Skip to main content
6 months 3 weeks ago

The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 1, § 17
6 months 3 weeks ago

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 22
4 months 1 week ago

Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once. One of a series of exchanges when Richard Owen repeated generally repudiated claims about the Gorilla brain in a Royal Institution lecture.

0
0
Source
source
Athenaeum (13 April 1861) p. 498; Browne Vol 2, p. 159
6 months 3 weeks ago

A gun gives you the body, not the bird.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson, in C. J. Woodbury (ed.) Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1890
3 months 3 weeks ago

We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word "admire" then means "marvel at."

0
0
Source
source
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
6 months 3 weeks ago

There can be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference elsewhere - no difference in abstract truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture II, What Pragmatism Means
6 months 3 weeks ago

The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's empires but is not the immutable universal law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth.

0
0
Source
source
March 4, 1831
7 months 3 weeks ago

The inexperienced in wisdom and virtue, ever occupied with feasting and such, are carried downward, and there, as is fitting, they wander their whole life long, neither ever looking upward to the truth above them nor rising toward it, nor tasting pure and lasting pleasures. Like cattle, always looking downward with their heads bent toward the ground and the banquet tables, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. In order to increase their possessions they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of steel and kill each other, insatiable as they are.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

A pair of statements may be taken conjunctively or disjunctively; for example, "It lightens and it thunders," is conjunctive, "It lightens or it thunders" is disjunctive. Each such individual act of connecting a pair of statements is a new monad for the mathematician.

0
0
Source
source
p. 268
5 months 2 weeks ago

The RIGHT OF NATURE, which Writers commonly call Jus Naturale, is the Liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life; and consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own Judgement, and Reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.

0
0
Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 14, p. 64
5 months 3 weeks ago

...what the freedom is that I love, and that to which I think all men intitled. It is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish Liberty. As if every Man was to regulate the whole of his Conduct by his own will. The Liberty I mean is social freedom. It is that state of things in which Liberty is secured by the equality of Restraint; A Constitution of things in which the liberty of no one Man, and no body of Men and no Number of men, can find Means to trespass on the liberty of any Person, or any description of Persons in the Society. This kind of liberty is indeed but another name for Justice, as ascertained by wise Laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Charles-Jean-François Depont (November 1789), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), p. 42

Not only must philosophy be in agreement with our empirical knowledge of Nature, but the origin and formation of the Philosophy of Nature presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics. However, the course of a science's origin and the preliminaries of its construction are one thing, while the science itself is another. In the latter, the former can no longer appear as the foundation of the science; here, the foundation must be the necessity of the Concept.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

0
0
Source
source
1841
7 months 3 days ago

Labour not after riches first, and think thou afterwards wilt enjoy them. He who neglecteth the present moment, throweth away all that he hath. As the arrow passeth through the heart, while the warrior knew not that it was coming; so shall his life be taken away before he knoweth that he hath it.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.

0
0
Source
source
The Genteel Tradition at Bay
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is no more evident that democratic institutions are to be measured by the sort of person they create than that they are to be measured against divine commands. ... Even if the typical character types of liberal democracies are bland, calculating, petty, and unheroic, the prevalence of such people may be a reasonable price to pay for political freedom.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

We cannot hope to be secure when our government has declared, by its readiness "to act alone," its willingness to be everybody's enemy.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the "meaning" of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.

0
0

One has to do something new in order to see something new.

0
0
Source
source
J 1770
7 months 3 days ago

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, Ch. 17
7 months 3 weeks ago

What a human being believes, however, no matter with what ardor, is not necessarily objective truth.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Somebody ought to make a historical study of the relations between theology and corporal punishment in childhood. I have a theory that, wherever little boys and girls are systematically flagellated, the victims grow up to think of God as - 'Wholly Other'... A people's theology reflects the state of its children's bottoms. Look at the Hebrews - enthusiastic child-beaters. And so were all good Christians in the Age of Faith. Hence Jehovah, hence Original Sin and the infinitely offended Father of Roman and Protestant orthodoxy. Whereas among Buddhists and Hindus education has always been nonviolent. No laceration of little buttocks - therefore Tat tvam asi, thou art That, mind from Mind is not divided.... Major premise: God is Wholly Other. Minor premise: man is totally depraved. Conclusion: Do to your children's bottoms what was done to yours, what your Heavenly Father has been doing to the collective bottom of humanity ever since the Fall: whip, whip, whip!

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

No artist can develop without increasing his self-knowledge; but self-knowledge supposes a certain preoccupation with the meaning of human life and the destiny of man. A definite set of beliefs - Methodist Christianity, for example - may only be a hindrance to development; but it is not more so than Beckett's refusal to think at all. Shaw says somewhere that all intelligent men must be preoccupied with either religion, politics, or sex. (He seems to attribute T. E. Lawrence's tragedy to his refusal to come to grips with any of them.) It is hard to see how an artist could hope to achieve any degree of self-knowledge without being deeply concerned with at least one of the three.

0
0
Source
source
p. 197
4 months 2 weeks ago

One naturally regrets not being an expert or one of those insiders who thoroughly understand. It's hell to be an amateur. A little reflection calms your sorrow, however. The experts in their own little speedboat, the rest of us floating with the rest of mankind in a great barge - that is the picture.

0
0
Source
source
The Day They Signed the Treaty (1979), p. 224
6 months 1 week ago

Reason not with him, that will deny the principal truths!

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

I'm not doing weekly videos anymore. Just once in a while I'll post a video here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzFA9pEGwgU

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.

0
0
Source
source
Mother to her young son, Act 1
6 months 2 weeks ago

Neither art nor wisdom may be attained without learning.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Kant stated that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge to make room for faith," but all he had "denied" was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought.

0
0
Source
source
p. 63
2 months 3 weeks ago

Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

0
0
Source
source
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front in Farming: A Hand Book
6 months 2 weeks ago

When I was a student in the 1950s, I read Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty. When you feel an overwhelming influence, you try to open a window. Paradoxically enough, Heidegger is not very difficult for a Frenchman to understand. When every word is an enigma, you are in a not-too-bad position to understand Heidegger. Being and Time is difficult, but the more recent works are clearer. Nietzsche was a revelation to me. I felt that there was someone quite different from what I had been taught. I read him with a great passion and broke with my life, left my job in the asylum, left France: I had the feeling I had been trapped. Through Nietzsche, I had become a stranger to all that.

0
0
Source
source
Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault
5 months 3 weeks ago

If there is a devil in human history, that devil is the principle of command. It alone, sustained by the ignorance and stupidity of the masses, without which it could not exist, is the source of all the catastrophes, all the crimes, and all the infamies of history.

0
0
Source
source
On the Program of the Alliance (1871), in Bakunin on Anarchy (1971), translated and edited by Sam Dolgoff Variant translation: If there is a devil in history, it is the power principle.
3 months 1 week ago

If the church had deadly sins, the state has capital crimes; if the one had heretics, the other has traitors; the one ecclesiastical penalties, the other criminal penalties; the one inquisitorial processes, the other fiscal; in short, there sins, here crimes, there inquisition and here - inquisition. Will the sanctity of the state not fall like the church's? The awe of its laws, the reverence for its highness, the humility of its 'subjects', will this remain? Will the 'saint's' face not be stripped of its adornment?

0
0
Source
source
Cambridge 1995, p. 211, 212
6 months 3 weeks ago

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

0
0
7 months ago

For a very small expence the public can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter I, Part III, Article II, p. 847.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But it cannot have been the sort of God that we need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted by Granville Hicks in The Living Novel: A Symposium (Macmillan, 1957; digitized version in 2006), p. ix
4 months 2 weeks ago

The book of the world, so richly studied by autodidacts, is being closed by the "learned," who are raising walls of opinions to shut the world out.

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

The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

But among all the discoveries and corrections probably none has resulted in a deeper influence on the human spirit than the doctrine of Copernicus.... Possibly mankind has never been demanded to do more, for considering all that went up in smoke as a result of realizing this change: a second Paradise, a world of innocence, poetry and piety: the witness of the senses, the conviction of a poetical and religious faith. No wonder his contemporaries did not wish to let all this go and offered every possible resistance to a doctrine which in its converts authorized and demanded a freedom of view and greatness of thought so far unknown indeed not even dreamed of.

0
0
Source
source
Zur Farbenlehre, Materialien zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre (1810), Frankfurt am Main, 1991, Seite 666.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Personally, people know themselves very poorly.

0
0
Source
source
Contributions to the analysis of the sensations (1897), translated by Cora May Williams, published by Open Court Publishing Company, p. 4
4 months 3 weeks ago

Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.

0
0
Source
source
Access, Issues 165-176, National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting, 1984, p. xxiii
5 months 2 weeks ago

Jesus said to His disciples, "Compare me to someone and tell Me whom I am like." Simon Peter said to Him, "You are like a righteous angel." Matthew said to Him, "You are like a wise philosopher." Thomas said to Him, "Master, my mouth is wholly incapable of saying whom You are like." Jesus said, "I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated by the bubbling spring which I have measured out." And He took him and withdrew and told him three things. When Thomas returned to his companions, they asked him, "What did Jesus say to you?" Thomas said to them, "If I tell you one of the things which he told me, you will pick up stones and throw them at me; a fire will come out of the stones and burn you up."

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 3, Ch. IX, State-Tamperings with Money and Banks
6 months 2 weeks ago

The pleasure is only for a little moment, and it [passes] like a dream, and a man at the end thereof finds death through knowing it.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim no. 18. Translated by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, Teaching Of Amenem Apt Son Of Kanekht (London: Martin Hopkinson and Company Ltd, 1924) p. 58

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia