Skip to main content
Image removed.

Main navigation

☰ ˟
  • Home
  • Articulation
  • Contact
John Dewey
John Dewey
4 months ago
In the late eighteenth and the...

In the late eighteenth and the greater part of the nineteenth centuries appeared the first marked cultural shift in the attitude taken toward change. Under the names of indefinite perfectibility, progress, and evolution, the movement of things in the universe itself and of the universe as a whole began to take on a beneficent instead of hateful aspect.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
5 months 1 week ago
Lord, you have cursed Cain and...

Lord, you have cursed Cain and Cain's children: thy will be done. You have allowed men's hearts to be corrupted, that their intentions be rotten, that their actions putrefy and stink: thy will be done.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Act 1
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
5 months 1 week ago
Every poet and musician and artist,...

Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Ch. 9
Philosophical Maxims
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
5 months 2 weeks ago
The demands of a free populace,...

The demands of a free populace, too, are very seldom harmful to liberty, for they are due either to the populace being oppressed or to the suspicious that it is going to be oppressed... and, should these impressions be false, a remedy is provided in the public platform on which some man of standing can get up, appeal to the crowd, and show that it is mistaken. And though, as Tully remarks, the populace may be ignorant, it is capable of grasping the truth and readily yields when a man, worthy of confidence, lays the truth before it.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Book 1, Ch. 4 (as translated by LJ Walker and B Crick)
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
3 months 4 weeks ago
The real struggle is not between...

The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
As quoted in Encounter with Martin Buber (1972) by Aubrey Hodes, p. 135
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
2 months 1 day ago
Patriotism ruins history. Conversation with Friedrich...

Patriotism ruins history.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Conversation with Friedrich Wilhem Riemer
Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
2 months 2 weeks ago
In the long run, there is...

In the long run, there is nothing to stop intelligent agents from identifying the molecular signature of experience below hedonic zero and eliminating it altogether - even in insects. Nociception is vital; pain is optional. I tentatively predict that the world's last unpleasant experience in our forward light-cone will be a precisely datable event - perhaps some micro-pain in an obscure marine invertebrate a few centuries hence.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
The Radical Plan to Phase out Earth's Predatory Species, io9, 30 Jul. 2014
Philosophical Maxims
Heraclitus
Heraclitus
5 months 4 weeks ago
Opposition brings concord. Out of discord...

Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
5 months 1 week ago
If a thousand citizens were not...

If a thousand citizens were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 4 weeks ago
The science of the age, in...

The science of the age, in short, is physical, chemical, physiological; in all shapes mechanical. Our favourite Mathematics, the highly prized exponent of all these other sciences, has also become more and more mechanical. Excellence in what is called its higher departments depends less on natural genius than on acquired expertness in wielding its machinery. Without undervaluing the wonderful results which a Lagrange or Laplace educes by means of it, we may remark, that their calculus, differential and integral, is little else than a more cunningly-constructed arithmetical mill; where the factors, being put in, are, as it were, ground into the true product, under cover, and without other effort on our part than steady turning of the handle. We have more Mathematics than ever; but less Mathesis.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
3 months 3 weeks ago
In organized groups such as the...

In organized groups such as the army or the Church there is either no mention of love whatsoever between the members, or it is expressed only in a sublimated and indirect way, through the mediation of some religious imagine in the love of whom the members unite and whose all-embracing love they are supposed to imitate in their attitude towards each other. ... It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda," The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1982), p. 123
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
4 months 2 weeks ago
Govern your tongue before all other...

Govern your tongue before all other things, following the gods.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Symbol 7
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 4 weeks ago
To fall into mere unreasoning deliquium...

To fall into mere unreasoning deliquium of love and admiration, was not good; but such unreasoning, nay irrational supercilious no-love at all is perhaps still worse!-It is a thing forever changing, this of Hero-worship: different in each age, difficult to do well in any age. Indeed, the heart of the whole business of the age, one may say, is to do it well.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
5 months 1 week ago
It is because we are predominantly...

It is because we are predominantly purposeful beings that we are perpetually correcting our immediate sensations. But men are free not to be utilitarianly purposeful. They can sometime be artists, for example. In which case they may like to accept the immediate sensation uncorrected, because it happens to be beautiful.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"One and Many," p. 11
Philosophical Maxims
Cornel West
Cornel West
5 months 3 days ago
From whence are these "rights of...

From whence are these "rights of individuals" derived, and why should we care? Unless we presume the existence of some greater power that determines what is good, isn't it arbitrary to posit that human survival is more important than private property rights, an equally artificially construed concept? Isn't it arbitrary to assume that some sort of equality is preferable to a system where, say, the poor are assumed to have bad karma? If these 'rights of individuals' are derived only from shared humanity, then do 'individuals' (a thoroughly meaningless term, by the way), begin to lose them when they act inhumanely? And isn't it totally arbitrary to grant rights to humans rather than other creatures anyway?

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Lecture in New Haven, On Constructed Rights
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 3 weeks ago
There is no reason why poverty...

There is no reason why poverty should call us away from philosophy-no, nor even actual want. For when hastening after wisdom, we must endure even hunger. Men have endured hunger when their towns were besieged, and what other reward for their endurance did they obtain than that they did not fall under the conqueror's power? How much greater is the promise of the prize of everlasting liberty, and the assurance that we need fear neither God nor man! Even though we starve, we must reach that goal.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 5 days ago
Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is...

Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg
1 month 4 days ago
For Lenin, the difference between the...

For Lenin, the difference between the Social Democracy and Blanquism is reduced to the observation that in place of a handful of conspirators we have a class-conscious proletariat. He forgets that this difference implies a complete revision of our ideas on organization and, therefore, an entirely different conception of centralism and the relations existing between the party and the struggle itself.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
4 weeks ago
Every man knows that in...

Every man knows that in his work he does best and accomplishes most when he has attained a proficiency that enables him to work intuitively. That is, there are things which we come to know so well that we do not know how we know them. So it seems to me in matters of principle. Perhaps we live best and do things best when we are not too conscious of how and why we do them.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 5 days ago
In every man sleeps a prophet,...

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
5 months 1 week ago
If you are describing any occurrence......

If you are describing any occurrence... make two or more distinct reports at different times... We discriminate at first only a few features, and we need to reconsider our experience from many points of view and in various moods in order to perceive the whole.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
March 24, 1857
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
5 months 1 week ago
Remorse sleeps...

Remorse sleeps during a prosperous period but wakes up in adversity. 

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Variant translations: Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity. Remorse goes to sleep during a prosperous period and wakes up in adversity.
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
1 month 3 weeks ago
No one ever saw Cato change,...

No one ever saw Cato change, no matter how often the state changed: he kept himself the same in all circumstances-in the praetorship, in defeat, under accusation, in his province, on the platform, in the army, in death.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
5 months 1 week ago
Define your terms…

Define your terms, you will permit me again to say, or we shall never understand one another.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"Miracles", 1764
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
6 months 6 days ago
If you're going to write a...

If you're going to write a story, avoid contemporary references. They date a story and they have no staying power.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 week ago
Even when he....
0
⚖0
Main Content / General
Lin Yutang
Lin Yutang
1 month 2 weeks ago
Human history is not the product...

Human history is not the product of the wise direction of human reason, but is shaped by the forces of emotion-our dreams, our pride, our greed, our fears, and our desire for revenge.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Confucius Saw Nancy and Essays about Nothing (1936), p. 95
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
5 months 1 week ago
It appears... that a work similar...

It appears... that a work similar in its object and general conception to that of Adam Smith, but adapted to the more extended knowledge and improved ideas of the present age, is the kind of contribution which Political Economy at present requires. The Wealth of Nations is in many parts obsolete, and in all, imperfect. Political Economy... has grown up almost from infancy since the time of Adam Smith; and the philosophy of society... has advanced many steps beyond the point at which he left it.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Preface, 1848
Philosophical Maxims
chanakya
chanakya
2 months 2 weeks ago
All urgent calls he shall hear...

All urgent calls he shall hear at once, but never put off; for when postponed, they will prove too hard or impossible to accomplish.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Book I : "Concerning Discipline" Chapter 19
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
4 months 1 day ago
On fact, the whole machinery of...

On fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact. Pt. III, Form; § 30: "The average modified in the direction of pleasure.", p. 125
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
5 months 1 week ago
Days of absence, sad and dreary, Clothed...

Days of absence,

sad and dreary, 

Clothed in sorrow's dark array,

Days of absence, I am weary: She I love is far away.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Day of Absence, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
4 months ago
There are two kinds of means....

There are two kinds of means. One kind is external to that which is accomplished; the other kind is taken up into the consequences and remains immanent in them. There are ends which are merely welcome cessations and there are ends that are fulfillments of what went before. The toil of the laborer is too often an antecedent to the wage he receives, as consumption of gasoline is merely a means to transportation. The means cease to act when the "end" is reached; one would be glad, as a rule, to get the result without having to employ the means. They are but the scaffolding.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 5 days ago
In the hours without sleep, each...

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Ptahhotep
Ptahhotep
4 months 4 weeks ago
One who is serious all day...

One who is serious all day will never have a good time, while one who is frivolous all day will never establish a household.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Maxim no. 25.
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
5 months 1 week ago
You can do everything with bayonets...

You can do everything with bayonets except sit on them. If you want to preserve your power indefinitely you have to get the consent of the ruled. And this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in "Brave new World", and partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious, and his deeper emotions, and his physiology, even, and so making him actually love his slavery. I mean I think this is the danger that actually people may be, in some ways, happy under the new regime. But they will be happy in situations when they oughtn't be happy.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
5 months 1 week ago
Instead of noble men, let us...

Instead of noble men, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, round a little there and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Editorial, Andhra Granthalayam, vol. 1, no. 2 (1939) p. 6
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
5 months 1 week ago
If there are different Notions of...

If there are different Notions of the science of Philosophy, it is the true Notion alone that puts us in a position to understand the writings of philosophers who have worked in the knowledge of it. For in thought, and particularly in speculative thought, comprehension means something quite different from understanding the grammatical sense of the words alone, and also from understanding them in the region of ordinary conception only. Hence we may possess a knowledge of the assertions, propositions, or of the opinions of philosophers; we may have occupied ourselves largely with the grounds of and deductions from these opinions, and the main point in all that we have done may be wanting - the comprehension of the propositions.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
First divsion, Chapter I. - The Metaphysics of the Understanding…
Philosophical Maxims
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1 month 2 weeks ago
Archeologists have not discovered stages of...

Archeologists have not discovered stages of human existence so early that they were without art. Right back in the early morning twilights of mankind we received it from Hands which we were too slow to discern. And we were too slow to ask: FOR WHAT PURPOSE have we been given this gift? What are we to do with it? And they were mistaken, and will always be mistaken, who prophesy that art will disintegrate, that it will outlive its forms and die. It is we who shall die - art will remain. And shall we comprehend, even on the day of our destruction, all its facets and all its possibilities?

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
5 months 1 week ago
No punishment has ever possessed enough...

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Epilogue
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
5 months 1 week ago
Our aim is precisely to establish...

Our aim is precisely to establish the human kingdom as a pattern of values in distinction from the material world. But the subjectivity which we thus postulate as the standard of truth is no narrowly individual subjectivism, for as we have demonstrated, it is not only one's own self that one discovers in the cogito, but those of others too. Contrary to the philosophy of Descartes, contrary to that of Kant, when we say "I think" we are attaining to ourselves in the presence of the other, and we are just as certain of the other as we are of ourselves. Thus the man who discovers himself directly in the cogito also discovers all the others, and discovers them as the condition of his own existence. He realizes that he can't be anything unless others recognize him as such. I cannot obtain any truth whatsoever about myself, except through the mediation of another. The other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 45
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
2 months 3 days ago
The Left's identity politics poses a...

The Left's identity politics poses a threat to free speech and to the kind of rational discourse needed to sustain a democracy... The focus on lived experience by identity groups prioritizes the emotional world of the inner self over the rational examination of issues in the outside world and privileges sincerely held opinions over a process of reasoned deliberation that may force one to abandon prior opinions.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Against Identity Politics (14 August 2018), Foreign Affairs
Philosophical Maxims
Plutarch
Plutarch
4 months 3 weeks ago
He is a fool who lets...

He is a fool who lets slip a bird in the hand for a bird in the bush.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Of Garrulity (Tr. Goodwin)
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
6 months 1 week ago
We often contradict an opinion for...
We often contradict an opinion for no other reason than that we do not like the tone in which it is expressed.
0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 6 days ago
Man in the electronic age has...

Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Protagoras
Protagoras
4 months 3 weeks ago
Man is the measure of all...

Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
As quoted in Theaetetus by Plato section 152a
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
4 months 5 days ago
Do not block the way of...

Do not block the way of inquiry.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Vol. I, par. 135
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 1 week ago
We do not count a man's...

We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Old Age
Philosophical Maxims
Ernest Renan
Ernest Renan
2 months 3 days ago
No place in the world has...

No place in the world has had a comparable role to that of the nameless mountain or valley where mankind first attained self-consciousness. Let us be proud ... of the old patriarchs who, at the foot of Imaiis, laid the foundations of what we are and of what we shall become.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Poliakov, L. (1974). The Aryan myth : a history of racist and nationalist ideas in Europe page 208
Philosophical Maxims
Leszek Kołakowski
Leszek Kołakowski
2 months 1 day ago
...shall we say that the difference...

...shall we say that the difference between a vegetarian and a cannibal is just a matter of taste?

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"The Idolatry of Politics", New Republic, 1986-June-16, page 31.
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
5 months 3 days ago
But let there be no misunderstanding:...

But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
  • Load More

User login

  • Create new account
  • Reset your password

Social

☰ ˟
  • Main Feed
  • Philosophical Maxims

Civic

☰ ˟
  • Propositions
  • Issue / Solution

Users

☰ ˟
  • All users
  • Historical Figures

Who's new

  • Søren Kierkegaard
  • Jesus
  • Friedrich Nietzsche
  • VeXed
  • Slavoj Žižek

Who's online

There are currently 0 users online.

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia