Skip to main content
4 months 3 weeks ago

Statistically, myth is on the right. There, it is essential, well-fed, sleek, expensive, garrulous, it invents itself ceaselessly. It takes hold of everything, all aspects of the law, of morality, of aesthetics, of diplomacy, of household equipment, of Literature, of entertainment.

0
0
Source
source
p. 148
3 months 2 weeks ago

Like other human freedoms, the freedoms embodied in market institutions are justified inasmuch as they meet human needs. Insofar as they fail to do this they can reasonably be altered. This is true not only of the rights that are involved in market institutions. It is true of all human rights.

0
0
Source
source
'Modus Vivendi' (p.36)
5 months 1 week ago

Liberty is so great a magician, endowed with so marvelous a power of productivity, that under the inspiration of this spirit alone, North America was able within less than a century to equal, and even surpass, the civilization of Europe.

0
0
3 months 2 days ago

The battling Reformer too is, from time to time, a needful and inevitable phenomenon. Obstructions are never wanting: the very things that were once indispensable furtherances become obstructions; and need to be shaken off, and left behind us,-a business often of enormous difficulty.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 14)
2 months 3 weeks ago

The criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 5: On Some Popular Errors Concerning the Scope and Method of Economics, § 9 : The Belief in the Omnipotence of Thought
5 months 1 week ago

To conceive that compulsion and punishment are the proper means of reformation, is the sentiment of a barbarian; civilisation and science are calculated to explode so ferocious an idea. It was once universally admitted and approved; it is now necessarily upon the decline.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, bk. 7, ch. 5
5 months 1 week ago

I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Hegel ... destroyed the illusion of the subject's being-in-itself and showed that the subject is itself an aspect of social objectivity. ... However, ... we must ask this question: is this objectivity which we have shown to be a necessary condition and which subsumes abstract subjectivity in fact the higher factor? Does it not rather remain precisely what Hegel reproached it with being in his youth, namely pure externality, the coercive collective? Does not the retreat to this supposedly higher authority signify the regression of the subject, which had earlier won its freedom only with the greatest efforts, with infinite pains?

0
0
Source
source
p. 16
6 months 2 weeks ago

I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 26. On the Education of Children
2 months 1 week ago

A modern theory of knowledge which takes account of the relational as distinct from the merely relative character of all historical knowledge must start with the assumption that there are spheres of thought in which it is impossible to conceive of absolute truth existing independently of the values and position of the subject and unrelated to the social context. Even a god could not formulate a proposition on historical subjects like 2 x 2 = 4, for what is intelligible in history can be formulated only with reference to problems and conceptual constructions which themselves arise in the flux of historical experience.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Often things realised in thought are more vivid than than the same things in inattentive physical experience. But the things apprehended as mental are always subject to the condition that we come to a stop when we come to explore ever higher grades of complexity in their realised relationships. We always find tat we have thought of just this - whatever it may be - and of no more.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 10: "Abstraction", p. 239
5 months 1 week ago

I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.

0
0
3 months 4 days ago

It seems to us that the past is our property. Well, on the contrary - we are its property, because we are not able to make changes in it, while it fills the whole of our existence.

0
0
Source
source
Original: "Otóż przeciwnie - to my jesteśmy jej własnością, ponieważ nie jesteśmy w stanie dokonać w niej zmian, ona natomiast wypełnia całość naszego istnienia." Klucz niebieski albo opowieści biblijne zebrane ku pouczeniu i przestrodze
3 months 2 days ago

The Public is an old woman. Let her maunder and mumble.

0
0
Source
source
Journal (1835).
4 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.

0
0
Source
source
p. 7
2 months 1 week ago

There is no man so fortunate that there shall not be by him when he is dying some who are pleased with what is going to happen. Suppose that he was a good and a wise man, will there not be at least some one to say to himself, Let us at last breathe freely, being relieved from this schoolmaster? It is true that he was harsh to none of us, but I perceive that he tacitly condemns us.-This is what is said of a good man. But in our own case how many other things are there for which there are many who wish to get rid of us.

0
0
Source
source
X, 36
6 months 1 week ago

We live to improve, or we live in vain.

0
0
Source
source
Address and Declaration at a Select Meeting of the Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty (August 20, 1791) p. 5
6 months 2 weeks ago

The more we devote ourselves to observing animals and their behaviour, the more we love them, on seeing how gready they care for their young; in such a context, we cannot even contemplate cruelty to a wolf. Leibnitz put the grub he had been observing back on the tree with its leaf, lest he should be guilty of doing any harm to it. It upsets a man to destroy such a creature for no reason, and this tenderness is subsequently transferred to man.

0
0
Source
source
Part II, pp. 212-213
6 months 2 days ago

Citizens of a Jeffersonian democracy can be as religious or irreligious as they please as long as they are not "fanatical." That is, they must abandon or modify opinion on matters of ultimate importance, the opinions that may hitherto have given sense and point to their lives, if these opinions entail public actions that cannot be justified to most of their fellow citizens.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

You remember Thurlow's answer to some one complaining of the injustice of a company. "Why, you never expected justice from a company, did you? they have neither a soul to lose, nor a body to kick."

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, ch. 11, p. 428
6 months 1 week ago

It is only by poets that the life of any epoch can be synthesized. Encyclopaedias and guides to knowledge cannot do it, for the good reason that they affect only the intellectual surface of a man's life. The lower layers, the core of his being, they leave untouched.

0
0
Source
source
p. 4
4 months 3 weeks ago

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

0
0
Source
source
A 10
6 months 1 week ago

What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.

0
0
Source
source
Orestes, Act 2
7 months 1 week ago

The military mind remains unparalleled as a vehicle of creative stupidity.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Every being ought to do that which is according to its constitution; and all other things have been constituted for the sake of the superior, but the rational for the sake of one another.

0
0
Source
source
VII, 55
5 months 4 days ago

And as in other things, so in men, not the seller, but the buyer determines the Price.

0
0
Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 10, p. 42
4 months 1 week ago

The savage recognizes life only in himself and his personal desires. His interest in life is concentrated on himself alone. The highest happiness for him is the fullest satisfaction of his desires. The motive power of his life is personal enjoyment. His religion consists in propitiating his deity and in worshiping his gods, whom he imagines as persons living only for their personal aims.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter IV, Christianity Misunderstood by Men of ScienceChapter IV, Christianity Misunderstood by Men of Science
2 months 1 week ago

If God holds all mankind guilty for the sin of Adam, if he has visited upon the innocent the punishment of the guilty, if he is to torture any single soul for ever, then it is wrong to worship him.

0
0
Source
source
[Lectures and essays (1879), vol. 2, p. 224]
2 months 1 week ago

I suppose I must be out of sorts to feel everything so deeply. Sometimes, however, it seems to me that i am not really a human being at all, but like a bird or a beast in human form. I feel so much more at home even in a scrap of garden like the one here, and still more in the meadows when the grass is humming with bees than - at one of the our party congresses.

0
0
Source
source
Prison Letter, (May 12, 1917), Rosa Luxemburg Speaks
4 months 1 week ago

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 1070
2 months 1 week ago

As long as the aristocracy is healthy, the name of the sovereign sacred to it, and it loves the monarchy passionately, the State is unshakeable, whatever be the qualities of the king. But once it loses its greatness, its pride, its energy, its faith, the spirit withdraws, the monarchy is dead, and its cadaver is left to the worms.

0
0
Source
source
p. 127
5 months 1 week ago

Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye. For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die.

0
0
Source
source
p. 50e
5 months 1 week ago

I was still blind, but twinkling stars did dance Throughout my being's limitless expanse, Nothing had yet drawn close, only at distant stages I found myself, a mere suggestion sensed in past and future ages.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Romantic Vision, Ethical Context: Novalis and Artistic Autonomy (1987) by Géza von Molnár, p. 2
3 weeks 2 days ago

Alright....here's the piece I referred to earlier...Universality is unquestionable! I'm not even going to waste time entertaining arguments against....

 

https://open.substack.com/pub/axiomaticpanic/p/universality-is-unquesti…

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

The pursuit of wealth generally diverts men of great talents and strong passions from the pursuit of power; and it frequently happens that a man does not undertake to direct the fortunes of the state until he has shown himself incompetent to conduct his own.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XIII.
6 months 1 week ago

I squander untold effort making an arrangement of my thoughts that may have no value whatever.

0
0
Source
source
p. 33e
4 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and - so far as may be - efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests.

0
0
Source
source
Preface, pp. ix-x
6 months 1 week ago

Probably in time physiologists will be able to make nerves connecting the bodies of different people; this will have the advantage that we shall be able to feel another man's tooth aching.

0
0
Source
source
Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), p. 493
4 months 3 weeks ago

Happiness is the proof that time can accommodate eternity.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

But there is a devil of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used for anything, and civilized people who apply them selves to everything.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, p. 25.
5 months 1 week ago

The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.

0
0
7 months 1 day ago

When the Superior Man (Junzi) eats he does not try to stuff himself; at rest he does not seek perfect comfort; he is diligent in his work and careful in speech. He avails himself to people of the Tao and thereby corrects himself. This is the kind of person of whom you can say, "he loves learning."

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

By mortifying vanity we do ourselves no good. It is the want of interest in our life which produces it; by filling up that want of interest in our life we can alone remedy it. And, did we even see this, how can we make the difference? How obtain the interest which society declares she does not want, and we cannot want?

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

0
0
Source
source
Act 5, sc. 2

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia