Skip to main content
3 weeks 2 days ago

On a certain level of generality A which I call the ground level, you have certain theorems that have been proved and certain unsolved problems P of recognised interest. Suppose you discover a generalisation of one of these theorems and thereby rise to a higher level of generality A'. Write it up, but lock it away in a drawer - unless or until it serves to solve one of the problems P on the ground level... But the deeper one drives the spade the harder the digging gets; maybe it has become too hard for us unless we are not given some outside help, be it even by such devilish devices as high-speed computing machines.

0
0
Source
source
At the Princeton Bicentennial, 17-19 December 1946
4 months 2 weeks ago

It is the natural effect of improvement, however, to diminish gradually the real price of almost all manufactures.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XI, Part III, (Conclusion..) p. 282.
3 months 1 week ago

The power of thought is the light of knowledge, the power of will is the energy of character, the power of heart is love. Reason, love and power of will are perfections of man.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 99
2 months 1 week ago

I think it is not helpful to apply Darwinian language too widely. Conquest of nation by nation is too distant for Darwinian explanations to be helpful. Darwinism is the differential survival of self-replicating genes in a gene pool, usually as manifested by individual behaviour, morphology, and phenotypes. Group selection of any kind is not Darwinism as Darwin understood it nor as I understand it. There is a very vague analogy between group selection and conquest of a nation by another nation, but I don't think it's a very helpful analogy. So I would prefer not to invoke Darwinian language for that kind of historical interpretation.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Let us be understood. If the Japanese surrender after the destruction of Hiroshima, having been intimidated, we will rejoice. But we refuse to see anything in such grave news other than the need to argue more energetically in favor of a true international society, in which the great powers will not have superior rights over small and middle-sized nations, where such an ultimate weapon will be controlled by human intelligence rather than by the appetites and doctrines of various states. Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only goal worth struggling for. This is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason.

0
0

Impurity is caused by attitude, not events.

0
0
Source
source
(trans. Emily Wilson)
3 months 2 weeks ago

Scepticism is the first step towards truth. Variant: A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence skepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Anchor Book of French Quotations with English Translations (1963) by Norbert Gutermam
1 week 6 days ago

I think we must be careful about too easily accepting, or being too easily grateful for, sacrifices made by others, especially if we have made none ourselves.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

There continue to be complex debates about what Nietzsche understood truth to be. Quite certainly, he did not think, in pragmatist spirit, that beliefs are true if they serve our interests or welfare: we have just seen some of his repeated denials of this idea. The more recently fashionable view is that he was the first of the deniers, thinking that there is no such thing as truth, or that truth is what anyone thinks it is, or that it is a boring category that we can do without. This is also wrong, and more deeply so. Nietzsche did not think that the ideal of truthfulness went into retirement when its metaphysical origins were discovered, and he did not suppose, either, that truthfulness could be detached from a concern for the truth. Truthfulness as an ideal retains its power, and so far from his seeing truth as dispensable or malleable, his main question is how it can be made bearable.

0
0
Source
source
p. 16
4 months 1 week ago

We have two bits of evidence about the Somebody. One is the universe He has made. If we used that as our only clue, I think we should have to conclude that He was a great artist (for the universe is a very beautiful place), but also that He is quite merciless and no friend to man (for the universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place.) ...The other bit of evidence is that Moral Law which He has put in our minds. And this is a better bit of evidence than the other, because it is inside information. You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, Chapter 5, "We Have Cause to Be Uneasy"
3 months 1 week ago

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

0
0

Reason, that which we call reason, reflex and reflective knowledge, the distinguishing mark of man, is a social product.

0
0
1 month 4 days ago

By now it may be clear that the position I'm developing is a sort of post-Darwinian Kantianism.

0
0
Source
source
p. 104; from "The Road since Structure"
2 months 3 weeks ago

What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine - they are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine - they are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior, jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.

0
0
Source
source
Letter (5 May 1855), published in Florence Nightingale : An Introduction to Her Life and Family (2001), edited by Lynn McDonald, p. 141
4 months 2 weeks ago

Among civilized and thriving nations, on the contrary, though a great number of people do no labor at all, many of whom consume the produce of ten times, frequently of a hundred times more labour than the greater part of those who work; yet the produce of the whole labour of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly supplied, and a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniencies of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction and Plan of the Work, p. 2.
3 months 6 days ago

Institutionalized desublimation thus appears to be an aspect of the "conquest of transcendence" achieved by the one-dimensional society. Just as this society tends to reduce, and even absorb opposition (the qualitative difference!) in the realm of politics and higher culture, so it does in the instinctual sphere. The result is the atrophy of the mental organs for grasping the contradictions and the alternatives and, in the one remaining dimension of technological rationality, the Happy Consciousness comes to prevail.

0
0
Source
source
p. 79
3 months 4 days ago

I am I and my circumstance, and if I don't save it I don't save myself.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

Educate the children and it won't be necessary to punish the men.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists‎ (2007) by James Geary
2 months 2 days ago

The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.

0
0
Source
source
Hallam', The Edinburgh Review (September 1828), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review, Vol. I (1843), p. 210
4 months 2 weeks ago

Is that to say we are against Free Trade? No, we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions in a single group, where they will stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletariat.

0
0
Source
source
Writing in the Chartist newspaper (1847), in Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 6, pg 290.
4 months 4 days ago

To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 4: Becoming a Vegetarian
3 months 1 week ago

How many women thus waste life away the prey of discontent, who might have practised as physicians, regulated a farm, managed a shop, and stood erect, supported by their own industry, instead of hanging their heads surcharged with the dew of sensibility, that consumes the beauty to which it at first gave lustre.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9
3 months 5 days ago

Because energy is not restrained by other elements that are at once antagonistic and cooperative, action proceeds by jerks and spasms. There is discontinuity.

0
0
Source
source
p. 189
3 months 1 week ago

Fourth, this supreme law, which is celestial and living harmony, does not so much as demand that the special ideas shall surrender their peculiar arbitrariness and caprice entirely; for that would be self-destructive. It only requires that they influence and be influenced by one another.

0
0
1 week 6 days ago

The Sensations are the 'Objective', the Ideas the 'Subjective' part of every act of perception or knowledge.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Sacred and inspired divinity, the sabaoth and port of all men's labours and peregrinations.

0
0
Source
source
Book II
2 months 3 weeks ago

The Outsider cannot accept life as it is, who cannot consider his own existence or anyone else's necessary. He sees 'too deep and too much'. It is still a question of self-expression.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter Four The Attempt to Gain Control
2 months 3 weeks ago

Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.

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

The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.

0
0
Source
source
Section 10
4 months 2 weeks ago

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
1 month 1 week ago

Empire is emerging today as the center that supports the globalization of productive networks and casts its widely inclusive net to try to envelop all power relations within its world order - and yet at the same time it deploys a powerful police function against the new barbarians and the rebellious slaves who threaten its order.

0
0
3 months 6 days ago

Whoever blasphemes against the Father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the Son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven.

0
0
3 weeks ago

A man may own a thousand acres of land, and yet he still sleeps upon a bed of five feet.

0
0
Source
source
p. 38 (Chinese saying)
1 month 5 days ago

In all human affairs, and especially in those that relate to war, ...leave always some room to fortune, and to accidents which cannot be foreseen.

0
0
Source
source
The General History, Book II, Ch. 4 (trans. by Hampton)
1 month 3 weeks ago

Experience is what you get while looking for something else.

0
0
Source
source
"Experience"
4 months 2 weeks ago

The love of power is a part of human nature, but power-philosophies are, in a certain precise sense, insane. The existence of the external world, both that of matter and of other human beings, is a datum, which may be humiliating to a certain kind of pride, but can only be denied by a madman. Men who allow their love of power to give them a distorted view of the world are to be found in every asylum: one man will think he is Governor of the Bank of England, another will think he is the King, and yet another will think he is God. Highly similar delusions, if expressed by educated men in obscure language, lead to professorships in philosophy; and if expressed by emotional men in eloquent language, lead to dictatorships. Certified lunatics are shut up because of the proneness to violence when their pretensions are questioned; the uncertified variety are given control of powerful armies, and can inflict death and disaster upon all sane men within their reach.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 16: Power philosophies
3 months 6 days ago

Then are the children free. Notwithstanding, lest we should offend them, go thou to the sea, and cast an hook, and take up the fish that first cometh up; and when thou hast opened his mouth, thou shalt find a piece of money: that take, and give unto them for me and thee.

0
0
Source
source
17:26-27 (KJV)
2 months 6 days ago

Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties - the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition, by all political parties, and by the electorate as a whole. Wherever the experience of nationality is weak or non-existent, democracy has failed to take root. For without national loyalty, opposition is a threat to government, and political disagreements create no common ground.

0
0
4 months 3 days ago

Men have made an idol of luck as an excuse for their own thoughtlessness. Luck seldom measures swords with wisdom. Most things in life quick wit and sharp vision can set right.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.

0
0
Source
source
Earliest citation to Paine appears to be in "Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Communism Vol. XXIV". Not found in any of his works.
1 month 1 week ago

There is a left wing version of this longing for community... because in a liberal society we never move as quickly as we should towards full equality, and therefore there are many marginalized groups who feel that the liberal society is... hypocritical, that it's promising an equality of recognition, and of rights, but it is not delivering... and therefore the very concept of liberal universalism is challenged in favor of a definition of rights that is tied to the specific groups.

0
0
Source
source
18:44
3 months 1 week ago

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts!

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 8, Humanity
4 months 1 week ago

Don't say: "They must have something in common, or they would not be called 'games'" but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them, you won't see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that.

0
0
Source
source
To repeat: don't think, but look! § 66
2 months 4 weeks ago

There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism. ... The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy.

0
0
Source
source
Slavery and Freedom (1939), p. 147
4 months 2 weeks ago

Who could believe in prophecies of Daniel or of Miller that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds?

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Humanity may endure the loss of everything: all its possessions may be torn away without infringing its true dignity; - all but the possibility of improvement.

0
0
Source
source
"The Vocation of the Scholar" (1794), as translated by William Smith, in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889), Vol. I, Lecture IV, p. 188.

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia