Skip to main content
8 months 2 weeks ago

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: Introductory
8 months 1 week ago

The evidence of our own eyes makes it more plausible to believe that the world was not created by any god at all. If, however, we insist on believing in divine creation, we are forced to admit that the god who made the world cannot be all-powerful and all good. He must be either evil or a bungler.

0
0
Source
source
The God of Suffering? Project Syndicate, 2008
9 months 4 days ago

The mind itself, its love [of itself] and its knowledge [of itself] are a kind of trinity.

0
0
Source
source
(Cambridge: 2002), Book 9, Chapter 4, Section 4, p. 27
8 months 2 weeks ago

It is so rare to meet with a man out-doors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his hands.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

The conviction that it is important to believe this or that, even if a free inquiry would not support the belief, is one which is common to almost all religions and which inspires all systems of state education. The consequence is that the minds of the young are stunted and are filled with fanatical hostility both to those who have other fanaticisms, and, even more virulently, to those who object to all fanaticisms.

0
0
Source
source
preface xxiii
5 months 3 weeks ago

Humans kill one another - and in some cases themselves - for many reasons, but none is more human than the attempt to make sense of their lives. More than the loss of life, they fear loss of meaning.

0
0
Source
source
In the Puppet Theatre: Roof Gardens, Feathers and Human Sacrifice (p. 87)
7 months 1 day ago

Thinking men and women the world over are beginning to realize that patriotism is too narrow and limited a conception to meet the necessities of our time.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

Inferiority is always with us, and merciless scorn of it is the keynote of the military temper.

0
0
8 months 2 days ago

Things essentially incorporeal, because they are more excellent than all body and place, are every where, not with interval, but impartibly. Things essentially incorporeal are not locally present with bodies but are present with them when they please; by verging towards them so far as they are naturally adapted so to verge. They are not, however, present with them locally, but through habitude, proximity, and alliance. Things essentially incorporeal, are not present with bodies, by hypostasis and essence; for they are not mingled with bodies. But they impart a certain power which is proximate to bodies, through verging towards them. For tendency constitutes a certain secondary power proximate to bodies.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 12 (p. 116)
7 months 1 week ago

But this priviledge, is allayed by another; and that is, by the priviledge of Absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only.

0
0
Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 5, p. 20
7 months 2 weeks ago

The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

To oppose the torrent of scholastic religion by such feeble maxims as these, that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be, that the whole is greater than a part, that two and three make five; is pretending to stop the ocean with a bullrush. Will you set up profane reason against sacred mystery? No punishment is great enough for your impiety. And the same fires, which were kindled for heretics, will serve also for the destruction of philosophers.

0
0
Source
source
Part XI - With regard to reason or absurdity
3 weeks 6 days ago

...or all the things that happened for a thousand generations that led to you...or the fact that all branches that didn't happen are meaningless to us and we think the one that did happen is so significant. How insignificant we'd feel if we could see all the possibilities with the same significance.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

It is a commonplace of the classical literature on Empire, from Polybius to Montesquieu and Gibbon, that Empire is from its inception decadent and corrupt.

0
0
Source
source
201
7 months 1 week ago

There are in our minds in solution a vast number of emotional attitudes, feelings ready to be re-excited when the proper stimulus arrives, and more than anything else it is these forms, this residue of experience, which, fuller and richer than in the mind if the ordinary man, constitute the artist's capital. What is called the magic of the artist resides in his ability to transfer these values from one field of experience to another, to attach them to objects of our common life, and by his imaginative insight make these objects poignant and momentous. Not colors, not sense qualities as such, are either matter or form, but these qualities as thoroughly imbued, impregnated, with transferred value. And then they are either matter or form according to the direction of our interest.

0
0
Source
source
p. 123
5 months 1 week ago

If you could see the earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon.

0
0
Source
source
Salviati, p. 88
6 months 2 weeks ago

By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

0
0
Source
source
316
4 months 2 weeks ago

One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to George Washington (1796); published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 20 Vols., Washington, D.C., (1903-04), 9:341
8 months 2 weeks ago

Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame.

0
0
Source
source
Attributed to Russell in Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists (2007), p. 346
9 months 2 weeks ago

Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity: men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. I, Bk. VII, ch. 4.
8 months 3 weeks ago

Where is the prince sufficiently educated to know that for seventeen hundred years the Christian sect has done nothing but harm?

0
0
Source
source
Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano's, 1927), transl. Richard Aldington, letter 160 from Voltaire to Frederick II of Prussia, 6 April 1767
9 months 2 weeks ago

The essential is to cease being free and to obey, in repentance, a greater rogue than oneself. When we are all guilty, that will be democracy.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

Propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to reason by means of logical arguments based upon the best available evidence fully and honestly set forth. Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lower passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 4 (p. 33)
5 months 2 weeks ago

The gentleman knows that whatever is imperfect and unrefined does not deserve praise. ... He makes his eyes not want to see what is not right, makes his ears not want to hear what is not right, makes his mouth not want to speak what is not right, and makes his heart not want to deliberate over what is not right. ... For this reason, power and profit cannot sway him, the masses cannot shift him, and nothing in the world can shake him.

0
0
Source
source
Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 260
8 months 3 weeks ago

A wise man's kingdom is his own breast: or, if he ever looks farther, it will only be to the judgment of a select few, who are free from prejudices, and capable of examining his work. Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood than the approbation of the multitude; and Phocion, you know, always suspected himself of some blunder when he was attended with the applauses of the populace.

0
0
Source
source
Playfully ironic letter to Adam Smith regarding the positive reception of "The Theory of Moral Sentiments"
6 months 2 weeks ago

In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for practical existence.

0
0
Source
source
A Lodging for the Night.
8 months 1 week ago

The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, p. 59
8 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.

0
0
Source
source
A 713, B 741
8 months 2 weeks ago

Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum. And here they will break out into their native music, and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns, and they mope and wallow like dogs!

0
0
Source
source
p. 165
6 months 2 weeks 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
7 months 1 day ago

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 4
7 months 2 weeks ago

Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Man does not exercise his thought because he finds it amusing, but because, obliged as he is to live immersed in the world and to force his way among things, he finds himself under the necessity of organizing his psychic activities, which are not very different from those of the anthropoid, in the form of thought - which is what the animal does not do.

0
0
Source
source
p. 28
1 month 5 days ago

😁...I agree...but...who are the "little men"?😂

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Throughout the years in which the US was punishing countries that departed from fiscal prudence, it was borrowing on a colossal scale to finance tax cuts and fund its over-stretched military commitments. Now, with federal finances critically dependent on continuing large inflows of foreign capital, it will be the countries that spurned the American model of capitalism that will shape America's economic future.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

I shall doubtless outlive some troublesome desires; but I am in no hurry about that; nor, when the time comes, shall I plume myself on the immunity just in the same way, I do not greatly pride myself on having outlived my belief in the fairy tales of Socialism. Old people have faults of their own; they tend to become cowardly, niggardly, and suspicious. Whether from the growth of experience or the decline of animal heat, I see that age leads to these and certain other faults; and it follows, of course, that while in one sense I hope I am journeying towards the truth, in another I am indubitably posting towards these forms and sources of error.

0
0
Source
source
Crabbed Age and Youth.
8 months 2 weeks ago

The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticizes it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives, the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that this higher part is coterminous and continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture XX, "Conclusions"
4 months 4 weeks ago

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

0
0
Source
source
The Gulag Archipelago
5 months 2 weeks ago

In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. IV: "The Line of Least Resistance", p. 52
4 months 2 weeks ago

Terms which imply theoretical views are admissible, as far as the theory is proved.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

Thanks to depression - that alpinism of the indolent - we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

As thou thyself art a component part of a social system, so let every act of thine be a component part of social life. Whatever act of thine that has no reference, either immediately or remotely, to a social end, this tears asunder thy life, and does not allow it to be one, and it is of the nature of a mutiny, just as when in a popular assembly a man acting by himself stands apart from the general agreement.

0
0
Source
source
IX, 23
5 months 1 week ago

I think there's a certain amount of luck necessary to become rich. So fate is the right word in this sense. But it's interesting, this quote makes me want to react in a sense that nobody is fated better inherently.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia