Skip to main content
3 months 1 week ago

Lichtenberg ... held something of the following kind: one should neither affirm the existence of God nor deny it. ... It is not that he wished to leave certain perspectives open, nor to please everyone. It is rather that he was identifying himself, for his part, with a consciousness of self, of the world, and of others that was "strange" (the word is his) in a sense which is equally well destroyed by the rival explanations.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 45-46
2 months 2 weeks ago

The judge is condemned when the guilty is absolved.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 407 Adopted by the original Edinburgh Review magazine as its motto.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.

0
0
Source
source
December 26, 1839
4 months 3 weeks ago

I call upon you, young men, to obey your heart, and be the nobility of this land. In every age of the world, there has been a leading nation, one of a more generous sentiment, whose eminent citizens were willing to stand for the interests of general justice and humanity, at the risk of being called, by the men of the moment, chimerical and fantastic. Which should be that nation but these States? Which should lead that movement, if not New England? Who should lead the leaders, but the Young American?

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 1 (p. 14)
1 month 1 week ago

One crime has to be concealed by another.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

O ye of little faith, why reason ye among yourselves, because ye have brought no bread? Do ye not yet understand, neither remember the five loaves of the five thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? Neither the seven loaves of the four thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? How is it that ye do not understand that I spake it not to you concerning bread, that ye should beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees?

0
0
Source
source
16:8-11 (KJV)
4 months 3 weeks ago

I was looking at my furniture, not as the utilitarian who has to sit on chairs, to write at desks and tables, and not as the cameraman or scientific recorder, but as the pure aesthete whose concern is only with forms and their relationships within the field of vision or the picture space. But as I looked, this purely aesthetic, Cubist's-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the sacramental vision of reality. I was back where I had been when I was looking at the flowers-back in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance.

0
0
Source
source
describing his experiment with mescaline, p. 22
2 months 2 weeks ago

Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. I, ch. II.
2 months 3 weeks ago

All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States-and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in "An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Carey Horwitz, Library Journal, Apr. 15, 1973: 1131
4 months 3 weeks ago

The only man for whom Hitler had "unqualified respect" was "Stalin the genius," and while in the case of Stalin and the Russian regime we do not... have the rich documentary material that is available for Germany, we nevertheless know since Khrushchev's speech before the Twentieth Party Congress that Stalin trusted only one man and that was Hitler.

0
0
Source
source
Part 3, Ch. 10
4 months 3 weeks ago

I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.

0
0
Source
source
Greek Exercises (1888); at the age of fifteen, Russell used to write down his reflections in this book, for fear that his people should find out what he was thinking.
4 months 3 weeks ago

The proper study of mankind is books.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. XXVIII
3 months 3 weeks ago

The acts of France were acts of hostility to this country; her whole system, every speech, every decree, every act, bespoke an intention preclusive of accommodation. No man, he would venture to say, had a more lively sense of the importance of the question before the House, or of the evils of war, than himself. A war with France, under such circumstances as now governed her conduct, must be terrible, but peace much more so. A nation that had abandoned all its valuable distinctions, arts, sciences, religion, law order, every thing but the sword, was most formidable and dreadful to all nations composed of citizens who only used soldiers as a defence; as such, France should be resisted with spirit and temper, without fear or scruple.

0
0
Source
source
Speech in the House of Commons upon the outbreak of war with France (12 February 1793)
3 months 2 weeks ago

Are ye come out as against a thief with swords and staves for to take me? I sat daily with you teaching in the temple, and ye laid no hold on me. But all this was done, that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled.

0
0
Source
source
26:55-56 (KJV)
3 months 1 week ago

When we rise out of [the night] into the new life and there begin to receive the signs, what can we know of that which - of him who gives them to us? Only what we experience from time to time from the signs themselves. If we name the speaker of this speech God, then it is always the God of a moment, a moment God.

0
0
Source
source
Between Man and Man (1965), p. 15
4 months 3 weeks ago

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

0
0
Source
source
Loser Wins (Les Séquestrés d'Altona: A Play in Five Acts)
3 weeks 1 day ago

The equal rights of man, and the happiness of every individual, are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government. Modern times have the signal advantage, too, of having discovered the only device by which these rights can be secured, to wit: government by the people, acting not in person, but by representatives chosen by themselves, that is to say; by every man of ripe years and sane mind, who either contributes by his purse or person to the support of his country.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XV.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

0
0
2 weeks 5 days ago

Concentrate every minute like a Roman-like a man-on doing what's in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) II, 5
3 months 2 weeks ago

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

0
0
Source
source
The Message to the Planet (1989) p. 43.
2 months 2 weeks ago

A millennial belief in a Holy God may have the effect of deepening the soul, but it is also obviously archaic, and modern influences would presently bring me up to date and reveal how antiquated my origins were. To turn away from those origins, however, has always seemed to me an utter impossibility. It would be a treason to my first consciousness to un-Jew myself.

0
0
Source
source
Part I, p. 26
3 months ago

Part of what makes moral philosophy an anachronistic field is that its practitioners continue to argue in this very traditional and aprioristic way even though they themselves do not claim that one can provide a systematic and indubitable 'foundation' for the subject. Most of them rely on what are supposed to be 'intuitions' without claiming that those intuitions deliver uncontroversial ethical premises, on the one hand, or that they have an ontological or epistemological explanation of the reliability of those intuitions, on the other.

0
0
Source
source
How Not to Solve Ethical Problems
4 months 3 weeks ago

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to François-Joachim de Pierre, cardinal de Bernis, 23 April 1764
4 months 3 weeks ago

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

0
0
Source
source
September 26, 1859

I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 13. Of Experience
1 month 1 week ago

Insurrection, never so necessary, is a most sad necessity; and governors who wait for that to instruct them are surely getting into the fatalest courses,-proving themselves sons of Nox and Chaos, of blind Cowardice, not of seeing Valour! How can there be any remedy in insurrection? It is a mere announcement of the disease,-visible now even to sons of Night. Insurrection usually gains little; usually wastes how much. One of its worst kinds of waste, to say nothing of the rest, is that of irritating and exasperating men against each other, by violence done, which is always sure to be injustice done; for violence does even justice unjustly. Book I, Chap. III

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Children are made to learn bits of Shakespeare by heart, with the result that ever after they associate him with pedantic boredom. If they could meet him in the flesh, full of jollity and ale, they would be astonished, and if they had never heard of him before they might be led by his jollity to see what he had written. But if at school they had been inoculated against him, they will never be able to enjoy him. The same sort of thing applies to music lessons. Human beings have certain capacities for spontaneous enjoyment, but moralists and pedants possess themselves of the apparatus of these enjoyments, and having extracted what they consider the poison of pleasure they leave them dreary and dismal and devoid of everything that gives them value. Shakespeare did not write with a view to boring school-children; he wrote with a view to delighting his audiences. If he does not give you delight, you had better ignore him.

0
0
Source
source
Part III: Man and Himself, Ch. 20: The Happy Man, p. 201
2 weeks 4 days ago

The socialist system of society should only be, and can only be, an historical product, born out of the school of its own experiences, born in the course of its realization, as a result of the developments of living history, which - just like organic nature of which, in the last analysis, it forms a part - has the fine habit of always producing along with any real social need the means to its satisfaction, along with the task simultaneously the solution. However, if such is the case, then it is clear that socialism by its very nature cannot be decreed or introduced by ukase. It has as its prerequisite a number of measures of force - against property, etc. The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive, cannot. New Territory. A thousand problems. Only experience is capable of correcting and opening new ways.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter Six, "The Problem of Dictatorship"
3 months 5 days ago

This is a strange -- and rather alarming -- realisation. For it clearly implies that masturbation is one of our highest faculties that human beings have developed. Many animals masturbate -- but never without the presence of another animal, or some similar stimulus. A human being can masturbate in an empty room: a triumph of pure imagination.

0
0
Source
source
p. 90
4 months 3 weeks ago

If a big diamond is cut up into pieces, it immediately loses its value as a whole; or if an army is scattered or divided into small bodies, it loses all its power; and in the same way a great intellect has no more power than an ordinary one as soon as it is interrupted, disturbed, distracted, or diverted; for its superiority entails that it concentrates all its strength on one point and object, just as a concave mirror concentrates all the rays of light thrown upon it. Noisy interruption prevents this concentration. This is why the most eminent intellects have always been strongly averse to any kind of disturbance, interruption and distraction, and above everything to that violent interruption which is caused by noise; other people do not take any particular notice of this sort of thing.

0
0
Source
source
On Noise
3 months 2 weeks ago

Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.

0
0
Source
source
p. 14
3 months 3 weeks ago

What terrible tragedies realism inflicts on people.'

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

Who consciously throws himself into the water or onto the knife?

0
0
Source
source
Part 2, Chapter ?
3 months 2 weeks ago

We return to our analysis of qualities. Something preserves itself throughout this flux, something that passes into other things, but also stands against them as a being for itself. This something can exist only as the product of a process through which it integrates its otherness with its own proper being. Hegel says that its existence comes about through 'the negation of the negation.' The first negation is the otherness in which it turns, and the second is the incorporation of this other into its own self. Such a process presupposes that things possess a certain power over their movement, that they exist in a certain self-relation that enables them to 'mediate' their existential conditions.

0
0
Source
source
P. 132-133
3 months 3 weeks ago

Frugality is founded on the principle that all riches have limits.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

In our science and philosophy, even, there is commonly no true and absolute account of things. The spirit of sect and bigotry has planted its hoof amid the stars. You have only to discuss the problem, whether the stars are inhabited or not, in order to discover it.

0
0
Source
source
p. 490
1 month ago

These influences of my young childhood were greatest: 1, the mountain landscape, 2, my father the impossible idealist, and 3, the upringing of a closely-knit Christian home.

0
0
Source
source
Memoirs of an Octogenarian (1975), pp. 8-9
4 months 3 weeks ago

We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but as human beings, members of the species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks 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.
5 months 1 week ago

Thus intrigues and conspiracies do not arise, and thievery and robbery do not occur; therefore doors need never be locked.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes.

0
0
Source
source
April 9, 1841
4 months 3 weeks ago

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied - as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels - that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.

0
0
Source
source
Epilogue
5 months 1 week ago

The silent treasuring up of knowledge; learning without satiety; and instructing others without being wearied: which one of these things belongs to me? To keep silently in mind what one has seen and heard, to study hard and never feel contented, to teach others tirelessly; have I done (all of) these things?

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 8
3 months 2 weeks ago

A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock.

0
0
3 weeks 2 days ago

The essence of our God is obscure. It ripens continuously; perhaps victory is strenghened with our every valorous deed, but perhaps even all these agonizing struggles toward deliverance and victory are inferior to the nature of divinity. Whatever it might be, we fight on without certainty, and our virtue, uncertain of any rewards, acquires a profound nobility.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia