Skip to main content
2 months 3 weeks ago

The disastrous feature of our civilization is that it is far more developed materially than spiritually. Its balance is disturbed ... Now come the facts to summon us to reflect. They tell us in terribly harsh language that a civilization which develops only on its material side, and not in the sphere of the spirit ... heads for disaster.

0
0
6 months 1 day ago

Cato the elder wondered how that city was preserved wherein a fish was sold for more than an ox.

0
0
Source
source
Cato the Elder
6 months 2 weeks ago

Lands for the purposes of pleasure and magnificence, parks, gardens, public walks, &c. possessions which are every where considered as causes of expence, not as sources of revenue, seem to be the only lands which, in a great and civilized monarchy, ought to belong the crown.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, Part I, p. 891.
6 months 2 weeks ago

A new moral outlook is called for in which submission to the powers of nature is replaced by respect for what is best in man. It is where this respect is lacking that scientific technique is dangerous.

0
0
Source
source
Attributed to Russell at the end of Isaac Asimov's short story Franchise with no specific source given.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Above and before all things, worship GOD!

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Sayings of the Wise: Or, Food for Thought: A Book of Moral Wisdom, Gathered from the Ancient Philosophers (1555) by William Baldwin [1908 edition]
6 months 3 weeks ago

Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made), much may be hoped.

0
0
Source
source
Aphorism 95
5 months 1 week ago

The Creation was the first act of sabotage.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Evolution is definable as a change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. II, The Knowable; Ch. XV, The Law of Evolution (continued)
4 months 4 weeks ago

You cannot think without abstractions; accordingly, it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction. It is here that philosophy finds its niche as essential to the healthy progress of society. It is the critic of abstractions. A civilisation which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 4: "The Eighteenth Century", pp. 82-83
5 months 1 week ago

The bourgeoisie has gained a monopoly of all means of existence in the broadest sense of the word. What the proletarian needs, he can obtain only from this bourgeoisie, which is protected in its monopoly by the power of the state. The proletarian is, therefore, in law and in fact, the slave of the bourgeoisie, which can decree his life or death.

0
0
Source
source
p. 112
3 months 3 weeks ago

The ideology of development has implied the globalization of the priorities, patterns, and prejudices of the West. Instead of self-generated, development is imposed. Instead of coming from within, it is externally guided. Instead of contributing to the maintenance of diversity, development has created homogeneity...

0
0
Source
source
Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology
6 months 2 weeks ago

The death of dogma is the birth of morality.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Faith Or Fact (1897) by Henry Moorehouse Taber, p. 86
2 months 3 weeks ago

Know all ye mortals who have entered this contest, that according to our laws and decrees the victor is allowed to exult but the vanquished must not complain. Depart then wherever you please, and in future live every one of you under the guidance of the gods. Let every man choose his own guardian and guide.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive, that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.

0
0
Source
source
On Manners and Fashion
7 months 2 weeks ago
Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has hitherto always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed: - history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!
0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

What J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were to the Age of Robber Barons, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett, as well as digital moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are to the contemporary age of the rule of the 1%. Then as now, the super-rich used governments to write laws and rules to allow them to accumulate unlimited wealth; then as now, creating monopolies by enclosing the commons and killing competition is the strategy for becoming the 1%.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

We hear only ourselves.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Let no act be done at haphazard, nor otherwise than according to the finished rules that govern its kind.

0
0
Source
source
IV, 2
5 months 6 days ago

The range of socially permissible and desirable satisfaction is greatly enlarged, but through this satisfaction, the Pleasure Principle is reduced-deprived of the claims which are irreconcilable with the established society. Pleasure, thus adjusted, generates submission.

0
0
Source
source
p. 75
6 months 3 weeks ago

So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination. ..And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do no bring forth in the agitation.

0
0
6 months 3 days ago

Ill repute is a good thing and much the same as pain.

0
0
Source
source
§ 5
6 months 2 weeks ago

That the human mind has a certain order of possible progress, in which some things must precede others, an order which governments and public instructors can modify to some, but not to an unlimited extent: that all questions of political institutions are relative, not absolute, and that different stages of human progress not only will have, but ought to have, different institutions: That government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is, does not depend on institutions, but institutions on it: That any general theory or philosophy of politics supposes a previous theory of human progress, and that this is the same thing with a philosophy of history.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 162)
5 months 6 days ago

In that very hour he became overjoyed in the holy spirit and said: “I publicly praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have carefully hidden these things from wise and intellectual ones and have revealed them to young children. Yes, O Father, because this is the way you approved.

0
0
Source
source
Luke 10:21, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures
7 months 1 week ago

Scientists have pushed back the horizon of time from the biblical 6,000 years to 4,600,000,000 years for the age of Earth a 760,000-fold increase.

0
0
5 months 5 days ago

In the late eighteenth and the greater part of the nineteenth centuries appeared the first marked cultural shift in the attitude taken toward change. Under the names of indefinite perfectibility, progress, and evolution, the movement of things in the universe itself and of the universe as a whole began to take on a beneficent instead of hateful aspect.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

Despotic government supports itself by abject civilization, in which debasement of the human mind, and wretchedness in the mass of the people, are the chief criterions. Such governments consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise of intellectual faculty is not his privilege; that he has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them; and they politically depend more upon breaking the spirit of the people by poverty, than they fear enraging it by desperation.

0
0
Source
source
Means by Which the Fund Is to Be Created
2 months 3 weeks ago

I realized that the difference that I saw between things was the same thing as their unity, because differences (borders, lines, surfaces, boundaries) don't really divide things from each other at all, they join them together, because all boundaries are held in common.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

This is a fine saying of Plato: That he who is discoursing about men should look also at earthly things as if he viewed them from some higher place; should look at them... a mixture of all things and an orderly combination of contraries.

0
0
Source
source
VII, 48
6 months 2 weeks ago

But simultaneously with the development of capitalist production the credit system also develops. The money-capital which the capitalist cannot as yet employ in his own business is employed by others, who pay him interest for its use.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. II, Ch. XVII, p. 325.
3 months 4 days ago

A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Treat your friend as if he might become an enemy.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 401
5 months 2 weeks ago

Cast your eyes on the journals of parliament. It is for fear of losing the inestimable treasure we have, that I do not venture to game it out of my hands for the vain hope of improving it. I look with filial reverence on the constitution of my country, and never will cut it in pieces, and put it into the kettle of any magician, in order to boil it, with the puddle of their compounds, into youth and vigour. On the contrary, I will drive away such pretenders; I will nurse its venerable age, and with lenient arts extend a parent's breath.

0
0
Source
source
Speech in the House of Commons against William Pitt's motion for parliamentary reform (7 May 1782), quoted in The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke ...: Miscellaneous speeches, letters, and fragments, Vol. VI (1890), p. 153
2 months 1 week ago

The selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Larkin Smith
5 months 4 days ago

In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.

0
0
Source
source
"Man has no nature"
6 months 3 weeks ago

It happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 5. Upon some Verses of Virgil
5 months 6 days ago

To understand this for sense it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or a logician, but that he should be mad. On the proposition that the volume generated by revolving the region under 1/x from 1 to infinity has finite volume.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Mathematical Maxims and Minims by N. Rose
4 months 4 weeks ago

The Great Beast is the only object of idolatry, the only ersatz of God, the only imitation of something which is infinitely far from me and which is I myself.

0
0
Source
source
p. 121; footnote in Gravity and Grace
2 months 3 weeks ago

I like to think of criticism as the highest intellectual effort that mankind is capable of, and above all, I like to think of self-criticism as the most difficult attainment of an educated man.

0
0
Source
source
"The Function of Criticism at the Present Time", in The China Critic, Vol. III, no. 4 (23 January 1930), p. 81
6 months 1 week ago

The criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter Two, pp.. 79
6 months 1 day ago

Antagoras the poet was boiling a conger, and Antigonus, coming behind him as he was stirring his skillet, said, "Do you think, Antagoras, that Homer boiled congers when he wrote the deeds of Agamemnon?" Antagoras replied, "Do you think, O king, that Agamemnon, when he did such exploits, was a peeping in his army to see who boiled congers?"

0
0
Source
source
46 Antigonus I
3 months 4 days ago

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with; as if, observes our author himself, any originality but our own could be expected to content us! In fact all strange thing are apt, without fault of theirs, to estrange us at first view, and unhappily scarcely anything is perfectly plain, but what is also perfectly common.

0
0
Source
source
Richter.
7 months 2 weeks ago

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
3 months 1 week ago

As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost.

0
0
Source
source
Orlando, in Caliban, act 2, sc. 1 (1878).
4 months 1 week ago

Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

When you are reading God's Word, it is not the obscure passages that bind you but what you understand, and with that you comply at once. If you understood only one single passage in all of Holy Scripture, well, then you must do that first of all, but you do not first have to sit down and ponder the obscure passages.

0
0
6 months 1 day ago

The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.

0
0
Source
source
On Listening to Lectures (Tr. Waterfield)

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia