Skip to main content
6 months 6 days ago

Reason perhaps teaches certain bourgeois virtues, but it does not make either heroes or saints.

0
0
8 months 3 weeks ago
Most men are too concerned with themselves to be malicious.
0
0
6 months 2 days ago

It is the private dominion over things that condemns millions of people to be mere nonentities, living corpses without originality or power of initiative, human machines of flesh and blood, who pile up mountains of wealth for others and pay for it with a gray, dull and wretched existence for themselves. I believe that there can be no real wealth, social wealth, so long as it rests on human lives - young lives, old lives and lives in the making.

0
0
6 months 2 days ago

Witness the tragic condition of Russia. The methods of State centralization have paralysed individual initiative and effort; the tyranny of the dictatorship has cowed the people into slavish submission and all but extinguished the fires of liberty; organized terrorism has depraved and brutalized the masses and stifled every idealistic aspiration; institutionalized murder has cheapened human life, and all sense of the dignity of man and the value of life has been eliminated; coercion at every step has made effort bitter, labour a punishment, has turned the whole of existence into a scheme of mutual deceit, and has revived the lowest and most brutal instincts of man. A sorry heritage to begin a new life of freedom and brotherhood.

0
0
8 months 3 days ago

For he who is unmusical is a child in music; he who is without letters is a child in learning; he who is untaught, is a child in life.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, ch. 19, 6.
8 months 2 weeks ago

Universal is known according to reason, but that which is particular, according to sense...

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

Either Man will abolish war, or war will abolish Man.

0
0
Source
source
Fact and Fiction (1961), Part IV, Ch. 10: "Can War Be Abolished?", p. 276
6 months 2 weeks ago

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

Drunkenness is temporary suicide.

0
0
6 months 6 days ago

To believe in God is to long for His existence and, further, it is to act as if he existed; it is to live by this longing and to make it the inner spring of our action. This longing or hunger for divinity begets hope, hope begets faith, and faith and hope beget charity. Of this divine longing is born our sense of beauty, of finality, of goodness.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

The social product grows from year to year. Who is now the true creator of this surplus value which grows wildly and beyond any measure? Who can afford to figure out the profit yielded causally adequate by this immense wealth and the series of economic miracles? In concrete terms: who is the legitimate distributor of the social product and who actually assesses the shares in practical life? As long as the issue is about value, all such questions must above all be formulated as economic questions.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.

0
0
2 weeks 1 day ago

Written in 1975....

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he, who is cruel to living creatures, cannot be a good man. Moreover, this compassion manifestly flows from the same source whence arise the virtues of justice and loving-kindness towards men.

0
0
Source
source
Part III, Ch. VIII, 7, p. 223
6 months 2 weeks ago

Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

Now any dogma, based primarily on faith and emotionalism, is a dangerous weapon to use on others, since it is almost impossible to guarantee that the weapon will never be turned on the user.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Moral philosophers say things like, 'What is actually wrong with cannibalism?' There are two ways of responding to that: one is to shrink back in horror and say, 'Cannibalism! Cannibalism! We can't talk about cannibalism!' The other is to say, 'Well, actually, what is wrong with cannibalism?' Then you work it out and you tease it out and you decide yes, actually, cannibalism is wrong, but for the following reasons. So I'd like to think that my moral values at least partly come from reasoning. Trying to suppress the gut reaction as much as possible.

0
0
Source
source
Interview with Sophie Elmhirst (2015),
4 months 1 week ago

But, one will say, if raw experience can not legitimatize reasoning by recurrence, is it so of experiment aided by induction? We see successively that a theorem is true of the number 1, of the number 2, of the number 3 and so on; the law is evident, we say, and it has the same warranty as every physical law based on observations, whose number is very great but limited. But there is an essential difference. Induction applied to the physical sciences is always uncertain, because it rests on the belief in a general order of the universe, an order outside of us. Mathematical induction, that is, demonstration by recurrence, on the contrary, imposes itself necessarily, because it is only the affirmation of a property of the mind itself.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. I. (1905) Tr. George Bruce Halstead
4 months 1 week ago

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; 'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions'; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: 'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy'.

0
0
Source
source
p. 87; the quoted phrases within the quotation are from the Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 4; Book I, 7
7 months 2 weeks ago

A ruddy drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs, The world uncertain comes and goes; The lover rooted stays.

0
0
Source
source
Friendship

The man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life in his own.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

It is precisely because we can destroy that we are under an obligation to know why we ought not to do it, and to summon those countervailing powers that curb our destructive capacity. Nonviolence becomes an ethical obligation by which we are bound precisely because we are bound to one another; it may well be an obligation against which we rail, in which ambivalent swings of the psyche make themselves known, but the obligation to preserve the social bond can be resolved upon without precisely resolving that ambivalence. The obligation not to destroy each other emerges from, and reflects, the vexed social form of our lives, and it leads us to reconsider whether self-preservation is not linked to preserving the lives of others.

0
0
Source
source
p. 148
5 months 2 weeks ago

For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

0
0
Source
source
p. 85; "Magic that Changes Mood")
4 months ago

Whenever the therapist stands with society, he will interpret his work as adjusting the individual and coaxing his 'unconscious drives' into social respectability. But such 'official psychotherapy' lacks integrity and becomes the obedient tool of armies, bureaucracies, churches, corporations, and all agencies that require individual brainwashing. On the other hand, the therapist who is really interested in helping the individual is forced into social criticism. This does not mean that he has to engage directly in political revolution; it means that he has to help the individual in liberating himself from various forms of social conditioning, which includes liberation from hating this conditioning - hatred being a form of bondage to its object.

0
0
Source
source
p. 8
4 months 4 weeks ago

A lot of people recoil from the word "drugs" - which is understandable given today's noxious street drugs and their uninspiring medical counterparts. Yet even academics and intellectuals in our society typically take the prototypical dumb drug, ethyl alcohol. If it's socially acceptable to take a drug that makes you temporarily happy and stupid, then why not rationally design drugs to make people perpetually happier and smarter? Presumably, in order to limit abuse-potential, one would want any ideal pleasure drug to be akin - in one limited but important sense - to nicotine, where the smoker's brain finely calibrates its optimal level: there is no uncontrolled dose-escalation.

0
0
Source
source
"The Abolitionist Project", Talks given at the FHI (Oxford University) and the Charity International Happiness Conference, 2007
5 months 5 days ago

M. Comte's philosophy, in practice, might be compendiously described as Catholicism minus Christianity.

0
0
Source
source
On the Physical Basis of Life
7 months 1 week ago

Life's short span forbids us to enter on far reaching hopes.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, ode iv, line 15
7 months 2 weeks ago

That which is best about conservatism, that which, though it cannot be expressed in detail, inspires reverence in all, is the Inevitable.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

According to the technical language of old writers, a thing and its qualities are described as subject and attributes; and thus a man's faculties and acts are attributes of which he is the subject. The mind is the subject in which ideas inhere. Moreover, the man's faculties and acts are employed upon external objects; and from objects all his sensations arise. Hence the part of a man's knowledge which belongs to his own mind, is subjective: that which flows in upon him from the world external to him, is objective.

0
0
Source
source
Part I Of Ideas, Book I Of Ideas in General, Chap. 4 Of the Difference and Opposition of Sensation and Ideas
5 months 3 days ago

It is the indignity of being treated as disposable that pushes people towards religious fundamentalism in order to retrieve a sense of self, of meaning, of significance. This is why globalization breeds religious fundamentalism and free markets create terrorism and extremism, not democracy.

0
0
Source
source
(p80)
6 months 2 weeks ago

It cannot at this time be too often repeated; line upon line; precept upon precept; until it comes into the currency of a proverb, To innovate is not to reform.

0
0
Source
source
p. 20
7 months 1 week ago

With a malicious man carry on no conflict, and do not molest him in any way whatever.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.

0
0
Source
source
Attributed to Voltaire in Likharev, K.K. (2021). On Government and Politics. In: Likharev, K.K. (eds) Essential Quotes for Scientists and Engineers.
6 months 2 weeks ago

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

0
0

I feel this way myself...and it was thought to add abduction too...I respect academic philosophy...BUT...things could be radically changed and still be relevant....

0
0
6 months 5 days ago

It is not only in literature that fiction generates immorality. It does it also in life itself. For the substance of our life is almost exclusively composed of fiction. We fictionalize our future, and, unless we are heroically devoted to truth, we fictionalize our past, refashioning it to our taste. We do not study other people; we invent what they are thinking, saying, and doing. Reality provides us with some raw material, just as novelists often take a theme from a news item, but we envelop it in a fog in which, as in all fiction, values are reversed, so that evil is attractive and good is tedious.

0
0
Source
source
"Morality and literature," pp. 161-162
6 months 6 days ago

I would say that teleology is theology, and that God is not a "because," but rather an "in order to."

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

There is no city that is truly one other than this city that we are involved in bringing forth.

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

Compared to the refined culture of sclerotic forms and frames, which mask everything, the lyrical mode is utterly barbarian in its expression. Its value resides precisely in its savage quality: it is only blood, sincerity, and fire.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

You need to know enough philosophy so that the methods of logical analysis are available to you to be used as a tool. One of the most depressing things about educated people today is that so few of them, even among professional intellectuals, are able to follow the steps of a simple logical argument.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfillment. 

0
0
Source
source
July 18, 1867, Progress of Culture Phi Beta Kappa Address
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Kierkegaard, the Melancholy Dane (1950) by Harold Victor Martin.
4 months 5 days ago

What matters the party to me? I shall find enough anyhow who unite with me without swearing allegiance to my flag.

0
0
Source
source
Dover 2005, p. 236
8 months 2 weeks ago

When God chooses to let himself be born in lowliness, when he who holds all possibilities in his hand takes upon himself the form of a lowly servant, when he goes about defenseless and lets people do with him what they will, he surely must know well enough what he is doing and why he wills it; but for all that it is he who has people in his power and not they who have power over him-so history ought not play Mr. Malapert by this wanting to make manifest who he was.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Understanding why this doesn't discount critical thought, but creates critical questions is key to truly understanding this....

0
0
6 months 5 days ago

We believe we are rising because while keeping the same base inclinations (for instance: the desire to triumph over others) we have given them a noble object. We should, on the contrary, rise by attaching noble inclinations to lowly objects.

0
0
Source
source
La pesanteur et la grâce (1948), p. 61
7 months 3 weeks ago

In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural capacities which are directed to the use of his reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual.

0
0
Source
source
Second Thesis

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia