Skip to main content
3 months 3 weeks ago

In Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thought, people have to love one another without knowing it.

0
0
1 month 2 days ago

There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 5

If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13.

0
0
Source
source
B 44
2 months 4 weeks ago

A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere... God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.

0
0
Source
source
p. 191
3 months 3 days ago

Oatmeal indeed supplies the common people of Scotland with the greatest and best part of their food, which is in general much inferior to that of their neighbours of the same rank in England.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter VIII, p. 91 (Oatmeal in England makes for great horses, in Scotland Great Men).
2 months 5 days ago

Well-filled and well-made are not mutually exclusive. 

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this kind of freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization. The technological processes of mechanization and standardization might release individual energy into a yet uncharted realm of freedom beyond necessity. The very structure of human existence would be altered; the individual would be liberated from the work world's imposing upon him alien needs and alien possibilities. The individual would be free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own.

0
0
Source
source
p. 2
1 month 2 weeks ago

Maurras, with perfect logic, is an atheist. The Cardinal [Richelieu], in postulating something whose whole reality is confined to this world as an absolute value, committed the sin of idolatry. ... The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State.

0
0
Source
source
p. 199

It is amusing to hear the modern Christian telling you how mild and rationalistic Christianity really is and ignoring the fact that all its mildness and rationalism is due to the teaching of men who in their own day were persecuted by all orthodox Christians.

0
0
Source
source
"Sources of Intolerance"
1 month 3 weeks ago

The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.

0
0
3 weeks 6 days ago

We may with advantage at times forget what we know.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 234

There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.

0
0
Source
source
"The Expanding Mental Universe", Saturday Evening Post, 7/1/1959

A new moral outlook is called for in which submission to the powers of nature is replaced by respect for what is best in man. It is where this respect is lacking that scientific technique is dangerous.

0
0
Source
source
Attributed to Russell at the end of Isaac Asimov's short story Franchise with no specific source given.
1 month 3 weeks ago

Government was intended to suppress injustice, but its effect has been to embody and perpetuate it.

0
0
Source
source
"Summary of Principles" 2.7
1 month 4 weeks ago

The supervision of the state extends to the lock upon the door, and there begins mine own. The lock is the boundary line between the power of the government and my own private power. It is the intention of locks to make possible self-protection. In my own house my person is sacred and inviolable even to the government. In civil cases government has no right to attack me in my house, but must wait till I am upon public ground.

0
0
Source
source
P. 324

I am ashamed of belonging to the species Homo Sapiens...You & I may be thankful to have lived in happier times - you more than I, because you have no children.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Lucy Donnelly, 6/23/1946
1 month 3 weeks ago

And having said this, Jesus smote his face with both his hands, and then smote the ground with his head. And having raised his head, he said: "Cursed be every one who shall insert into my sayings that I am the son of God." At these words the disciples fell down as dead, whereupon Jesus lifted them up, saying: 'Let us fear God now, if we would not be affrighted in that day.'

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 53
3 months 3 weeks ago

For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.

0
0

If a man own land, the land owns him.

0
0
Source
source
Wealth
1 month 3 weeks ago

Marx explains the alienation of labor as exemplified in, first, the relation of the worker to the product of his labor and, second, the relation of the worker to his own activity. P. 276

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. V: Democracy
1 month 3 weeks ago

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, sect. 6
1 month 1 week ago

We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transforming being at home to being in the world. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space. They render time habitable.

0
0

A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature, and it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured.

0
0

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared "that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow".

0
0
Source
source
Social Aims
2 months 4 weeks ago

If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.

0
0
Source
source
p. 8
3 months 1 week ago

Merit is a work for the sake of which Christ gives rewards. But no such work is to be found, for Christ gives by promise. Just as if a prince should say to me, "Come to me in my castle, and I will give you a hundred florins." I do a work, certainly, in going to the castle, but the gift is not given me as the reward of my work in going, but because the prince promised it to me.

0
0
Source
source
p. 409
1 month 3 weeks ago

Our life is no dream, but it should and perhaps will become one.

0
0
Source
source
Fragmente I, Magische Philosophie Variant: "Our life is no dream; but it ought to become one, and perhaps will." George MacDonald, Phantastes, epigraph to Chapter XXV
2 months 4 weeks ago

The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1, p. 10 [2012 reprint]
7 months 5 days ago

The symptom is not only a cyphered message, it is at the same time a way for the subject to organize his enjoyment - that is why, even after the completed interpretation, the subject is not prepared to renounce his symptom.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Sincerity is that whereby self-completion is effected, and its way is that by which man must direct himself.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Ethics occupies a central place in philosophy because it is concerned with sin, with the origin of good and evil and with moral valuations. And since these problems have a universal significance, the sphere of ethics is wider than is generally supposed. It deals with meaning and value and its province is the world in which the distinction between good and evil is drawn, evaluations are made and meaning is sought.

0
0
Source
source
The Destiny of Man (1931), p. 15
3 months 6 days ago

You're either excluding the right people or including the wrong people.

0
0
Source
source
ComfortDragon
1 month 1 week ago

It was the normal working of the antisuccess mechanism. In our overcrowded modern world a hit record, a best-selling book, a successful film, can reach more people in a week than Shakespeare or Beethoven reached in a whole lifetime. And so fame has become the most romantic, the most desirable of all commodities, the dream for which a modern Faust might sell his soul to the Devil. Once attained, fame is never as easy to hold on to as some people believe. The people who achieve fame by some accident of fashion are usually forgotten within a week; the ones who remain on top have to work to stay there. But few people understand this. The result is that anyone who achieves sudden notoriety arouses envy and hostility. The greater the success, the greater the reaction.

0
0
Source
source
p. 28
1 month 2 weeks ago

The "old maid" with her repressed cravings for tenderness, sex, and propagation, is rarely quite free of ressentiment. What we call "prudery," in contrast with true modesty, is but one of the numerous variants of sexual ressentiment. The habitual behavior of many old maids, who obsessively ferret out all sexually significant events in their surroundings in order to condemn them harshly, is nothing but sexual gratification transformed into ressentiment satisfaction. Thus the criticism accomplishes the very thing it pretends to condemn.

0
0
Source
source
L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 61-62
1 month 1 week ago

The terrible struggle of the thinking man and woman against political, social and moral conventions owes its origin to the family, where the child is ever compelled to battle against the internal and external use of force. The categorical imperatives: You shall! you must! this is right! that is wrong! this is true! that is false! shower like a violent rain upon the unsophisticated head of the young being and impress upon its sensibilities that it has to bow before the long established and hard notions of thoughts and emotions.

0
0
3 months ago

If this labourer were in possession of his own means of production, and was satisfied to live as a labourer, he need not work beyond beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 11, pg. 336.

I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away - yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ----------- and wanted to shoot myself.

0
0
2 months 3 weeks ago

Not only must people know, they must see with their own eyes. Because they must be made to be afraid; but also because they must be the witnesses, the guarantors, of the punishment, and because they must to a certain extent take part in it.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter One, pp.58
3 months ago

The weapon of criticism obviously cannot replace the criticism of weapons. Material force can only be overthrown by material force, but theory itself becomes a material force when it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses when it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem, when it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp things by the root, but for man the root is man himself. The clear proof of the radicalism of German theory, and hence of its political energy, is that it proceeds from the decisive positive abolition of religion.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted from David McLellan, Marx before Marxism, MacMillan, 1980, p. 150.
3 months 2 weeks ago

The superior man examines his heart, that there may be nothing wrong there, and that he may have no cause for dissatisfaction with himself. That wherein the superior man cannot be equaled is simply this, his work which other men cannot see.

0
0
2 months ago

To execute laws is a royal office; to execute orders is not to be a king. However, a political executive magistracy, though merely such, is a great trust.

0
0
Source
source
Volume iii, p. 497
3 months 3 weeks ago

O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer. Return to Tipasa (1954) Variant translation: In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Ever since the first World War, when the system of liberalism began to shape into the system of authoritarianism, a widespread opinion has blames Hegelianism for the ideological of the new system.

0
0
Source
source
P. 390
2 months 4 weeks ago

For the lesson of such stories [of resistance to Nazi atrocities] is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. XIV

Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

0
0
Source
source
Behavior

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia