Skip to main content
4 months 3 weeks ago

I may as well say at once that I do not distinguish between inference and deduction. What is called induction appears to me to be either disguised deduction or a mere method of making plausible guesses.

0
0
Source
source
Principles of Mathematics (1903), Ch. II: Symbolic Logic, p. 11
5 months 1 week ago

For no fact is so simple we believe it at first sight, And there is nothing that exists so great or marvellous That over time mankind does not admire it less and less.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, lines 1026-1029 (tr. Stallings)
4 months 3 weeks ago

The fault of the utilitarian doctrine is that it mistakes impersonality for impartiality.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, Section 30, pg. 190
5 months 3 weeks ago
Perhaps no philosopher is more correct than the cynic. The happiness of the animal, that thorough cynic, is the living proof of cynicism.
0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

A man of intellect is like an artist who gives a concert without any help from anyone else, playing on a single instrument - a piano, say, which is a little orchestra in itself. Such a man is a little world in himself; and the effect produced by various instruments together, he produces single-handed, in the unity of his own consciousness. Like the piano, he has no place in a symphony; he is a soloist and performs by himself - in solitude, it may be; or if in the company with other instruments, only as principal; or for setting the tone, as in singing.

0
0

The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. IV, sec. 3, ch. 3
2 months 3 weeks ago

Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: 'what shall we do and how shall we live.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted by Max Weber in his lecture "Science as a Vocation"; in Lynda Walsh (2013)
4 months 3 weeks ago

This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise or, at least, neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.

0
0
Source
source
Section III, Chap. III.
1 month 2 weeks ago

With exceptions so rare they are regarded as miracles of nature, successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular-not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.

0
0
Source
source
p. 27
2 months 3 weeks ago

It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 469
3 months 2 weeks ago

Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts.

0
0
Source
source
p. 15
4 months 3 weeks ago

Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. III, Ch. L, Illusions Created by Competition, p. 866.
1 month 1 week ago

If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.

0
0
Source
source
Planning for Freedom (1952), p. 44
1 month 1 week ago

Criticism actually says: You must free your I so completely from all limitations that it becomes a human I. I say: Free yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; because it is not given to everyone to break through all limits, or, more eloquently: that is not a limit for everyone which is one to the others. Consequently, don't exhaust yourself on the limits of others; it's enough if you tear down your own. Who has ever been able to break down even one limit for all people? Aren't countless people today, as at all times, running around with all the "limitations of humanity"? One who overturns one of his limits may have shown others the way and the means; the overturning of their limits remains their affair.

0
0
Source
source
Landstreicher 2017, p. 97
2 months 2 weeks ago

You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with someone else.

0
0
Source
source
Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 1. Cornhill Magazine,
2 months 3 weeks ago

Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 14)
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

0
0
Source
source
"Rights", 1771
3 weeks 3 days ago

With respect to the new Government, nine or ten States will probably have accepted by the end of this month. The others may oppose it. Virginia, I think, will be of this number. Besides other objections of less moment, she will insist on annexing a bill of rights to the new Constitution, i.e. a bill wherein the Government shall declare that, 1. Religion shall be free; 2. Printing presses free; 3. Trials by jury preserved in all cases; 4. No monopolies in commerce; 5. No standing army. Upon receiving this bill of rights, she will probably depart from her other objections; and this bill is so much to the interest of all the States, that I presume they will offer it, and thus our Constitution be amended, and our Union closed by the end of the present year.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Mr. Dumas
3 weeks 1 day ago

Political thought and political instinct prove themselves theoretically and practically in the ability to distinguish friend and enemy. The high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

An empire derives no advantage from the caresses of two turtledoves who spend a year cooing to each other in public meetings.

0
0
Source
source
Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World, J. Beecher (1986), p. 315
1 month 2 weeks ago

Woman is degraded and made to believe that nature destined her exclusively to menial domestic labors, which in the combined order will be so abridged as to be performed without oppression to either sex.

0
0
Source
source
The Theory of Social Organization
4 months 3 weeks ago

Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.

0
0
Source
source
Social Aims
2 months 3 weeks ago

Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.

0
0
3 weeks 2 days ago

In 'voluntary' motions, Sensations produce Actions, and the connexion is made by means of Ideas: in 'reflected' motions, the connexion neither seems to be nor is made by means of Ideas: in 'instinctive' motions, the connexion is such as requires Ideas, but we cannot believe the Ideas to exist.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

I suggest that scientific knowledge, though logically more articulate and far more complex, is of this sort. The books and teachers from whom it is acquired present concrete examples together with a multitude of theoretical generalizations. Both are essential carriers of knowledge, and it is therefore Pickwickian to seek a methodological criterion that supposes the scientist can specify in advance whether each imaginable instance fits or would falsify his theory.

0
0
Source
source
"Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?", Criticism and the growth of knowledge edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave
1 week 6 days ago

I lie on the beach like a crocodile and let myself be roasted by the sun. I never see a newspaper and don't give a damn for what is called the world.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 1, § 1
5 months 2 weeks ago

One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

The men of England - the men, I mean of light and leading in England.

0
0
Source
source
Volume iii, p. 365
4 months 3 weeks ago

The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

It is odd that the last twenty-five years which have witnessed the greatest progress ever made in physical science-the greatest victories ever achieved by mind over matter-should have produced hardly a volume that will be remembered in 1900.

0
0
Source
source
Journal entry (9 March 1850), quoted in Thomas Macaulay, The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay: Volume 5, January 1849-December 1855, ed. Thomas Pinney (1981), p. 99
3 weeks 3 days ago

I said only one word, brought only one message: Love. Love - nothing else.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

The Word takes to Himself one man, for He takes unity. He does not take schisms to Himself, nor does He take heresies. So it is one man who is taken, and his Head is Christ. This is that "blessed man who hath not walked in the council of the ungodly" (Ps. 1:1); this is he that is assumed. He is not outside of us. Let us be in Him, and we shall be assumed; let us be in Him, and we shall be chosen. Therefore this one man that is taken to become the temple of God, is at once many and one.

0
0
Source
source
p.430
4 months 3 weeks ago

Childish and altogether ludicrous is what you yourself are and all philosophers; and if a grown-up man like me spends fifteen minutes with fools of this kind, it is merely a way of passing the time. I've now got more important things to do. Goodbye!

0
0
Source
source
Thrasymachus, in On the Indestructibility of our Essential Being by Death, in Essays and Aphorisms (1970) as translated by R. J. Hollingdale, p. 76
4 months 3 weeks ago

At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 12 (p. 116)

Man is an enigma whose knot has not ceased to occupy observers. The contradictions that he contains astonish reason and impose silence on it. So what is this inconceivable being who carries within him powers that clash and who is obliged to hate himself in order to esteem himself?

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

Let another say. "Perhaps the worst will not happen." You yourself must say. "Well, what if it does happen? Let us see who wins! Perhaps it happens for my best interests; it may be that such a death will shed credit upon my life."

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Apparently the rise of consciousness is linked to certain kinds of privation. It is the bitterness of self-consciousness that we knowers know best. Critical of the illusions that sustained mankind in earlier times, this self-consciousness of ours does little to sustain us now. The question is: which is disenchanted, the world itself or the consciousness we have of it?

0
0
Source
source
A Matter of the Soul (1975), pp. 75-76
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.

0
0
Source
source
A 727, B 755
2 months 3 weeks ago

Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.

0
0
Source
source
"The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary" (1993), later published in The Judith Butler Reader (2004) edited by Sarah Salih with Judith Butler
3 months 4 weeks ago

We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.

0
0
Source
source
Section 9
3 months 2 weeks ago

Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

0
0
Source
source
Matthew 7:20 (KJV)
4 months 3 weeks ago

The consequences of beliefs that go against the providence of a perfectly good, wise, and just God, or against that immortality of souls which lays them open to the operations of justice.... I even find that somewhat similar opinions, by stealing gradually into the minds of men of high station who rule the rest and on whom affairs depend, and by slithering into fashionable books, are inclining everything toward the universal revolution with which Europe is threatened, and are completing the destruction of what still remains in the world of the generous Greeks and Romans who placed love of country and of the public good, and the welfare of future generations before fortune and even before life.

0
0
Source
source
Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain, 1704
2 weeks 6 days ago

The mind which is free from passions is a citadel, for man has nothing more secure to which he can fly for refuge and for the future be inexpugnable. He then who has not seen this is an ignorant man: but he who has seen it and does not fly to this refuge is unhappy.

0
0
Source
source
VIII, 48

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia