Skip to main content
4 months 6 days ago

Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

0
0
Source
source
June 21, 1852
3 months 2 weeks ago

We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy - at least until we have become as clever as they are.

0
0
Source
source
D 97
5 months 1 week ago

You come from attending the funeral of mankind to attend to a natural phenomenon. A little thought is sexton to all the world.

0
0
Source
source
p. 490
3 months 3 weeks ago

More and more it is becoming evident that what the West can most readily give to the East is its science and its scientific outlook. This is transferable from country to country, and from race to race, wherever there is a rational society.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: "The Origins of Modern Science", p. 4
4 months 6 days ago

A certain maxim of Logic which I have called Pragmatism has recommended itself to me for diverse reasons and on sundry considerations. Having taken it as my guide for most of my thought, I find that as the years of my knowledge of it lengthen, my sense of the importance of it presses upon me more and more. If it is only true, it is certainly a wonderfully efficient instrument. It is not to philosophy only that it is applicable. I have found it of signal service in every branch of science that I have studied. My want of skill in practical affairs does not prevent me from perceiving the advantage of being well imbued with pragmatism in the conduct of life.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture I : Pragmatism : The Normative Sciences, CP 5.14
5 months 1 week ago

Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 22, § 261
5 months 1 week ago

I have assumed throughout that the persons in the original position are rational.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Section 25, pg. 142
3 months 3 weeks ago

Every human being is the natural guardian of his own importance.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9: "Science and Philosophy", p. 195
3 months 3 weeks ago

The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

0
0
Source
source
p. 209
1 month 3 weeks ago

The best ideas are common property.

0
0
Source
source
Line 11.
2 months 1 day ago

Our true Deity is Mechanism. It has subdued external Nature for us, and we think it will do all other things. We are Giants in physical power: in a deeper than metaphorical sense, we are Titans, that strive, by heaping mountain on mountain, to conquer Heaven also.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter V, p. 38.
1 month 6 days ago

Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the name of Lamiae, bugbears to frighten children.

0
0
Source
source
XI, 23
5 months 4 days ago

Technically speaking, since our complex societies are highly susceptible to interferences and accidents,they certainly offer ideal opportunities for a prompt disruption of normal activities. These disruptions can, with minimum expense, have considerably destructive consequences. Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.

0
0
Source
source
Habermas (2004) in: Giovanna Borradori (2004) Philosophy in a Time of Terror: : Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. p. 34
2 months 3 weeks ago

Science has taught... me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile. My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonise with my aspirations.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

The moral things I wish to say to future generations is very simple. I should say love is wise hatred is foolish. In this world which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way, and if we are to live together and not die together we must learn the kind of charity and kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

How many we know who have fled the sweetness of a tranquil life in their homes, among their friends, to seek the horror of uninhabitable deserts; who have flung themselves into humiliation, degradation, and the contempt of the world, and have enjoyed these and even sought them out.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 14 (tr. Donald M. Frame)
5 months 5 days ago

Ambition is the death of thought.

0
0
Source
source
p. 77e
5 months 1 week ago

So far as living instruments of labour are concerned, for instance horses, their reproduction is timed by nature itself. Their average lifetime as instruments of labour is determined by the laws of nature. As soon as this term has expired they must be replaced by new ones. A horse cannot be replaced piecemeal; it must be replaced by another horse.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. II, Ch. VIII, p. 174.
4 months 1 week ago

I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a little country churchyard, than in the tombs of the Capulets.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Matthew Smith
4 months 6 days ago

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

The purpose of the State is, as we have already shown in our last lecture, no other than that of the Human Race itself:-to order all its relations according to the Laws of Reason. It is only after the Age of Reason as Science shall have been traversed, and we shall have arrived at the Age of Reason as Art, that the State can reflect upon this purpose with clear consciousness. Till then it constantly promotes this purpose, but without its own knowledge, or free pre meditated design; prompted thereto by the natural law of the development of our Race, even while it has a totally different purpose in view;-with which purpose of its own, Nature has indissolubly bound up the purpose of the whole Race.

0
0
Source
source
p. 168
5 months 1 week ago

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe - "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

0
0
1 month 6 days ago

Nothing can come out of nothing, any more than a thing can go back to nothing.

0
0
Source
source
IV, 4
1 month 1 week ago

The Constitution of 1795, like its predecessors, was made for man. But there is no such thing as man in the world. In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

We're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial root, adventitious growths and rhizomes.

0
0
Source
source
from A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, p. 15
5 months ago

The only justifiable stopping place for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism. This means that all beings with the capacity to feel pleasure or pain should be included; we can improve their welfare by increasing their pleasures and diminishing their pains.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 4, Reason, p. 120
2 months 2 weeks ago

Humans are prone to status quo bias. So let's do a thought-experiment. Imagine we stumble across an advanced civilisation that has abolished predation, disease, famine, and all the horrors of primitive Darwinian life. The descendants of archaic lifeforms flourish unmolested in their wildlife parks - free living, but not "wild". Should we urge scrapping their regime of compassionate stewardship of the living world - and a return to asphyxiation, disembowelling and being eaten alive? Or is a happy biosphere best conserved intact? Reply to "Should humans wipe out all carnivorous animals so the succeeding generations of herbivores can live in peace?"

0
0
Source
source
, Quora, 16 Jun. 2018
5 months 1 week ago

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstacies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.

0
0
Source
source
Page 159
3 months 1 week ago

Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view. "

0
0
Source
source
The Precession of Simulacra," p. 10
5 months 1 week ago

Man is a rational animal - so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents. Often paraphrased as "It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this."

0
0
3 months 5 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.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Part of what makes moral philosophy an anachronistic field is that its practitioners continue to argue in this very traditional and aprioristic way even though they themselves do not claim that one can provide a systematic and indubitable 'foundation' for the subject. Most of them rely on what are supposed to be 'intuitions' without claiming that those intuitions deliver uncontroversial ethical premises, on the one hand, or that they have an ontological or epistemological explanation of the reliability of those intuitions, on the other.

0
0
Source
source
How Not to Solve Ethical Problems
2 months 4 weeks ago

That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.

0
0
Source
source
p. 160
5 months 1 week ago

Somebody ought to make a historical study of the relations between theology and corporal punishment in childhood. I have a theory that, wherever little boys and girls are systematically flagellated, the victims grow up to think of God as - 'Wholly Other'... A people's theology reflects the state of its children's bottoms. Look at the Hebrews - enthusiastic child-beaters. And so were all good Christians in the Age of Faith. Hence Jehovah, hence Original Sin and the infinitely offended Father of Roman and Protestant orthodoxy. Whereas among Buddhists and Hindus education has always been nonviolent. No laceration of little buttocks - therefore Tat tvam asi, thou art That, mind from Mind is not divided.... Major premise: God is Wholly Other. Minor premise: man is totally depraved. Conclusion: Do to your children's bottoms what was done to yours, what your Heavenly Father has been doing to the collective bottom of humanity ever since the Fall: whip, whip, whip!

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

How many worthy men have we seen survive their own reputation!

0
0
Source
source
Book II, Ch. 16. Of Glory
3 months 1 week ago

The Churches as Churches-as institutions affirming their own infallibility-are anti-Christian institutions. Between the Churches as such and Christianity, not only is there nothing in common except the name, but they are two quite opposite and opposing principles. The one represents pride, violence, self-assertion, immobility and death: the other humility, penitence, meekness, progress, and life.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Christianity Misunderstood by Believers
5 months 2 weeks ago

There is no need for you to develop an armed insurrection. Christ himself has already begun an insurrection with his mouth.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 67-68
1 month 1 week ago

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, - so good night!

0
0
Source
source
Letter to John Adams
1 month 6 days ago

Whenever you suffer pain, keep in mind that it's nothing to be ashamed of and that it can't degrade your guiding intelligence, nor keep it from acting rationally and for the common good. And in most cases you should be helped by the saying of Epicurus, that pain is never unbearable or unending, so you can remember these limits and not add to them in your imagination. Remember too that many common annoyances are pain in disguise, such as sleepiness, fever and loss of appetite. When they start to get you down, tell yourself you are giving in to pain.

0
0
Source
source
VII. 64:280
4 months 6 days ago

The healthy man does not torture others-generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

0
0
Source
source
In Du, May 1941
5 months 1 week ago

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

0
0
Source
source
"Vivisection" (1947), p. 227
4 months 6 days ago

I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

The gods sell anything to everybody at a fair price.

0
0
Source
source
Quotation and Originality
3 months 6 days ago

Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional "next world" is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them.

0
0
Source
source
Gordy Slack, "The Atheist" Salon.com
5 months 1 week ago

Inequalities are permissible when they maximize, or at least all contribute to, the long term expectations of the least fortunate group in society.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Section 26, pg. 151
2 months 3 weeks ago

God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Nature Vol. 149 (Jan-Jun) 1942 p. 291, and A Philosophy for Our Time (1954) by Bernard Mannes Baruch, p. 13

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia