Skip to main content
3 months 1 week ago

All of those who are "without" - without employment, without residence, without housing - are really excluded only in part.

0
0
Source
source
129
3 months 2 days ago

And some others that I have seen, were perhaps among the first. There is no third rising. Time sweeps all away with it so fast at this epoch. The Scottish Church has been short-lived, and was late in reaching thither.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Do the essences of proposition and of the truth determine themselves from out of the essence of the thing, or does the essence of the thing determine itself from out of the essence of the proposition? The question is posed as an either/or. However does this either/or itself suffice? Are the essence of the thing and the essence of the proposition only built as mirror images because both of them together determine themselves from out of the same but deeper lying root? However, what and where can be this common ground for the essence of the thing and of the proposition and of their origin? The unconditioned (Unbedingt)? We stated at the beginning that what conditions the essense of the thing in its thingness can no longer itself be thing and conditioned, it must be an unconditioned (Un-bedingtes).

0
0
Source
source
p. 47
2 months 1 week ago

The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were on the heights; they have developed this 'defeat' into one of the historical defeats which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And that is why the future victory will bloom from this 'defeat'. 'Order reigns in Berlin!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I will be!

0
0
Source
source
"Order reigns in Berlin", Last written words. Collected Works 4
3 months 2 weeks ago

Universal Humanism:

1) Preserve Life (end)

Precludes those who think they get to decide who lives and who dies.

2) Avoid and limit suffering (means)

Precludes those who use absurd exceptions to turn their backs on functional rules.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

FACULTY PSYCHOLOGY is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology I mean, roughly , the view that many fundamentally different kinds of psychological mechanisms must be postulated in order to explain the facts of mental life . Faculty psychology takes seriously the apparent heterogeneity of the mental and is impressed by such prima facie differences as between, say, sensation and perception, volition and cognition, learning and remembering, or language and thought.

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

It is impossible that each of the elements should be infinite. For that is body which has interval on all sides; and that is infinite which has extension without bound.

0
0
4 months 4 days ago

Conquered people tend to be witty.

0
0
Source
source
Mr. Sammler's Planet, (1976), p. 98
2 months 1 week ago

Life is a crusade in the service of God. Whether we wished to or not, we set out as crusaders to free - not the Holy Sepulchre - but that God buried in matter and in our souls. Every body, every soul is a Holy Sepulcher. Every seed of grain is a Holy Sepulchre; let us free it! The brain is a Holy Sepulchre, God sprawls within it and battles with death; let us run to his assistance!

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

When we have weighed everything, and when our relations in life permit us to choose any given position, we may take that one which guarantees us the greatest dignity, which is based on ideas of whose truth we are completely convinced, which offers the largest field to work for mankind and approach the universal goal for which every position is only a means: perfection.

0
0
Source
source
Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 38
4 months 2 weeks ago

By public administration is meant, in common usage, the activities of the executive branches of national, state, and local governments; independent boards and commissions set up by the congress and state legislatures; government corporations, and certain agencies of a specialized character. Specifically excluded are judicial and legislative agencies within the government and nongovernmental administration.

0
0
Source
source
p. 7
3 months 3 days ago

It is a course which perhaps would not have been necessary had it been possible to form a state composed of wise men, but as every multitude is fickle, full of lawless desires, unreasoned passion, and violent anger, the multitude must be held in by invisible terrors and suchlike pageantry. For this reason I think, not that the ancients acted rashly and at haphazard in introducing among the people notions concerning the gods and beliefs in the terrors of hell, but that the moderns are most rash and foolish in banishing such beliefs.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

What is Europe really but a sterile trunk which owes everything to oriental grafts?

0
0
Source
source
Letter of 18 December 1806 to Windischmann, quoted by Rene Gerard, L'Orient et la pensée romantique allemande, Paris 1963,, p. 213. quoted in Poliakov, L. (1974).
4 months 4 weeks ago

Faith makes us live by showing us that life, although it is dependent upon reason, has its well spring and source of power elsewhere, in something supernatural and miraculous. Cournot the mathematician, a man of singularly well-balanced and scientifically equipped mind has said that it is this tendency towards the supernatural and miraculous that gives life, and that when it is lacking, all the speculations of reason lead to nothing but affliction of the spirit. ...And in truth we wish to live.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even "realities"; you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a "solitary elephant.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

0
0
Source
source
Second Treatise of Government, Ch. II, sec. 6
6 months 1 week ago

I believe that the early success and reputation of Carlyle's French Revolution, were considerably accelerated by what I wrote about it in the Review. Immediately on its publication, and before the commonplace critics, all whose rules and modes of judgment it set at defiance, had time to preoccupy the public with their disapproval of it, I wrote and published a review of the book, hailing it as one of those productions of genius which are above all rules, and are a law to themselves.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 217)
6 months 1 week ago

The purely corporeal can be uncanny. Compare the way angels and devils are portrayed. So-called "miracles" must be connected with this. A miracle must be, as it were, a sacred gesture.

0
0
Source
source
p. 50e
5 months 4 days ago

No doubt the spirit or energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves.

0
0
Source
source
p. 199
3 months 3 weeks ago

If the brutes have consciousness and no souls, then it is clear that, in them, consciousness is a direct function of material changes; while, if they possess immaterial subjects of consciousness, or souls, then, as consciousness is brought into existence only as the consequence of molecular motion of the brain, it follows that it is an indirect product of material changes. The soul stands related to the body as the bell of a clock to the works, and consciousness answers to the sound which the bell gives out when it is struck.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

I've had letters from Chinese scientists at the peak of the SARS epidemic who said the problem is a hybridization between the viruses planted into GMO feed, which is then fed to animals, then the virus jumped from the animals to humans. We're going to see more and more of these kinds of risks. I think the whole issue of the H1N1 virus was the fact that it had genes for three influenza types--human, chicken, pig. All of these crossings are becoming possible because of the crossing of genes across species barriers.

0
0
Source
source
On the SARS epidemic, as quoted in "A Visit to My Kitchen: Vandana Shiva", The Huffington Post
4 months 3 weeks ago

What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.

0
0
Source
source
"Le monde où l'on catche"
4 months 3 weeks ago

I was aggressively nonpolitical. I believed that people who make a fuss about politics do so because their heads are too empty to think about more important things. So I felt nothing but impatient contempt for Osborne's Jimmy Porter and the rest of the heroes of social protest.

0
0
Source
source
p. 2
4 months 4 weeks ago

I have told you that... we know nothing save what we have first, in one way or another, desired; and it may even be added that we can know nothing well save what we love, save what we pity.

0
0
5 months 4 days ago

Outside the academic establishment, the "far-reaching change in all our habits of thought" is more serious. It serves to coordinate ideas and goals with those exacted by the prevailing system, to enclose them in the system, and to repel those which are irreconcilable with the system. The reign of such a one-dimensional reality does not mean that materialism rules, and that the spiritual, metaphysical, and bohemian occupations are petering out. On the contrary, there is a great deal of "Worship together this week," "Why not try God," Zen, existentialism, and beat ways of life, etc. But such modes of protest and transcendence are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial part of practical behaviorism, its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 13-14
6 months 1 week ago

The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1, p. 10 [2012 reprint]
4 months 1 week ago

Science has adapted itself entirely to the wealthy classes and accordingly has set itself to heal those who can afford everything, and it prescribes the same methods for those who have nothing to spare.

0
0
5 months 4 days ago

If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.

0
0
Source
source
19:21 (KJV)
4 months 5 days ago

Where are these rational practices to be taught and acquired? Not within the four walls of a bare building, in which formality predominates... But in the nursery, play-ground, fields, gardens, workshops, manufactures, museums and class-rooms. ...The facts collected from all these sources will be concentrated, explained, discussed, made obvious to all, and shown in their direct application to practice in all the business of life.

0
0
Source
source
3rd Part
2 months 1 week ago

It may indeed be true that in order to act we need a certain amount of self-confidence and intellectual self-assurance. It may also be true that the very form of expression, in which we clothe our thoughts, tends to impose upon them an absolute tone.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

When I was a child, the institution of war, which, by then, had been in existence for perhaps about five thousand years, was still being taken for granted by most people in the World as a normal and acceptable fact of life. One small religious community, the Society of Friends, was at that time singular in condemning war as immoral and in consequently refusing to have any part or lot in war-making.

0
0
Source
source
Experiences (New York: Oxford UP, 1969) pt. 2, sect. 4
6 months 2 weeks ago

Regarding the plan to collect my writings in volumes, I am quite cool and not at all eager about it because, roused by a Saturnian hunger, I would rather see them all devoured. For I acknowledge none of them to be really a book of mine, except perhaps the one On the Bound Will and the Catechism.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Wolfgang Capito
2 months 2 weeks ago

When the mirror meets with an ugly woman, when a rare ink-stone finds a vulgar owner, and when a good sword is in the hands of a common general, there is utterly nothing to be done about it.

0
0
Source
source
p. 317
6 months 1 week ago

If we must absolutely mention this state of affairs, I suggest that we call ourselves "absent", that is more proper.

0
0
Source
source
Estelle, refusing to use the word "dead", Act 1, sc. 5
2 months 1 week ago

I am glad (sayes Eleutherius) to see the Vanity or Envy of the canting Chymists thus discover'd and chastis'd; and I could wish, that Learned Men would conspire together to make these deluding Writers sensible, that they must no longe[r] hope with Impunity to abuse the World. For whilst such Men are quietly permitted to publish Books with promising Titles, and therein to Assert what they please, and contradict others, and ev'n themselves as they please, with as little danger of being confuted as of being understood, they are encourag'd to get themselves a name, at the cost of the Readers, by finding that intelligent Men are wont for the reason newly mention'd, to let their Books and Them alone: And the ignorant and credulous (of which the number is still much greater then that of the other) are forward to admire most what they least understand.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

The world's a bubble, and the life of man Less than a span.

0
0
3 months 1 day ago

Space, subjectively, is the coexistence of perceptions - perceiving two objects at once.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 6 : Our Souls
2 months 3 weeks ago

The first discipline modernity's originators imposed upon themselves was that of self-restraint, learning to live with vulgarity. Their high expectations for effectiveness were made possible by low expectations of what was to be.

0
0
Source
source
Commerce and Culture, p. 285.
4 months 3 weeks ago

And at once I saw with great clarity that human beings possess two bodies. One is the physical body, the other -- just as real, just as self-contained -- is the emotional body. Like the physical body, the emotional body reaches a certain level of growth, and then stops. But it stops rather sooner than the physical body. So most of us possess the emotional body of a retarded adolescent.

0
0
Source
source
p. 23
5 months 3 weeks ago

Reason not with him, that will deny the principal truths!

0
0
5 months 3 days ago

To regiment artists, to make them servants of some particular cause does violence to the very springs of artistic creation. But it does more than that. It betrays the very cause of a better future it would serve, for in its subjugation of the individuality of the artist it annihilates the source of that which is genuinely new. Where the regimentation is successful, it would cause the future to be but a rearrangement of the past.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many. This is centralisation proper, as distinct from accumulation and concentration.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 25, Section 2, pg. 686.
6 months 2 weeks ago

You must not murder. (Exodus 20:13) Q. What does this mean? A. We should fear and love God so that we may not hurt or harm our neighbor in his body, but help and befriend him in every bodily need [in every need and danger of life and body].

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Credit expansion can bring about a temporary boom. But such a fictitious prosperity must end in a general depression of trade, a slump.

0
0
3 months 2 days ago

It must have been in his teens, perhaps rather early, that he and his elder brother John, with William Bell (afterwards of Wylie Hill, and a noted drover) and his brother, all met in the kiln at Eelief to play cards. The corn was dried then at home. There was a fire, therefore, aud perhaps it was both heat and light. The boys had played, perhaps, often enough for trifling stakes, and always parted in good humor. One night they came to some disagreement. My father spoke out what was in him about the folly, the sinfulness, of quarreling over a perhaps sinful amusement. The earnest mind persuaded other minds. They threw the cards into the fire, and (I think the younger Bell told my brother James) no one of the four ever touched a card again through life. My father certainly never hinted at such a game since I knew him. I cannot remember that I, at that age, had any such force of belief. Which of us can?

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia