Skip to main content
5 months 2 weeks ago

When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.

0
0
Source
source
Letter XIV
5 months 3 weeks ago

No more useful inquiry can be proposed than that which seeks to determine the nature and the scope of human knowledge. ... This investigation should be undertaken once at least in his life by anyone who has the slightest regard for truth, since in pursuing it the true instruments of knowledge and the whole method of inquiry come to light. But nothing seems to me more futile than the conduct of those who boldly dispute about the secrets of nature ... without yet having ever asked even whether human reason is adequate to the solution of these problems.

0
0
Source
source
Rules for the Direction of the Mind in Key Philosophical Writings (1997), pp. 29-30
4 months 1 week ago

But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.

0
0
Source
source
5:22, King James Version.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, p. x
2 months 3 weeks ago

A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provided they come close together.

0
0
Source
source
Recipe for a Good Film
3 months 1 week ago

All the measures now proposed are only a compromise with the errors of the present systems; but as these errors now almost universally exist, and must be overcome solely by the force of reason; and as reason, to effect the most beneficial purposes, makes her advance by slow degrees, and progressively substantiates one truth of high import after another, it will be evident, to minds of comprehensive and accurate thought, that by these and similar compromises alone can success be rationally expected in practice. For such compromises bring truth and error before the public; and whenever they are fairly exhibited together, truth must ultimately prevail.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Thought depends largely on the stomach. In spite of this, those with the best stomachs are not always the best thinkers.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Jean le Rond d'Alembert, 20 August 1770
5 months 2 weeks ago

Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?

0
0
Source
source
"The Will to Believe" p. 14
4 months 6 days ago

"There is no God," cry the masses more and more vociferously; and with the loss of God man loses his sense of values - is, as it were, massacred because he feels himself of no account.

0
0
2 months 5 days ago

Man is as young as the risks he takes.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2 : On Youth
6 months 2 weeks ago

After these matters we ought perhaps next to discuss pleasure. For it is thought to be most intimately connected with our human nature, which is the reason why in educating the young we steer them by the rudders of pleasure and pain; it is thought, too, that to enjoy the things we ought and to hate the things we ought has the greatest bearing on virtue of character. For these things extend right through life, with a weight and power of their own in respect both to virtue and to the happy life, since men choose what is pleasant and avoid what is painful; and such things, it will be thought, we should least of all omit to discuss, especially since they admit of much dispute.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

I took some pains to convince you that the Whigs, as a party in the state, were of the highest value to the public welfare, and constituted the party to which a liberal-minded and enlightened man would adhere.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to H. B. Rosser (7 March 1820), quoted in C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, Vol. II (1876), p. 263
5 months 3 weeks ago

The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

If there were no limits to human rationality administrative theory would be barren. It would consist of the single precept: Always select that alternative, among those available, which will lead to the most complete achievement of your goals.

0
0
Source
source
Simon (1945, p. 240); As cited in:
2 months 2 weeks ago

Some people steal from others, or defraud them, or enslave them, seizing their product and preventing them from living as they choose, or forcibly exclude others from competing in exchanges. None of these are permissible modes of transition from one situation to another.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 7 : Distributive Justice, Section I, The Entitlement Theory, p. 152
5 months 2 weeks ago

Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

No difference of rank, position, or birth, is so great as the gulf that separates the countless millions who use their head only in the service of their belly, in other words, look upon it as an instrument of the will, and those very few and rare persons who have the courage to say: No! my head is too good for that; it shall be active only in its own service; it shall try to comprehend the wondrous and varied spectacle of this world and then reproduce it in some form, whether as art or as literature, that may answer to my character as an individual.

0
0
Source
source
On Genius, Parerga and Paralipomena, Chapter III
4 months 2 weeks ago

Good order is the foundation of all good things.

0
0
6 months 1 day ago

Venerate the martyrs, praise, love, proclaim, honor them. But worship the God of the martyrs.

0
0
Source
source
273:9; translation from: The works of Saint Augustine, John E. Rotelle, New City Press, ISBN 1565480600 ISBN 9781565480605 p. 21
5 months 2 weeks ago

He asked my religion and I replied 'agnostic'. He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: 'Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God. This remark kept me cheerful for about a week.

0
0
4 months 6 days ago

It must be emphasized that the warrior spirit is one thing and the military spirit quite another. Militarism was unknown in the Middle Ages. The soldier signifies the degeneration of the warrior, corrupted by the industrialist. The soldier is an armed industrialist, a bourgeois who has invented gunpowder. He was organized by the state to make war on the castles. With his coming, long-distance warfare appeared, the abstract war waged by cannon and machine gun.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

If the importation of foreign cattle, for example, were made ever so free, so few could be imported, that the grazing trade of Great Britain could be little affected by it. Live cattle are, perhaps, the only commodity of which the transportation is more expensive by sea than by land.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II
4 months 2 weeks ago

Under the natural course of things each citizen tends towards his fittest function. Those who are competent to the kind of work they undertake, succeed, and, in the average of cases, are advanced in proportion to their efficiency; while the incompetent, society soon finds out, ceases to employ, forces to try something easier, and eventually turns to use.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 3, Ch. VII, Over-Legislation
5 months 1 week ago

We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed.

0
0
Source
source
Macquarrie & Robinson translation
3 months 1 week ago

My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Robert Fulford, 1964. Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 300

That man should think of God as nothingness must at first sight seem astonishing, must appear to us a most peculiar idea. But, considered more closely, this determination means that God is absolutely nothing determined. He is the Undetermined; no determinateness of any kind pertains to God; He is the Infinite. This is equivalent to saying that God is the negation of all particularity.

0
0
Source
source
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Lectures on the philosophy of religion, together with a work on the proofs of the existence of God. Vol 2 Translated from the 2d German ed. 1895 Ebenezer Brown Speirs 1854-1900, and J Burdon Sanderson p. 51
3 months 1 day ago

If a well were sunk at our feet in the midst of the city of Norwich, the diggers would very soon find themselves at work in that white substance almost too soft to be called rock, with which we are all familiar as "chalk".

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

Suffering, sad "female humanity!" What are these feelings which they are taught to consider as disgraceful, to deny to themselves? What form do the Chinese feet assume when denied their proper development? If the young girls of the "higher classes," who never commit a false step, whose justly earned reputations were never sullied even by the stain which the fruit of mere "knowledge of good and evil" leaves behind, were to speak, and say what are their thoughts employed upon, their thoughts, which alone are free, what would they say?

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Gaiety - a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

0
0
Source
source
"Diseases"
5 months 6 days ago

May we be those who shall heal this world.

0
0
Source
source
Yasna 30,9
2 months 1 week ago

From the point of view of the development of Marx's theories, his early journalistic writings are important for two main reasons. In his sharp attacks on the censorship law he spoke out unequivocally for the freedom of the Press, against the levelling effect of government restriction ('You don't expect a rose to smell like a violet; why then should the human spirit, the richest thing we have, exist only in a single form?'), and also expressed views concerning the whole nature of the state and the essence of freedom. Pointing out that the vagueness and ambiguity of the Press law placed arbitrary power in the hands of officials, Marx went on to argue that censorship was contrary not only to the purposes of the Press, but to the nature of the state as such.

0
0
Source
source
(pp. 120-1)
4 months 1 day ago

There is nothing that comes closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to feel pride in one's intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in the Introduction (by Siân Miles) p. 35
2 months 2 weeks ago

Some anarchists have claimed not merely that we would be better off without a state, but that any state necessarily violates people's moral rights and hence is intrinsically immoral. Our starting point then, though nonpolitical, is by intention far from nonmoral. Moral philosophy sets the background for, and boundaries of, political philosophy. What persons may and may not do to one another limits what they may do through the apparatus of a state, or do to establish such an apparatus.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1 : Why State of Nature Theory?; Political Philosophy, p. 6
2 months 6 days ago

I here, on the very threshold, protest against it in reference to Paganism, and to all other isms by which man has ever for a length of time striven to walk in this world. They have all had a truth in them, or men would not have taken them up. Quackery and dupery do abound; in religions, above all in the more advanced decaying stages of religions, they have fearfully abounded: but quackery was never the originating influence in such things; it was not the health and life of such things, but their disease, the sure precursor of their being about to die! Let us never forget this.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Because in the end particularity is a slanderous joke to deterministic universality.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Cut not fire with a sword. Symbol 9 Variant translation: Poke not the fire with a sword.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Short Sayings of Great Men: With Historical and Explanatory Notes‎ (1882) by Samuel Arthur Bent, p. 455
5 months 3 weeks ago

And to bring in a new word by the head and shoulders, they leave out the old one.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 5. Upon some Verses of Virgil
2 months 1 week ago

It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better.

0
0
Source
source
Part II. Ch. 2 : Mathematical Definitions and Education, p. 129
6 months 1 week ago

Anything could be found in figures if the search were long enough and hard enough and if the proper pieces of information were ignored or overlooked.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 33)
3 months 4 weeks ago

My theory was that we are all fundamentally 'multiple personalities', beginning with the baby and the child, and slowly developing into more complex selves. If, for some reason, we abruptly cease to develop -- through some trauma that undermines self-confidence -- all those potential personalities are stunted and repressed. And some accident or violent shock may give one of them the opportunity to 'take over'. This suggests, of course, that in some mysterious sense, our 'future' personalities are already there, in embryo, so to speak, and that they also develop as we mature. We move from personality to personality, as we might climb a ladder. The Beethovens and Leonardos got further up the ladder than most of us; yet even they failed to reach the top, as we can see if we study their lives.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 228- 229
4 months 1 week ago

Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.

0
0
Source
source
Fate
4 months 4 weeks ago

Every body is in place; but nothing essentially incorporeal, or any thing of this kind, has any locality.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.

0
0
Source
source
"Conversation Between D'Alembert and Diderot"
5 months 5 days ago

Let hopes and sorrows, fears and angers be, and think each day that dawns the last you'll see; For so the hour that greets you unforeseen, will bring with it enjoyment twice as keen.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, epistle iv, line 12 (translated by John Conington)
4 months 1 week ago

A philosophy has no private store of knowledge or methods for attaining truth, so it has no private access to good. As it accepts knowledge and principles from those competent in science and inquiry, it accepts the goods that are diffused in human experience. It has no Mosaic or Pauline authority of revelation entrusted to it. But it has the authority of intelligence, of criticism of these common and natural goods.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia