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3 months 6 days ago

The mosaic form of the TV image demands participation and involvement in depth, of the whole being, as does the sense of touch.

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(p. 334)
3 months 6 days ago

When two do the same thing, it is not the same thing after all.

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Maxim 338
4 months 1 day ago

But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.

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5:22, King James Version.
1 month 3 weeks ago

Virtue alone affords everlasting and peace-giving joy; even if some obstacle arise, it is but like an intervening cloud, which floats beneath the sun but never prevails against it.

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5 months 1 week ago

And why should man, added he, pretend to an exemption from the lot of all other animals? The whole earth, believe me, PHILO, is cursed and polluted. A perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures. Necessity, hunger, want, stimulate the strong and courageous: Fear, anxiety, terror, agitate the weak and infirm. The first entrance into life gives anguish to the new-born infant and to its wretched parent: Weakness, impotence, distress, attend each stage of that life: and it is at last finished in agony and horror.

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Demea to Philo, Part X
1 month 1 week ago

The abolition of the evil is not impossible; it ought never therefore to be despaired of. Every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried, which may do something towards the ultimate object.

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5 months 1 week ago

At puberty, the elements of an unsuperstitious sexual morality ought to be taught. Boys and girls should be taught that nothing can justify sexual intercourse unless there is mutual inclination... Boys and girls should be taught respect for each other's liberty; they should be made to feel that nothing gives one human being rights over another, and that jealousy and possessiveness kill love. They should be taught that to bring another human being into the world is a very serious matter, only to be undertaken when the child will have a reasonable prospect of health, good surroundings, and parental care. But they should also be taught methods of birth control, so as to insure that children shall only come when they are wanted. Finally, they should be taught the dangers of venereal disease, and the methods of prevention and cure. The increase of human happiness to be expected from sex education on these lines is immeasurable.

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4 months 1 week ago

If your little savage were left to himself and be allowed to retain all his ignorance, he would in time join the infant's reasoning to the grown man's passion, he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother.

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5 months 1 week ago

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.

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Ch. 4
5 months 1 week ago

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Today's mic-hogging, fast-talking, contentious young (and old) lefties continue to hawk little books and pamphlets on revolution, always with choice words or documents from Marx, Mao, even Malcolm. But I've never seen a broadside with "A Black Feminist Statement or even the writings of Angela Davis or June Jordan or Barbara Omolade or Flo Kennedy or Audre Lorde or bell hooks or Michelle Wallace, at least not from the groups who call themselves leftist. These women's collective wisdom has provided the richest insights into American radicalism's most fundamental questions: How can we build a multiracial movement? Who are the working class and what do they desire? How do we resolve the Negro Question and the Woman Question? What is freedom?

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Robin Kelley Freedom Dreams
1 month 1 week ago

The solution is, that we do not see the image on the retina at all, we only see by means of it.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Human progress having reached a high level through respect for the liberty and dignity of men, it has become desirable to re-affirm these evident truths: That differences of race, color, and creed are natural, and that diverse groups, institutions, and ideas are stimulating factors in the development of man; That to promote harmony in diversity is a responsible task of religion and statesmanship; That since no individual can express the whole truth, it is essential to treat with understanding and good will those whose views differ from our own; That by the testimony of history intolerance is the door to violence, brutality and dictatorship; and That the realization of human interdependence and solidarity is the best guard of civilization.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!

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Chapter 4, Evidence, p. 31.
1 month 2 weeks ago

The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.

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p. 32
5 months 1 week ago

We need a science to save us from science.

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NY Times Magazine, as reported in High Points in the Work of the High Schools of New York City, Vol. 34 (1952), p. 46
3 months 6 days ago

In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.

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(p. 4)
5 months 3 weeks ago

Anger is a weed; hate is the tree.

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58 Alternate versions: Anger is a stem, hate is a trunk. Anger is the mote, hate is the beam.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Patience cometh by the grace of the Soul.

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3 months 6 days ago

An agreeable companion on a journey is as good as a carriage.

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Maxim 143
4 months 4 days ago

It is difficult, it is impossible to believe that the Good Lord - "Our Father" - had a hand in the scandal of creation. Everything suggests that He took no part in it, that it proceeds from a god without scruples, a feculent god. Goodness does not create, lacking imagination; it takes imagination to put together a world, however botched. At the very least, there must be a mixture of good and evil in order to produce an action or a work.

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5 months 3 days ago

The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.

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6 months 6 days ago

Knowledge is the food of the soul; and we must take care, my friend, that the Sophist does not deceive us when he praises what he sells, like the dealers wholesale or retail who sell the food of the body; for they praise indiscriminately all their goods, without knowing what are really beneficial or hurtful.

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3 months 1 week ago

People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotherapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc. Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food.

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"The Precession of Simulacra," p. 13
3 months 2 weeks ago

At present we live to impede each other's satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this? We go somewhere where we are not wanted and where we don't want to go. What else is conventional life? Passivity when we want to be active. So many hours spent every day in passively doing what conventional life tells us, when we would so gladly be at work. And is it a wonder that all individual life is extinguished?

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5 months 1 week ago

The claims of existing social arrangements and of self interest have been duly allowed for. We cannot at the end count them a second time because we do not like the result.

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Chapter III, Section 23, pg. 135
1 month 1 week ago

'The Law of Continuity' is this:-that a quantity cannot pass from one amount to another by any change of conditions, without passing through all intermediate magnitudes according to the intermediate conditions. It may often be employed to disprove distinctions which have no real foundation. 'The Method of Gradation' consists in taking a number of stages of a property in question, intermediate between two extreme cases which appear to be different. It is employed to determine whether the extreme cases are really distinct or not. 'The Method of Gradation', applied to decide the question, whether the existing phenomena arise from existing causes, leads to this result:-That the phenomena do appear to arise from existing causes, but that the action of existing causes have transgressed their recorded Limits of Intensity. 'The Method of Natural Classification' consists in classing cases, not according to any assumed definition, but according to the connexion of the facts themselves.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The obliteration of the evil hath been practised by two means, some kind of redemption or expiation of that which is past, and an inception or account de novo for the time to come. But this part seemeth sacred and religious, and justly; for all good moral philosophy (as was said) is but a handmaid to religion.

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Book II, xxii, 14
4 months 6 days ago

We must make a very precise distinction between the official and consequently dictatorial prerogatives of society organized as a state, and of the natural influence and action of the members of a non-official, non-artificial society.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Given our anthropocentric bias, thinking of non-human vertebrates not just as equivalent in moral status to toddlers or infants, but as though they were toddlers or infants, is a useful exercise. Such reconceptualisation helps correct our lack of empathy for sentient beings whose physical appearance is different from "us". Ethically, the practice of intelligent "anthropomorphism" shouldn't be shunned as unscientific, but embraced insofar as it augments our stunted capacity for empathy. Such anthropomorphism can be a valuable corrective to our cognitive and moral limitations. This is not a plea to be sentimental, simply for impartial benevolence.

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Reprogramming Predators, BLTC Research, 2009
5 months 3 weeks ago

To master this instrument the religious thinker must make a preliminary study of logic, just as the lawyer must study legal reasoning. This is no more heretical in the one case than in the other. And logic must be learned from the ancient masters, regardless of the fact that they were not Muslims.

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5 months 3 days ago

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.

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Part Three, Panopticism
5 months 3 weeks ago

Who is this that cries from the ends of the earth? Who is this one man who reaches to the extremities of the universe? He is one, but that one is unity. He is one, not one in a single place, but the cry of this one man comes from the remotest ends of the earth. But how can this one man cry out from the ends of the earth, unless he be one in all?

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p.423
1 month 3 weeks ago

Perhaps its destruction has been brought about only that it may be raised up again to a better destiny. Oftentimes a reverse has but made room for more prosperous fortune. Many structures have fallen only to rise to a greater height.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacings of the spheres.

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As quoted in the preface of the book entitled Music of the Spheres by Guy Murchie
4 months 3 weeks ago

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

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On Listening to Lectures (Tr. Waterfield)
5 months 1 week ago

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

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Poetry and Imagination
2 months 3 weeks ago

If a well were sunk at our feet in the midst of the city of Norwich, the diggers would very soon find themselves at work in that white substance almost too soft to be called rock, with which we are all familiar as "chalk".

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4 months 1 day ago

All natures, all formed things, all creatures exist in and with one another and will again be resolved into their own roots, because the nature of matter is dissolved into the roots of its nature alone. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

He has now a second far greater success to gain: to seek out his real superiors, whom not the Tailor but the Almighty God has made superior to him, and see a little what he will do with these! Rebel against these also? Pass by with minatory eagle-glance, with calm-sniffing mockery, or even without any mockery or sniff, when these present themselves? The lion-hearted will never dream of such a thing. Forever far be it from him! His minatory eagle-glance will veil itself in softness of the dove: his lion- heart will become a lamb's; all is just indignation changed into just reverence, dissolved in blessed floods of noble humble love, how much heavenlier than any pride, nay, if you will, how much prouder!

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4 months 1 week ago

Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.

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"Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaeum (1798)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #96
1 month 1 week ago

I congratulate you, my dear friend, on the law of your state for suspending the importation of slaves, and for the glory you have justly acquired by endeavoring to prevent it forever. This abomination must have an end, and there is a superior bench reserved in heaven for those who hasten it.

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4 months 4 days ago

Lucidity is not necessarily compatible with life, actually not at all.

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6 months 6 days ago

Hypocrisy is a universal phenomenon. It ends with death, but not before.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

He who is not sure of his memory, should not undertake the trade of lying. 

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Book I, Ch. 9

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