Skip to main content
1 month 3 weeks ago

He was one of those who wished for the abolition of the Slave Trade. He thought it ought to be abolished on principles of humanity and justice.

0
0
Source
source
Speech in the House of Commons (9 May 1788), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXVII (1816), column 502

For my own part, I may desire in general to be other than I am; I may condemn and dislike my whole form, and beg of Almighty God for an entire reformation, and that He will please to pardon my natural infirmity: but I ought not to call this repentance, methinks, no more than the being dissatisfied that I am not an angel or Cato. My actions are regular, and conformable to what I am and to my condition; I can do no better; and repentance does not properly touch things that are not in our power; sorrow does.. I imagine an infinite number of natures more elevated and regular than mine; and yet I do not for all that improve my faculties, no more than my arm or will grow more strong and vigorous for conceiving those of another to be so.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2
2 weeks 4 days ago

To spendthrifts money is so living and actual-it is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune-that of time; and a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a breath.

0
0
Source
source
A Lodging for the Night.
1 month 2 weeks ago

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

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.

0
0
Source
source
On Suicide
1 month 3 weeks ago

I am far from denying that newspapers in democratic countries lead citizens to do very ill-considered things in common; but without newspapers there would be hardly any common action at all. So they mend many more ills than they cause.

0
0
Source
source
Book Two, Chapter VI.
3 months 2 weeks ago

We can hope that the ways of peace will attract the Arabic nations, for their territory and opportunities are broad enough for immeasurable advance, if the energies vented in spleen, are turned instead to a modernisation of the technology, a restoration of the soil, and a renovation of the economic, social, and political structure of those great and venerable lands.

0
0
3 weeks 1 day ago

Every one who has a heart and eyes sees that you, working men, are obliged to pass your lives in want and in hard labor, which is useless to you, while other men, who do not work, enjoy the fruits of your labor-that you are the slaves of these men, and that this ought not to exist.

0
0
Source
source
To the Working People, Complete Works, trans. Leo Wiener, Vol 24, p. 129
2 months 2 weeks ago

It is not by recognizing the want of courage in someone else that you acquire courage yourself.

0
0
Source
source
p. 44e

I have come to believe that you can get along without anyone - that is, without the close contact of any one person. That is a terrible shock to me, but I think it is true. You do need companionship, but wherever you go, in whatever new environment, you will find people who, to a large degree, take the place of those you left...The intimate companionship goes, I think, when you leave a friend, but friendship stays. It is an inherent possibility of relationship that, once admitted - well, there it is.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

The even larger difference between rich and poor makes the latter even worse off, and this violates the principle of mutual advantage.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, Section 13, pg. 79
1 month 6 days ago

Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified.

0
0
1 month 6 days ago

Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons?

0
0
Source
source
p. 17
1 month 2 weeks ago

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions. 

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Listener
3 months 2 weeks ago

A robot, the man had said, is logical but not reasonable.

0
0

I have been deep in Plato, Aristotle, and Theocritus ever since I left home, and admiring more and more every day the powers of that mighty language which is incomparably the best vehicle both for reasoning and for imagery that mankind have ever discovered, and which is richer both in abstract philosophical terms and poetical expressions than the English, French, and Latin tongues put together.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Zachary Macaulay (19? August 1820), quoted in The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, Volume I: 1807-February 1831, ed. Thomas Pinney (1974), p. 145
1 month 2 weeks ago

I think of so many people who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Let the states of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection, and a happy order will prevail throughout heaven and earth, and all things will be nourished and flourish.

0
0

What the history of Philosophy shows us is a succession of noble minds, a gallery of heroes of thought, who, by the power of reason, have penetrated into the being of things, of nature and of spirit, into the Being of God, and have won for us by their labours the highest treasure, the treasure of reasoned knowledge.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction p. 1 Lectures on the history of philosophy, Translated from German by E. S. Haldane in Three Volumes (1892-96) full text
3 weeks 3 days ago

What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. The child watching TV loves these people, you know -- they're in color, and they're talking to the child. Why wouldn't a child relate to these people? And you know, if you can't sleep at 3 o'clock in the morning, you can turn on a switch, and there are your friends and relatives, and they obviously like you. And they're charming. Who wouldn't want Peter Jennings for a relative? This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house.

0
0
Source
source
Interviewed by Frank Houston, "The Salon Interview: Kurt Vonnegut", Salon
1 month 1 week ago

The physical change in the thickness of walls since the Middle Ages could be shown in a diagram. In the fourteenth century each house was a fortress. Man spent the major portion of his day in them, in secret and well-defended solitude. That solitude, working on the soul hour after hour, forged it, like a transcendent blacksmith, into a compact and forceful character. Under its treatment, man consolidated his individual destiny and sallied forth with impunity, never yielding to the contamination from the public. It is only in isolation that we gain, almost automatically, a certain discrimination in ideas, desires, longings, that we learn which are ours, and which are anonymous, floating in the air, falling on us like dust in the street.

0
0
Source
source
p. 168
1 month 1 week ago

Buddhism is the most colossal example in the history of applied metaphysics.

0
0
Source
source
in Verhoeven, Martin J. 2001. "Buddhism and Science: Probing the Boundaries Of Faith and Reason." Religion East and West (1): 77-97.
3 weeks 1 day ago

To recognize this clearly is enough to drive a man out of his senses or to make him shoot himself. And this is just what does happen, and especially often among military men. A man need only come to himself for an instant to be impelled inevitably to such an end.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter V, Contradiction Between our Life and our Christian Conscience
1 month 3 weeks ago

A widow, the mother of a family, and from her heart she produces chords to which my whole being responds.

0
0
Source
source
Part 1, Chapter 12
1 month 2 weeks ago

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

0
0
4 weeks 1 day ago

Nationality, class, race, religion, culture....subgroup identity particularity does not supersede universality and humanity.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

It requires twenty years for a man to rise from the vegetable state in which he is within his mother's womb, and from the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of reason begins to appear. It has required thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him.

0
0
Source
source
"Man: General Reflection on Man", 1771
1 month 4 days ago

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2
2 months 3 weeks ago

I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malformation nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

The woman wants to dominate, the man wants to be dominated.

0
0
Source
source
Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 220
2 months 3 weeks 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.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 115
2 months 3 weeks ago

That a joint stock company should be able to carry on successfully any branch of foreign trade, when private adventurers can come into any sort of open and fair competition with them, seems contrary to all experience.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter I, Part III, Article I, p. 810.
1 month 6 days ago

The Outsider may be an artist, but the artist is not necessarily an Outsider.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter one, The Country of the Blind
3 months 1 week ago

Much learning does not teach understanding.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

A righteous government is of all the most to be wished for,Bearing of blessing and good fortune in the highest.Guided by the law of Truth, supported by dedication and zeal,It blossoms into the Best of Order, a Kingdom of Heaven!To effect this I shall work now and ever more.

0
0
Source
source
Vohu-Khshathra Gatha; Yasna 51, 1.
1 month 2 weeks ago

The modern state, in its essence and objectives, is necessarily a military state, and a military state necessarily becomes an aggressive state. If it does not conquer others it will itself be conquered, for the simple reason that wherever force exists, it absolutely must be displayed or put into action. From this again it follows that the modern state must without fail be huge and powerful; that is the indispensable condition for its preservation.

0
0

Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour. No known civilization has, ever reached the goal of civilization yet. There has never been a communion of saints on earth. In the least uncivilized society at its least uncivilized moment, the vast majority of its members have remained very near indeed to the primitive human level. And no society has ever been secure of holding such ground as it has managed to gain in its spiritual advance. Ch. 8: Civilization on Trial Variants: Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Reader's Digest (October 1958)
1 month 2 weeks ago

True anarchy is the generative element of religion. Out of the annihilation of all existing institutions she raises her glorious head, as the new foundress of the world.

0
0
Source
source
English translation as quoted in The Dublin Review Vol. III (July-October 1837)
2 months 2 weeks ago

I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being.

0
0
Source
source
Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault
3 months 1 day ago

Careful thought about this will reveal how few there are who are truly converted from evil habits, especially among those who have prolonged their lives of sin right up to the end. The path down to evil is quick, slippery, and easy. But to turn and "to go forth to the upper air . . . this is effort, this is toil." Think of Aesop's goat before you descend and remember that climbing out is not easy.

0
0
Source
source
p. 147
1 month 6 days ago

Power is more 'spacious' than violence. And violence becomes power if it 'gives itself more time.' Looked at from this perspective, power rests on an excess of space and time.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

It is only by poets that the life of any epoch can be synthesized. Encyclopaedias and guides to knowledge cannot do it, for the good reason that they affect only the intellectual surface of a man's life. The lower layers, the core of his being, they leave untouched.

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

I shall keep it [the manuscript] by me until the end of May for purposes of revision, and of adding malicious foot-notes.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to W. W. Norton, 17 February, 1931
3 months ago

A penny saved is of more value than a penny paid out.

0
0
Source
source
What Luther Says, Section on "Life, Human," No. 2438. Rules for a Thrifty Life. 2, p. 784
2 months 2 weeks ago

This book, admirable in so many respects, power in its break and style, is even more intimidating for me in that, having formely had the good fortune to study under Michel Foucault, I retain the consciousness of an admiring and grateful disciple. Now, the disciple's consciousness, when he starts, I would not say to dispute, but to engage in dialogue with the master or, better, to articulate the interminable and silent dialogue which made him into a disciple-this disciple's consciousness is an unhappy consciousness.

0
0
Source
source
Cogito and The History of Madness (Routledge classics edition)
2 weeks 6 days ago

Fortune is like glass-the brighter the glitter, the more easily broken.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 280
1 month 3 weeks ago

Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one's innocence with the loss of one's prejudices.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia