Skip to main content
4 months 2 weeks ago

The highest instrument of inner awakening of race is combat, and war is its highest expression. That pacifism and humanitarianism are phenomena closely linked to internationalism, democracy, cosmopolitanism and liberalism is perfectly logical - the same anti-racial instinct present in some, is reflected and confirmed in the others. The will towards sub-racial levelling inborn in internationalism finds its ally in pacifist humanitarianism, which has the function of preventing the heroic test from disrupting the game by galvanising the surviving forces of any still not completely deracinated peoples.

0
0
Source
source
p. 67
6 months 3 weeks ago

I do not mean to deny the biologic, physiologic, or psychologic factors in creating crime; but there is hardly an advanced criminologist who will not concede that the social and economic influences are the most relentless, the most poisonous germs of crime.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Christian philosophers have found no difficulty in justifying imperialism, war, the capitalist system, the use of torture, the censorship of the press and ecclesiastical tyrannies of every sort, from the tyranny of Rome to the tyrannies of Geneva and New England.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 14, p. 315 [2012 reprint]
8 months 1 week ago

While there are manners and compliments we do not meet, we do not teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. The fault is commonly mutual, however; for we do not habitually demand any more of each other.

0
0
Source
source
p. 490
5 months 2 weeks ago

The idea of politics as a conservation in which the collision of opinions is moderated and accommodated, in which what is sought is not truth but peace, has been almost entirely lost, and supplanted by a legalist paradigm in which all political claims and conflicts are modelled in the jargon of rights.

0
0
Source
source
'Oakeshott as a Liberal' (p.80)
5 months 5 days ago

Sociology is the science which has the most methods and the least results.

0
0
Source
source
Part I. Ch. 1 : The Selection of Facts, p. 19
4 months 1 week ago

In the history of bourgeois society, legislative reform served to strengthen progressively the rising class till the latter was sufficiently strong to seize political power, to suppress the existing juridical system and to construct itself a new one.

0
0
Source
source
Ch.8
6 months 3 weeks ago

Just as a vagrant accused of stealing a carrot from a field stands before a comfortably seated judge who keeps up an elegant flow of queries, comments and witticisms while the accused is unable to stammer a word, so truth stands before an intelligence which is concerned with the elegant manipulation of opinions.

0
0
Source
source
p. 68
7 months 2 weeks ago

Your god is too small.

0
0
Source
source
Attributed to Bruno in episode 1 of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014). Earliest use of this phrase appears to be in Your God is Too Small (1961) by English priest John Bertram Phillips.
4 months 3 weeks ago

No man ought to glory except in that which is his own.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

0
0
Source
source
Section 1, paragraph 1, lines 1-2.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture IX : On the Conduct of the Understanding
9 months 1 week ago

Wit is cultured insolence.

0
0
9 months 1 day ago

Earnest in practicing the ordinary virtues, and careful in speaking about them, if, in his practice, he has anything defective, the superior man dares not but exert himself; and if, in his words, he has any excess, he dares not allow himself such license. Thus his words have respect to his actions, and his actions have respect to his words; is it not just an entire sincerity which marks the superior man?

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

...this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky ways is-nothing.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 142)
8 months 6 days ago

A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its law and its rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.

0
0
Source
source
Plato's Pharmacy, intro
8 months 1 week ago

Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

He knows his own strength; he knows that he was born to carry burdens.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

For the lesson of such stories [of resistance to Nazi atrocities] is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. XIV
4 months 3 weeks ago

The prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East - in particular the central and germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man's natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction. We are therefore in urgent need of a sense of our own existence which is in accord with the physical facts and which overcomes our feeling of alienation from the universe.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

The abolition of private property has become not only possible but absolutely necessary. ... The outcome can only be the victory of the proletariat.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

The principle of utility judges any action to be right by the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interests are in question... if that party be the community the happiness of the community, if a particular individual, the happiness of that individual.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, 1789 edition
8 months 1 week ago

It's a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.'

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Huston Smith, "Aldous Huxley--A Tribute," The Psychedelic Review, (1964) Vol I, No.3, (Aldous Huxley Memorial Issue), p. 264-5
7 months 1 week ago

Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word Liberty entire nations.

0
0
Source
source
Fragment No. 2
7 months 2 days ago

Today war seems to have undergone a change of meaning, insofar as it is not a war of religion but a war of interests, not a war of conflicting cultures or civilizations but a war of national areas, not a war of human beings but a technical struggle of machines one against another and all against the non-combatant population.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

I don't explain-I explore.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Well, which is the most rational theory about these ten millions of species? Is it most likely that there have been ten millions of special creations? or is it most likely that, by continual modifications due to change of circumstances, ten millions of varieties have been produced, as varieties are being produced still?

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor.

0
0
Source
source
Notebooks, c.1735-c.1750
8 months 1 week ago

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

We are passengers, comprehended and displaced by metaphor.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 8, Performative Reflexivity, p. 137
7 months 2 weeks ago

The first condition of unity is a subjective principle; and this principle in the Positive system is the subordination of the intellect to the heart: Without this the unity that we seek can never be placed on a permanent basis, whether individually or collectively. It is essential to have some influence sufficiently powerful to produce convergence amid the heterogeneous and often antagonistic tendencies of so complex an organism as ours.

0
0
Source
source
p. 24
4 months 3 weeks ago

Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about it than adults.

0
0
Source
source
Inside Information p. 4
8 months 1 week ago

Being happy involves both a certain achievement in action and a rational assurance about the outcome.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter IX, Section 83, p. 549
6 months 3 weeks ago

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 32, January 13, 1944.
7 months 2 weeks ago

In democratic ages men rarely sacrifice themselves for another, but they show a general compassion for all the human race. One never sees them inflict pointless suffering, and they are glad to relieve the sorrows of others when they can do so without much trouble to themselves. They are not disinterested, but they are gentle.

0
0
Source
source
Book Three, Chapter I.
6 months 1 week ago

There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Arthur Greeves (29 December 1935) - in They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963) (1979), p. 477
6 months 3 weeks ago

I have said that, in a sense, the parasites were a 'shadow' of man's cowardice and passivity. Their strength could increase in an atmosphere of defeat and panic, for it fed on human fear. In that case, the best way to combat them was to change the atmosphere to one of strength and purpose.

0
0
Source
source
p. 188
7 months 2 weeks ago

To a body of infinite size there can be ascribed neither centre nor boundary... Thus the Earth no more than any other world is at the centre.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia