Skip to main content
5 months 1 week ago

History warns us, however, that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions; and, as matters now stand, it is hardly rash to anticipate that, in another twenty years, the new generation, educated under the influences of the present day, will be in danger of accepting the main doctrines of the 'Origin of Species' with as little reflection, and it may be with as little justification, as so many of our contemporaries, twenty years ago, rejected them. Against any such a consummation let us all devoutly pray; for the scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

0
0
Source
source
The Coming of Age of The Origin of Species (1880); Collected Essays, vol. 2
4 months 2 weeks ago

A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.

0
0
Source
source
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
6 months 2 weeks ago

The great man, whether we comprehend him in the most intense activity of his work or in the restful equipoise of his forces, is powerful, involuntarily and composedly powerful, but he is not avid for power. What he is avid for is the realization of what he has in mind, the incarnation of the spirit.

0
0
Source
source
p. 151
6 months 3 weeks ago

Plants are Children of the Earth; we are Children of the Æther. Our Lungs are properly our Root; we live, when we breathe; we begin our life with breathing.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

It is no advantage to be near the light if the eyes are closed.

0
0
Source
source
p. 607
6 months 4 weeks ago

There is surely a Physiognomy, which those experienced and Master Mendicants observe... For there are mystically in our faces certain Characters that carry in them the motto of our Souls, wherein he that cannot read A.B.C. may read our natures.

0
0
Source
source
Section 2
6 months 4 weeks ago

Happy are they that go to bed with grave music like Pythagoras.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

To have a great man for an intimate friend seems pleasant to those who have never tried it; those who have, fear it.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, epistle xviii, line 86
5 months 2 weeks ago

To train and educate the rising generation will at all times be the first object of society, to which every other will be subordinate.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

As money grows, care follows it and the hunger for more.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, ode xvi, line 17
6 months 1 week ago

Creation spirituality replaced a patriarchal spirituality rooted in notions of fall and redemption.

0
0
Source
source
Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2014), p.106.
7 months 2 weeks ago

Exercise is the technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are both repetitive and different, but always graduated. By bending behavior towards a terminal state, exercise makes possible a perpetual characterization of the individual...It thus assures, in the form of continuity and constraint, a growth, an observation, a qualification.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

The most interesting aspect of suffering is the sufferer's belief in its absoluteness. He believes he has a monopoly on suffering. I think that I alone suffer, that I alone have the right to suffer, although I also realize that there are modalities of suffering more terrible than mine, pieces of flesh falling from the bones, the body crumbling under one's very eyes, monstrous, criminal , shameful sufferings. One asks oneself, How can this be, and if it be, how can one still speak of finality and other such old wives' tales? Suffering moves me so much that I lose all my courage. I lose heart because I do not understand why there is suffering in the world.

0
0
Source
source
in essay: the monopoly of suffering
6 months 1 week ago

But the capacity to enjoy is impossible without the capacity to suffer; and the faculty of enjoyment is one with that of pain. Whosoever does not suffer does not enjoy, just as whosoever is insensible to cold is insensible to heat.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.

0
0
Source
source
S. 41
7 months 3 weeks ago

It is not by prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

Never spend your money before you have it.

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago

Such was the vast power which the god settled in the lost island of Atlantis; and this he afterwards directed against our land for the following reasons, as tradition tells: For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well-affectioned towards the god, whose seed they were; for they possessed true and in every way great spirits, uniting gentleness with wisdom in the various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one another.

0
0
8 months 1 day ago

The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in William James: The Essential Writings (1971), edited by Bruce W. Wilshire, p. xiii
6 months 3 weeks ago

Feuerbach is saying: No, wait a minute - if you are going to be allowed to go on living as you are living, then you also have to admit that you are not Christians. Feuerbach has understood the requirements but cannot force himself to submit to them - ergo, he prefers to renounce being a Christian. And now, no matter how great a responsibility he must bear, he takes a position that is not unsound, that is, it is wrong of established Christendom to say that Feuerbach is attacking Christianity; it is not true, he is attacking the Christians by demonstrating that their lives do not correspond to the teachings of Christianity.

0
0
Source
source
Soren Kierkegaard, Journals X2A 163
5 months 2 days ago

What right have humans to impose our values on members of another race or species? The charge is seductive but misplaced. There is no anthropomorphism here, no imposition of human values on alien minds. Human and nonhuman animals are alike in an ethically critical respect. The pleasure-pain axis is universal to sentient life. No sentient being wants to be harmed - to be asphyxiated, dismembered, or eaten alive. The wishes of a terrified toddler or a fleeing zebra to flourish unmolested are not open to doubt even in the absence of the verbal capacity to say so.

0
0
Source
source
"The Radical Plan to Phase out Earth's Predatory Species", io9, 30 Jul. 2014
6 months 2 weeks ago

What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 44)
5 months 1 week ago

In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am opposed. I feel with them, that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

The safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

0
0
Source
source
Letter XII
6 months 2 weeks ago

The ego involved in responsibility is me and no one else, me with whom one whould have liked to pair up a sister soul, from whom one would have substitution and sacrifice.

0
0
Source
source
The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 116
6 months 3 weeks ago

Many counterrevolutionary books have been written in favor of the Revolution. But Burke has written a revolutionary book against the Revolution.

0
0
Source
source
Fragment No. 104; on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
8 months 1 day ago

There were never in the world two opinions alike, any more than two hairs or two grains. Their most universal quality is diversity.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 37
6 months 3 weeks ago

A good man with a good conscience doesn't walk so fast.

0
0
Source
source
Scene X.
6 months 3 weeks ago

By means of the new education we want to mould the Germans into a corporate body, which shall be stimulated and animated in all its individual members by the same interest.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction p. 15
6 months 5 days ago

The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period. This division is not very different from Marx's concept of "human nature in general", to be distinguished from "human nature as modified in each historical period". The same distinction exists in Marx when he distinguishes between "constant" or "fixed" drives and "relative" drives. The constant drives "exist under all circumstances and ... can be changed by social conditions only as far as form and direction are concerned". The relative drives "owe their origin only to a certain type of social organization".

0
0
2 months 5 days ago

Alright....here's the piece I referred to earlier...Universality is unquestionable! I'm not even going to waste time entertaining arguments against....

 

https://open.substack.com/pub/axiomaticpanic/p/universality-is-unquesti…

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Alas! in the clothes of the greatest potentate, what is there but a man?

0
0
Source
source
The Suicide Club, Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts.
3 months 1 week ago

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

0
0
6 months 5 days ago

I agree as to the doubtful value of competitive examination. The qualities which you really want, viz., self-control, self-reliance, habits of accurate thought, integrity and what you generally call trustworthiness, are not decided by competitive examination, which test little else than the memory.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Lord Stanley (May 17, 1857), published in Florence Nightingale on Wars and the War Office: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale. Vol. 15 (2011), edited by Lynn McDonald, p. 265.
7 months 2 weeks ago

Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 119
8 months 1 day ago

The reproduction of mankind is a great marvel and mystery. Had God consulted me in the matter, I should have advised him to continue the generation of the species by fashioning them of clay, in the way Adam was fashioned.

0
0
Source
source
752
8 months 3 weeks ago

Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.

0
0
6 months 5 days ago

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The New York Times
6 months 6 days ago

The STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle, has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution. If I were to sum up my whole argument in one sentence I should say: The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. These two tendencies are incompatible and mutually destructive. The State idea killed the Russian Revolution and it must have the same result in all other revolutions, unless the libertarian idea prevail.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

"No human laws are of any validity if contrary to the law of nature; and such of them as are valid derive all their force and all their authority mediately or immediately from this original." Thus writes Blackstone, to whom let all honour be given for having so far outseen the ideas of his time; and, indeed, we may say of our time. A good antidote, this, for those political superstitions which so widely prevail. A good check upon that sentiment of power-worship which still misleads us by magnifying the prerogatives of constitutional governments as it once did those of monarchs. Let men learn that a legislature is not "our God upon earth," though, by the authority they ascribe to it, and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is. Let them learn rather that it is an institution serving a purely temporary purpose, whose power, when not stolen, is at the best borrowed.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. III, Ch. 19 : The Right to Ignore the State, § 2
5 months 2 weeks ago

Conquered people tend to be witty.

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

And what is its moral proof? We may formulate it thus: Act so that in your own judgment and in the judgment of others you may merit eternity, act so that you may become irreplaceable, act so that you may not merit death. Or perhaps thus: Act as if you were to die tomorrow, but to die in order to survive and be eternalized. The end of morality is to give personal, human finality to the Universe; to discover the finality that belongs to it - if indeed it has any finality - and to discover it by acting.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

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

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

And then one babbles - 'if only I could bear it, or the worst of it, or any of it, instead of her.' But one can't tell how serious that bid is, for nothing is staked on it. If it suddenly became a real possibility, then, for the first time, we should discover how seriously we had meant it. But is it ever allowed? It was allowed to One, we are told, and I find I can now believe again, that He has done vicariously whatever can be done. He replies to our babble, 'you cannot and dare not. I could and dared.'

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia