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7 months 3 weeks ago

In situations of sparse resources along with degraded self-images and depoliticized sensibilities, one avenue for poor people is in existential rebellion and anarchic expression. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.

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The Role of Law in Progressive Politics in Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America
4 months 2 weeks ago

We shall either learn to know a Hero, a true Governor and Captain, somewhat better, when we see him; or else go on to be forever governed by the Unheroic;-had we ballot-boxes clattering at every street-corner, there were no remedy in these.

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6 months 1 week ago

What would become of the rich, if not for the poor? What would become of these idle, parasitic ladies, who squander more in a week than their victims earn in a year, if not for the eighty million wage-workers? Equality, who ever heard of such a thing?

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3 months 3 weeks ago

What one has to say to begin with is that, as humans, we are limited in intelligence and we really have no reliable foresight. So none of us will come up with answers to the whole great problem. What we can do is judge our behavior, our history, and our present situation by a better standard than "efficiency" or "profit," or those measures that we're still using to determine economic decisions.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

When things fall out opportunely for the person concerned, he is not apt to be critical about the how or why, his own immediate personal convenience seeming a sufficient reason for the strangest oddities and revolutions in our sublunary things.

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The Sire de Maletroit's Door.
4 months 2 weeks ago

It is life that educates, and perhaps love more than anything else in life.

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Ch. 2 : On Youth
8 months 1 week ago

For what is life but a play in which everyone acts a part until the curtain comes down?

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7 months 3 weeks ago

At best the principles that economists have supposed the choices of rational individuals to satisfy can be presented as guidelines for us to consider when we make our decisions.

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Chapter IX, Section 84, p. 558
3 months 2 weeks ago

Fundamental ideas play the most essential role in forming a physical theory. Books on physics are full of complicated mathematical formulae. But thought and ideas, not formulae, are the beginning of every physical theory. The ideas must later take the mathematical form of a quantitative theory, to make possible the comparison with experiment.

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The Evolution of Physics (1938) (co-written with Leopold Infeld)
8 months 5 days ago

Let us keep to Christ, and cling to Him, and hang on Him, so that no power can remove us.

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p. 433
6 months 1 week ago

One gloomy and pessimistic writer with a powerful style affects a whole generation of writers, who in turn affect almost every educated person in the country.

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p. 79
6 months 3 weeks ago

Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Be not as one that hath ten thousand years to live; death is nigh at hand: while thou livest, while thou hast time, be good.

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Meditations. iv. 17.
3 months 3 weeks ago

A Natural Group is steadily fixed, though not precisely limited; it is given in position, though not circumscribed; it is determined, not by a boundary without, but by a central point within; -not by what it strictly excludes, but by what it eminently includes; - by a Type, not by a Definition.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Tools arm the man. One can well say that man is capable of bringing forth a world; he lacks only the necessary apparatus, the corresponding armature of his sensory tools. The beginning is there. Thus the principle of a warship lies in the idea of the shipbuilder, who is able to incorporate this thought by making himself into a gigantic machine, as it were, through a mass of men and appropriate tools and materials. Thus the idea of a moment often required monstrous organs, monstrous masses of materials, and man is therefore a potential, if not an actual creator.

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Fragment No. 88
6 months 3 weeks ago

For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.

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Do What You Will, 1929
7 months 4 weeks ago

There are men who astonish and delight, men who instruct and guide. Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.

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Character
3 months 4 weeks ago

I am quite at a loss about the nailboys remaining with mr Stewart. they have long been a dead expence instead of profit to me. in truth they require a vigour of discipline to make them do reasonable work, to which he cannot bring himself. on the whole I think it will be best for them also to be removed to mr Lilly's control.

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In a letter to James Dinsmore as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson, by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine,
4 months 1 week ago

He who has injured thee was either stronger or weaker than thee. If weaker, spare him; if stronger, spare thyself.

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De Ira (On Anger); Book III, Chapter V
8 months ago

"If God did not exist, he would have to be invented." But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.

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Voltaire quoting himself in his Letter to Prince Frederick William of Prussia (28 November 1770), translated by S.G. Tallentyre, Voltaire in His Letters, 1919
7 months 2 days ago

They all attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country mainly to the separation of church and state. I do not hesitate to affirm that during my stay in America I did not meet a single individual, of the clergy or the laity, who was not of the same opinion on this point.

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Chapter XVII.
7 months 3 weeks ago

With despair, true optimism begins: the optimism of the man who expects nothing, who knows he has no rights and nothing coming to him, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

It was by the sober sense of our citizens that we were safely and steadily conducted from monarchy to republicanism, and it is by the same agency alone we can be kept from falling back.

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Letter to Arthur Campbell
4 months 2 weeks ago

The concept of original sin gives us a penetrating insight into human destiny.

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On the Dilemmas of the Christian Legacy
8 months 4 weeks ago

Confession should be only in secret before God, who knows everything anyway, and thus it could remain hidden in one's innermost being. But at a dinner and a woman! A dinner-it is not some hidden, remote place, nor is the lighting dim, nor is the mood like that among graves, nor are the listeners silent or invisibly present.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

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p. 18
7 months 3 weeks ago

The blues is relevant today because when we look down through the corridors of time, the black American interpretation of tragicomic hope in the face of dehumanizing hate and oppression will be seen as the only kind of hope that has any kind of maturity in a world of overwhelming barbarity and bestiality. That barbarity is found not just in the form of terrorism but in the form of the emptiness of our lives - in terms of the wasted human potential that we see around the world. In this sense, the blues is a great democratic contribution of black people to world history.

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(p20)
4 months 1 week ago

But what we've got going wrong is we've got a kind of bifurcation in cultural development:You take your classified telephone directory, and open up "Churches", and have a ruler in your hand. And you will find that the longest space is occupied by authoritarian, Bible-banging churches. And these people are barbarians, who take the written word of the Bible literally. Because they need terribly, they have a personal need, for something to depend on. ... The government realizes that there is a very large number of people like that; and therefore, to keep their votes, they have to pander to those kind of people. And these are the boys who never grew up; they always need Papa. ... The trouble is that the boys who need Papa, are violent. They have the guns. And they are the types of people who like to be soldiers, policemen-tough guys. And therefore they have a great deal of power.

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Interviewed on Les Hixon's show "In The Spirit" on WBAI New York
7 months 4 weeks ago

The only government that I recognize-and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army - is that power that establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice.

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8 months 5 days ago

For as when much superfluous matter has gathered in simple bodies, nature makes repeated efforts to remove and purge it away, thereby promoting the health of these bodies, so likewise as regards that composite body the human race, when every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove elsewhere, every region being equally crowded and over-peopled, and when human craft and wickedness have reached their highest pitch, it must needs come about that the world will purge herself in one or another of these three ways, to the end that men, becoming few and contrite, may amend their lives and live with more convenience.

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Book 1 Ch. 5 (as translated by Ninian Hill Thomson)
8 months 3 weeks ago

Predicting the future is a hopeless, thankless task, with ridicule to begin with and, all too often, scorn to end with.

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8 months 1 day ago

The Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: and whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.

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Section 10 : Of Miracles Pt. 2
5 months 3 weeks ago

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

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To Wilfred Watson, October 6 1965. Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 325
7 months 1 week ago

For this, to draw a right line from every point, to every point, follows the definition, which says, that a line is the flux of a point, and a right line an indeclinable and inflexible flow.

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Book III. Concerning Petitions and Axioms.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Poverty is a crime. I do not mean that it is a crime to be poor. Murder is a crime; but it is not a crime to be murdered; and a man who is in poverty, I look upon, not as a criminal in himself, so much as the victim of a crime for which others, as well perhaps as himself, are responsible.

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The Crime of Poverty, 1885
1 month 2 weeks ago

He was in France in the 40's when he said this.
 

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The present stage redefines the possibilities of man and nature in accordance with the new means available for their realization.

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p. 65
3 months 3 weeks ago

The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by Nature be attained. No citizen will have an advantage over any other citizen save as is given by his industry, skill, and intelligence; and each will obtain what he fairly earns. Then, but not till then, will labor get its full reward, and capital its natural return.

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Book VIII, Ch. 3
8 months ago

I am at heart more of a United-States-man than an Englishman.

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Letter to Andrew Jackson (14 June 1830), quoted in Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, Volume 4, ed. David Maydole Matteson (1929), p. 146
8 months ago

The first step to get this noble and manly steadiness, is... carefully keep children from frights of all kinds, when they are young. ...Instances of such who in a weak timorous mind, have borne, all their whole lives through, the effects of a fright when they were young, are every where to be seen, and therefore as much as may be to be prevented.

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Sec. 115
6 months ago

I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. I was never against the category of men. "As a Jew, I was taught it was ethically imperative to speak up" in Haaretz.

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24-Feb-10
8 months 2 weeks ago

Praise be to God with all due praise, and a prayer for Muhammad His chosen servant and apostle. The purpose of this treatise is to examine, from the standpoint of the study of the Law, whether the study of philosophy and logic is allowed by the Law, or prohibited, or commanded either by way of recommendation or as obligatory.

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