, homosexuality is not a form of desire but something desirable. Therefore, we have to work at becoming homosexuals.

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"Friendship as a Way of Life," interview in Gai pied, April 1981, as translated in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (1994), pp. 135-136
4 months 1 week ago

The measure of a man is a man. Justice, morality, ethics, fairness, goodness all based on the preservation of life. You can do other things, but you'd be Good by coincidence.

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4 months 1 week ago

Every technology contrived and "outered" by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization.

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(p. 174)
5 months 1 week ago

Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven: Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.

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(Luke 6:37-38) (KJV)
7 months 1 week ago

Generals are, as a matter of course, allowed to be far more idiotic than ordinary human beings are permitted to be.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Be charitable before Wealth makes thee covetous.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections, keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

No one entrusts a secret to a drunken man; but one will entrust a secret to a good man; therefore, the good man will not get drunk.

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As quoted in Epistulae morales ad Lucilium by Seneca, Epistle LXXXIII (trans. R. M. Gummere)
5 months 2 weeks ago

The principal means of realizing it will be the formation of an alliance between philosophers and the working classes, for which both are alike prepared by the negative and positive progress of the last five centuries. The direct object of their combined action will be to set in motion the force of Public Opinion.

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p. 153
2 months 5 days ago

I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act as if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being. I know that philosophically a murderer is not responsible for his crime; nevertheless, I must protect myself from unpleasant contacts. I may consider him guiltless, but I prefer not to take tea with him.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

I sincerely rejoice at the acceptance of our new Constitution by nine States. It is a good canvas, on which some strokes only want retouching. What these are, I think are sufficiently manifested by the general voice from north to south, which calls for a bill of rights.

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Letter to James Madison (July 31, 1788); reported in Memoir, correspondence, and miscellanies from the papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volumes 1-2 (1829), p. 343
6 months 1 week ago

Your church is a whore: she sells her favors to the rich.

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Act 1
2 months 2 weeks ago

The politicians have kept the environmental movement quiet by designating wilderness areas. And in the meantime, they've let corporations run completely out of control, and extraordinarily destructively, in the economic landscapes, without any acknowledgement at all that the natural world is out there just the same as it is in the parks.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Grey Life.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Wisdom thoroughly learned, will never be forgotten. Science is got by diligence; but Discretion and Wisdom cometh of GOD.

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6 months 4 days ago

Mediocrity in poets has never been tolerated by either men, or gods, or booksellers.

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Lines 372-373
4 months 4 weeks ago

Eros, erotic desire, conquers depression. It delivers us from the inferno of the same to the utopia, indeed utopia, of the wholly other.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

The fierce willingness to repudiate domination in a holistic manner is the starting point for progressive cultural revolution.

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Women, Art, and Society: Fourth Edition (2007) by Whitney Chadwick ISBN 0-500-20393-8
5 months 1 week ago

The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.

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2 months 1 week ago

It is not right to vex ourselves at things, For they care not about it.

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VII, 38
4 months 1 week ago

Privacy invasion is now one of biggest knowledge industries.

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(p. 24)
6 months 2 weeks ago

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

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L'Ingénu, ch.10 (1767) Quoted in The End, part 13 of A Series of Unfortunate Events
6 months 2 weeks ago

No difference of rank, position, or birth, is so great as the gulf that separates the countless millions who use their head only in the service of their belly, in other words, look upon it as an instrument of the will, and those very few and rare persons who have the courage to say: No! my head is too good for that; it shall be active only in its own service; it shall try to comprehend the wondrous and varied spectacle of this world and then reproduce it in some form, whether as art or as literature, that may answer to my character as an individual.

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On Genius, Parerga and Paralipomena, Chapter III
6 months 5 days ago

I'd rather be mad than feel pleasure.

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§ 3; quoted also by Eusebius of Caesarea, Praeparatio Evangelica xv. 13
6 months 1 week ago

...in order to change poverty into wealth, one must start by displaying it.

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p. 420
4 months 4 weeks ago

The Outsider has his proper place in the Order of Society, as the impractical dreamer.

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Chapter Three, The Romantic Outsider
5 months 2 weeks ago

If there is to be any philosophy at all, this contradiction must be resolved - and the solution of this problem, or answer to the question: how can we think both of Presentations as conforming to objects, and objects as conforming to presentations? is, not the first, but the highest task of transcendental philosophy.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feeling; none when they are under the influence of imagination.

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p. 460
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is entirely clear that there is only one way in which great wars can be permanently prevented, and that is the establishment of an international government with a monopoly of serious armed force.

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"The Atomic Bomb and the Prevention of War" in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 10/1/1945
2 months 2 weeks ago

Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know. So, friends, every day do somethingthat won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor.Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embracethe flag. Hope to live in that freerepublic for which it stands. Give your approval to all you cannotunderstand. Praise ignorance, for what manhas not encountered he has not destroyed.

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"Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" in Farming: A Hand Book
6 months 2 weeks ago

The very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.

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"The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna," Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 7 November 1848.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves.

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p. 25
5 months 1 week ago

The spectacle of what religions have been in the past, of what certain religions still are to-day, is indeed humiliating for human intelligence. What a farrago of error and folly!'

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Chapter II : Static Religion
4 months 4 weeks ago

God is nothingness: He is 'beyond all speech.'

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