Skip to main content
5 months 1 week ago

Even to have come forth is something, since I see that being able to conquer is placed in the hands of fate. However, there was in me, whatever I was able to do, that which no future century will deny to be mine, that which a victor could have for his own: Not to have feared to die, not to have yielded to any equal in firmness of nature, and to have preferred a courageous death to a noncombatant life.

0
0
2 months 2 days ago

It's unfortunate that this has happened. No. It's fortunate that this has happened and I've remained unharmed by it-not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. It could have happened to anyone. But not everyone could have remained unharmed by it.

0
0
Source
source
IV, 49a

This investigation aims to analyze the type "bourgeois public sphere". Its particular approach is required, to begin with, by the difficulties specific to an object whose complexity precludes exclusive reliance on the specialized methods of a single discipline. Rather, the category. "public sphere" must be investigated within the broad field formerly reflected in the perspective of the traditional science of "politics."' When particular social-scientific discipline, this object disintegrates. The problems that result from fusing aspects of sociology and economics, of constitutional law and political science, and of social and intellectual history are obvious: given the present state of differentiation and specialization in the social sciences, scarcely anyone will be able to master several, let alone all, of these disciplines.

0
0
Source
source
p.xvii
2 months 2 weeks ago

Every relationship between two individuals or two groups will be characterized by the ratio of secrecy that is involved in it. Even when one of the parties does not notice the secret factor, yet the attitude of the concealer, and consequently the whole relationship, will be modified by it.

0
0
Source
source
p. 462

Do not imagine that there is any bird more easily caught by decoy, nor any fish sooner fixed on the hook by wormy bait, than are all these poor fools neatly tricked into servitude by the slightest feather passed, so to speak, before their mouths. Truly it is a marvelous thing that they let themselves be caught so quickly at the slightest tickling of their fancy. Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naïvely, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.

0
0
Source
source
Part 2
6 months 2 weeks ago

Once we have tasted the sweetness of what is spiritual, the pleasures of the world will have no attraction for us. If we disregard the shadows of things, then we will penetrate their inner substance.

0
0
2 months 2 days ago

Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.

0
0
Source
source
III, 7
6 months 4 days ago

He was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché. Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. III
5 months 5 days ago

The world is chaos. Nothingness is the yet-to-be-born god of the world.

0
0
Source
source
Act IV
5 months 1 week ago

Anything we take in the Universe, because it has in itself that which is All in All, includes in its own way, the entire soul of the world, which is entirely in any part of it.

0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

Or... they observe an astronomic phenomenon... an eclipse of the moon, and... suppose... this... is perceived simultaneously from all points of the earth. That is not altogether true, since the propagation of light is not instantaneous; if absolute exactitude were desired, there would be a correction... according to a complicated rule.

0
0
3 months 4 weeks ago

In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.

0
0
Source
source
"Why I became a conservative," The New Criterion
6 months 6 days ago

There was once a millionaire who bought an infinite number of pairs of shoes and, whenever he bought a pair of shoes, he also bought a pair of socks. We can make a selection choosing one out of each pair of shoes, because we can choose always the right shoe or always the left shoe. Thus, so far as the shoes are concerned, selections exist. But, as regards the socks, where there is no distinction of right and left, we cannot use this rule of selection.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 93-93
6 months 6 days ago

I regard religion as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.

0
0
6 months 6 days ago

In civil law the existing property relationships are declared to be the result of the general will. The jus utendi et abutendi itself asserts on the one hand the fact that private property has become entirely independent of the community, and on the other the illusion that private property itself is based solely on the private will, the arbitrary disposal.

0
0
Source
source
ibid, pp. 188
7 months 2 days ago

Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.

0
0
5 months 6 days ago

What is the wisdom of a book compared with the wisdom of an angel?

0
0
4 months 1 day ago

Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.

0
0
Source
source
Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 2.
5 months 1 week ago

I am in no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and galliardize of company, yet in one dream I can compose a whole Comedy, behold the action, apprehend the jests, and laugh myself awake at the conceits thereof.

0
0
Source
source
Section 11
6 months 1 week ago

I think, therefore I am.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Men's hearts ought not to be set against one another; but set with one another, and all against the Evil Thing only.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

This poor amphibious Pope too gives loaves to the Poor; has in him more good latent than he is himself aware of. His poor Jesuits, in the late Italian Cholera, were, with a few German Doctors, the only creatures whom dastard terror had not driven mad: they descended fearless into all gulfs and bedlams; watched over the pillow of the dying, with help, with counsel and hope; shone as luminous fixed stars, when all else had gone out in chaotic night: honour to them!

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.

0
0
2 months 5 days ago

We were laboring under a dropsical fulness of circulating medium. Nearly all of it is now called in by the banks, who have the regulation of the safety-valves of our fortunes, and who condense and explode them at their will. Lands in this State cannot now be sold for a year's rent; and unless our Legislature have wisdom enough to effect a remedy by a gradual diminution only of the medium, there will be a general revolution of property in this state.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to John Adams (7 November 1819) ME 15:224 : The Writings of Thomas Jefferson "Memorial Edition" (20 Vols., 1903-04) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 15, p. 224
4 months 4 weeks ago

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

0
0
Source
source
22:37-40 (KJV)
2 months 2 weeks ago

I have observed that even the barbarians across the Rhine sing savage songs composed in language not unlike the croaking of harsh-voiced birds, and that they delight in such songs. For I think it is always the case that inferior musicians, though they annoy their audiences, give very great pleasure to themselves.

0
0
Source
source
On the songs of the early Germans, in his Mispogon, 337-338
6 months 1 week ago

It is the duty of every patriot to protect his country from its government.

0
0
Source
source
Edward Abbey, "A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government." as written in "A Voice Crying in the Wilderness" (Vox Clamantis en Deserto): Notes from a Secret Journal (1990), ISBN 0312064888
1 month 3 weeks ago

Freeeedom! Too much freedom and you have anarchy and a state of war...which is actually not free at all....everybody always wants MORE freedom instead of the balance that's necessary...

0
0
6 months 6 days ago

While we are reading these sentences, this fair modern world seems only a reprint of the Laws of Menu with the gloss of Culluca. Tried by a New England eye, or the mere practical wisdom of modern times, they are the oracles of a race already in its dotage, but held up to the sky, which is the only impartial and incorruptible ordeal, they are of a piece with its depth and serenity, and I am assured that they will have a place and significance as long as there is a sky to test them by.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

The direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilisation. Not of this or that civilisation but - from what we can judge to-day - of any civilisation. ...The type of man dominant to-day is a primitive one, a Naturmensch rising up in the midst of a civilised world.

0
0
Source
source
Chap.IX: The Primitive and the Technical
4 months 4 weeks ago

The ontological concept of truth is in the centre of a logic which may serve as a model of pre- technological rationality. It is the rationality of a two-dimensional universe of discourse which, contrasts with the of thought and behavior that develop in the execution of the technological project.

0
0
Source
source
p. 130
5 months 6 days ago

A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (3 April 1777); as published in The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (1899), vol. 2, p. 206
6 months 5 days ago

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

0
0
Source
source
Quotation and Originality
6 months 6 days ago

That Man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

0
0
2 months 6 days ago

I am NOT nothing! A vaporous phosphorescence on a damp meadow, a miserable worm that crawls and loves, that shouts and talks about wings for an hour or two until his mouth is blocked with earth. The dark powers give no other answer. But within me a deathless Cry, superior to me, continues to shout. For whether I want to or not, I am also, without doubt, a part of the visible and the invisible Universe. We are one.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Take provocation, for instance, which is the opposite and the caricature of seduction. It says: "I know that you want to be seduced, and I will seduce you." Nothing could be worse than betraying this secret rule. Nothing could be less seductive than a provocative smile or inciteful behaviour, since both presuppose that one cannot be seduced naturally and that one needs to be blackmailed into it, or through a declaration of intent: "Let me seduce you"

0
0
Source
source
(p. 67)
4 months 5 days ago

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.

0
0
Source
source
The Law of Love and the Law of Violence
4 months 3 days ago

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 26)
4 months 2 weeks ago

In the empire of signs, the soul, psychology, is erased. There is no soul to infect the holy seriousness of ritual play.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Is it not a right glorious thing, and set of things, this that Shakspeare has brought us? For myself, I feel that there is actually a kind of sacredness in the fact of such a man being sent into this Earth.

0
0
2 months 5 days ago

The solution is, that we do not see the image on the retina at all, we only see by means of it.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Now, you see, if you understand what I'm saying, with your intelligence, and then take the next step and say "But I understood it now, but I didn't feel it." Then, next I raise the question: Why do you want to feel it? You say: "I want something more", because that's again that spiritual greed. And you could only say that because you didn't understand it.

0
0
Source
source
Intellectual Yoga
4 months 2 weeks ago

If things are deprived of memory, they become information or commodities. They are pushed into a time-free, ahistorical place.

0
0
2 months 5 days ago

We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.

0
0
Source
source
"Think Little"
5 months 5 days ago

We have repeatedly observed that while any whole is evolving, there is always going on an evolution of the parts into which it divides itself; but we have not observed that this equally holds of the totality of things, which is made up of parts within parts from the greatest down to the smallest.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. II, The Knowable; Ch. XV, The Law of Evolution (continued)
6 months 6 days ago

The entire history of social improvement has been a series of transitions, by which one custom or institution after another, from being a supposed primary necessity of social existence, has passed into the rank of an universally stigmatized injustice and tyranny. So it has been with the distinctions of slaves and freemen, nobles and serfs, patricians and plebeians; and so it will be, and in part already is, with the aristocracies of colour, race, and sex.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 5
3 months 1 week ago

As the Genesis story teaches, knowledge cannot save us from ourselves. If we know more than before, it means only that we have greater scope to enact our fantasies. But - as the Genesis myth also teaches - there is no way we can rid ourselves of what we know. If we try to regain a state of innocence, the result can only be a worse madness. The message of Genesis is that in the most vital areas of human life there can be no progress, only an unending struggle with our own nature.

0
0
Source
source
An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (pp. 79-80)
6 months 5 days ago

Nature is the best posture-master.

0
0
Source
source
p. 167

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia