Skip to main content
2 months ago

Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such "transcending" analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory.

0
0
Source
source
p. xliii

Nowhere is there more constancy and more unanimity than among the French to subordinate that sex which they pretend to honor so highly.

0
0
Source
source
The Theory of Social Organization
1 month 3 weeks ago

Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death.

0
0
Source
source
p. 277
2 months 4 weeks ago

On James's view, "true" resembles "good" or "rational" in being a normative notion, a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit with other sentences which are doing so.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism
3 months 1 week ago

The virtue of frugality lies in a middle between avarice and profusion, of which the one consists in an excess, the other in a defect of the proper attention to the objects of self-interest.

0
0
Source
source
Section II, Chap. I.
3 months 1 week ago

We are never without a pilot. When we know not how to steer, and dare not hoist a sail, we can drift. The current knows the way, though we do not. The ship of heaven guides itself, and will not accept a wooden rudder.

0
0
Source
source
"The Sovereignty of Ethics", in The North America Review, no. 262 (May-June 1878) p. 407
3 months 6 days ago

"And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes."

0
0
Source
source
Hyoi, p. 76
2 months 1 week ago

...no Monarchy limited or unlimited, nor any of the old Republics, can possibly be safe as long as this strange, nameless, wild, enthusiastic thing is established in the Center of Europe.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to John Trevor (January 1791), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), p. 218

Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer. One orients one's attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands.

0
0
Source
source
Miscellaneous writings of G.W.F. Hegel, translation by Jon Bartley Stewart, Northwestern University Press, 2002, page 247.
2 months 3 days ago

The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Essays in Zoosemiotics (1990) by Thomas A. Sebeok

In art the best is good enough.

0
0
Source
source
Italian Journey
3 months 6 days ago

For the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.

0
0
Source
source
"Lying in Politics"
3 months 1 week ago

Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Grey Life.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

All of the other people have committed crimes, the Jews are the only ones who have boasted about committing them. They are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blond hair. I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not some day become deadly to the human race.

0
0
Source
source
Lettres de Memmius a Cicéron, 1771
3 months 1 week ago

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it means one always has some battle to wage against oneself.

0
0
Source
source
Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (French), Sixième partie, Lettre VII Réponse (1761) Julie, or The New Heloise (English), Part Six, Letter VII Response, pg 560
1 month 2 weeks ago

These are the visionary, mystical moments, when a man 'completes his partial mind'. His everyday conscious self is only a small part of the mind, like the final crescent of the moon. In moments of crisis, the full moon suddenly appears.

0
0
Source
source
p. 156
3 months 1 week ago

There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future: the Establishment and the Movement. At times the resistance is reanimated, the schism runs under the world and appears in Literature, Philosophy, Church, State and social customs.

0
0
Source
source
p. 529, col. 1
3 months 1 week ago

Thus, while the refugee serfs only wished to be free to develop and assert those conditions of existence which were already there, and hence, in the end, only arrived at free labour, the proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, will have to abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto (which has, moreover, been that of all society up to the present), namely, labour. Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State.

0
0
Source
source
"Communism. The Production of the Form of Intercourse Itself", The Marx-Engels Reader
1 month 3 days ago

We've reached a truly remarkable situation: a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligentsia and the American electorate. A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe which is held by the vast majority of top American scientists, and probably the majority of the intelligentsia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public. If I'm right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it: the intelligentsia, unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. To put it bluntly American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.

0
0
Source
source
Richard Dawkins on militant atheism,
2 months 3 days ago

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Capitalism has brought about the emancipation of collective humanity with respect to nature. But this collective humanity has itself taken on with respect to the individual the oppressive function formerly exercised by nature.

0
0
Source
source
p. 140
1 month 3 weeks ago

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Hegel once observed that comedy is in act superior to tragedy and humourous reasoning superior to grandiloquent reasoning. Although Lincoln does not possess the grandiloquence of historical action, as an average man of the people he has its humour.

0
0
2 months ago

Time, and Industry, produce everyday new knowledge.

0
0
Source
source
The Second Part, Chapter 30, p. 176
4 months 1 week ago

The similarity between Christ and Socrates consists essentially in their dissimilarity. Just as philosophy begins with doubt, so also a life that may be called human begins with irony.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interests should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular society--that the interests of this order of society be sacrificed to the greater interest of the state. He should therefore he equally willing that all those inferior interests should be sacrificed to the greater society of all sensible and intelligent beings.

0
0
Source
source
Section II, Chap. III; cited by Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941, 24-25.
3 months 1 week ago

Human reason is by nature architectonic.

0
0
Source
source
B 502
2 months 3 weeks ago

Good breeding in cattle depends on physical health, but in men on a well-formed character.

0
0
Source
source
Freeman (1948), p. 151
2 months 1 week ago

The debates of that great assembly are frequently vague and perplexed, seeming to be dragged rather than to march, to the intended goal. Something of this sort must, I think, always happen in public democratic assemblies.

0
0
Source
source
Book One, Chapter XXI.
1 month ago

As a scholar [Allan Bloom] intends to enlighten us, and as a writer he has learned from Aristophanes and other models that enlightenment should also be enjoyable. To me, this is not the book of a professor, but that of a thinker who is willing to take the risks more frequently taken by writers. It is risky in a book of ideas to speak in one's own voice, but it reminds us that the sources of the truest truths are inevitably profoundly personal. ... Academics, even those describing themselves as existentialists, very seldom offer themselves publicly and frankly as individuals, as persons.

0
0
Source
source
p. 12
3 months 6 days ago

He is dead, and my hatred has died with him.

0
0
Source
source
Electra, before the dead Aegistheus, Act 2
2 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
1 month 3 days ago

It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none. But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in favour of diligence; only there is something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say.

0
0
Source
source
An Apology for Idlers.
2 months 3 days ago

By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.

0
0
Source
source
The Communist Manifesto, footnote
3 months 1 week ago

Every artist was first an amateur.

0
0
Source
source
Progress of Culture
2 months 4 days ago

Since the Devil is the adversary of Christ he should occupy a position equivalent to his and be the Son of God as well. Satan would be the first Son of God and Christ the second.

0
0
Source
source
Paris, 1991, p. 207. As quoted in Curzio Nitoglia
7 months 1 week ago

What is at stake here is precisely the problem of the fulfillment of desire: when we encounter in reality an object which has all the properties of the fantasized object of desire, we are nevertheless necessarily somewhat disappointed; we experience a certain this is not it; it becomes evident that the finally found real object is not the reference of desire even though it possesses all the required properties.

1
1
1 month 3 days ago

Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of lèse-respectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, and labour therein with something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party, who are content when they have enough.

0
0
Source
source
An Apology for Idlers.
3 months 2 weeks ago

My whole heart and soul are stirred and incensed against the Turks and Mohammed, when I see this intolerable raging of the Devil. Therefore I shall pray and cry to God, nor rest until I know that my cry is heard in heaven.

0
0
Source
source
Statement while being confined to residence at Coburg, as quoted in History of the Christian Church, (1910) by Philip Schaff, Vol. VII
3 months 1 week ago

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that.

0
0
Source
source
"The First-cause Argument"
3 months 1 week ago

The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 5
1 month 3 days ago

Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines that who can only learn of the basis of trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. ...The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 4. The Gene machine
2 months 1 week ago

The more cunning a man is, the less he suspects that he will be caught in a simple thing. The more cunning a man is, the simpler the trap he must be caught in.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Time is the wisest of all things that are; for it brings everything to light.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, I, 35
1 month 2 weeks ago

Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 4, Evidence, p. 31.
3 months 1 week ago

In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 10, Section 7, pg. 329.
2 months 1 week ago

Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter V

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia