Skip to main content
4 months 2 weeks ago

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

There is no virtue they should be excited to, nor fault they should be kept from, which I do not think they may be convinced of; but it must be by such reasons as their age and understandings are capable of, and those propos'd always in very few and plain words.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 81
6 months 2 weeks ago

The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.

0
0
Source
source
Hallam', The Edinburgh Review (September 1828), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review, Vol. I (1843), p. 210
8 months ago

Thus the social position of women is in this respect very similar to that of philosophers and of the working classes. And we now see why these three elements should be united. It is their combined action which constitutes the moral or modifying force of society.

0
0
Source
source
p. 235
7 months 2 weeks ago

Institutionalized desublimation thus appears to be an aspect of the "conquest of transcendence" achieved by the one-dimensional society. Just as this society tends to reduce, and even absorb opposition (the qualitative difference!) in the realm of politics and higher culture, so it does in the instinctual sphere. The result is the atrophy of the mental organs for grasping the contradictions and the alternatives and, in the one remaining dimension of technological rationality, the Happy Consciousness comes to prevail.

0
0
Source
source
p. 79
6 months 3 weeks ago

Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 914
8 months 3 weeks ago

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

0
0
Source
source
p. 375
6 months 3 weeks ago

The Churches as Churches-as institutions affirming their own infallibility-are anti-Christian institutions. Between the Churches as such and Christianity, not only is there nothing in common except the name, but they are two quite opposite and opposing principles. The one represents pride, violence, self-assertion, immobility and death: the other humility, penitence, meekness, progress, and life.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Christianity Misunderstood by Believers
6 months 1 week 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

With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.

0
0
Source
source
H 23
6 months 4 weeks ago

We are in a logic of simulation, which no longer has anything to do with a logic of facts and an order of reason. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all the models based on the merest fact-the models come first, their circulation, orbital like that of the bomb, constitutes the genuine magnetic field of the event. The facts no longer have a specific trajectory, they are born at the intersection of models, a single fact can be engendered by all the models at once.

0
0
Source
source
"The Precession of Simulacra," pp. 16-17
5 months 1 week ago

But he has no fear; unconquered he looks down from a lofty height upon his sufferings.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

There have always been poor and working classes; and the working class have mostly been poor. But there have not always been workers and poor people living under conditions as they are today.

0
0
5 months 6 days ago

For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

0
0
Source
source
BBC Radio broadcast, Russian service, as quoted in The Listener
5 months 4 weeks ago

Some communities will be abandoned, others will struggle along, others will split, others will flourish, gain members, and be duplicated elsewhere. Each community must win and hold the voluntary adherence of its members. No pattern is imposed on everyone, and the result will be one pattern if and only if everyone voluntarily chooses to live in accordance with that pattern of community.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; Design Devices and Filter Devices, p. 316
8 months 2 weeks ago

But what then is this confrontation below the language of reason? Where might this interrogation lead, following not reason in its horizontal becoming, but seeking to retrace in time this constant verticality, which, the length of Western culture, confronts it with what it is not, measuring it with its own extravagance?

0
0
Source
source
Preface to 1961 edition
5 months 2 weeks ago

If I work incessantly to the last, nature owes me another form of existence when the present one collapses.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Eckermann
8 months 4 weeks ago

This miracle of analysis, this marvel of the world of ideas, an almost amphibian object between Being and Non-being that we call the imaginary number.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Singularités : individus et relations dans le système de Leibniz (2003) by Christiane Frémont
8 months 3 weeks ago

If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

0
0
Source
source
"On Three Ways of Writing for Children" (1952) - in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1967), p. 25
8 months 3 weeks ago

I dislike Communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.

0
0
Source
source
Unarmed Victory (1963), p. 14
4 months 3 weeks ago

Never spend your money before you have it.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

It will hardly be disputed, I suppose, that the department of literature in which the Eastern writers stand highest is poetry. And I certainly never met with any orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

What concerns me most here are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be leftist have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress.

0
0
Source
source
Polity (2023), p. 5
7 months 2 weeks ago

Notwithstanding their attacks on the basic conception of rationalism, on synthetic a priori judgments, that is, material propositions that cannot be contradicted by any experience, the empiricist posits the forms of being as constant.

0
0
Source
source
p. 146.
5 months 2 weeks ago

The way of learning is none other than finding the lost mind.

0
0
Source
source
6A:11, as translated by Wing-tsit Chan in A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (1963), p. 58
4 months 3 weeks ago

Enlighten the dark blood of your ancestors, shape their cries into speech, purify their will, widen their narrow, unmerciful brows. This is your second duty. For you are not only a slave. As soon as you were born, a new possibility was born with you, a free heartbeat stormed through the great sunless heart of your race.

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

The militarily-patriotic and the romantic-minded everywhere, and especially the professional military class, refuse to admit for a moment that war may be a transitory phenomenon in social evolution. The notion of a sheep's paradise like that revolts, they say, our higher imagination. Where then would be the steeps of life? If war had ever stopped, we should have to re-invent it, on this view, to redeem life from flat degeneration. Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. It's profits are to the vanquished as well as to the victor; and quite apart from any question of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature at its highest dynamic.

0
0
9 months 3 weeks ago

Generals are usually a conservative force who can be relied on to oppose social change.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons - moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on - no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.

0
0
5 months 6 days ago

The deeper we look into nature, the more we recognize that it is full of life, and the more profoundly we know that all life is a secret and that we are united with all life that is in nature. Man can no longer live for himself alone. We realize that all life is valuable, and that we are united to all this life. From this knowledge comes our spiritual relationship to the universe.

0
0
Source
source
p. 248
4 months 3 weeks ago

Look at everything that exists, and observe that it is already in dissolution and change, and as it were putrefaction or dispersion, or that everything is so constituted in nature as to die.

0
0
Source
source
X, 18
5 months 1 week ago

By Hercules, the state would have sustained a great loss if you had not brought him forth from the oblivion to which his two splendid qualities, eloquence and independence, had consigned him: he is now read, is popular, is received into men's hands and bosoms, and fears no old age: but as for those who butchered him, before long men will cease to speak even of their crimes, the only things by which they are remembered.

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture VI, Pragmatism's Conception of Truth

I have no hesitation in saying that although the American woman never leaves her domestic sphere and is in some respects very dependent within it, nowhere does she enjoy a higher station. And if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women.

0
0
Source
source
Book Three, Chapter XII.
8 months 3 weeks ago

We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

Animal Liberation is Human Liberation too.

0
0
Source
source
Preface
5 months 5 days ago

Objectivity does not simply involve passivity and detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement.

0
0
Source
source
p. 403
7 months 3 weeks ago

Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle...

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they've slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, 'Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!' And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to M. de Menonville
7 months 1 week ago

The ancient world takes its stand upon the drama of the Universe, the modern world upon the inward drama of the Soul.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9: "Science and Philosophy", p. 196
6 months 3 weeks ago

Eternity is best spent under a general anesthetic - which is what is going to happen.

0
0
Source
source
Interview with Joe Rogan on The Joe Rogan Experience (2019);

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia