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3 months 4 weeks ago

It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows, into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain, must be obtained by their charms and weakness.

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Ch. 4
5 months 2 days ago

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

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Ch. 12: Free Thought and Official Propaganda
2 months 3 weeks ago

There are evils, as someone has pointed out, that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever - money, for instance, or war.

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The Dean's December (1982) [Penguin Classics, 1998, ISBN 0-140-18913-0], ch. 13, p. 140
4 months 2 days ago

And now I ask, whether, with this map of misgovernment before me, I can suppose myself bound by my vote to continue, upon any principles of pretended public faith, the management of these countries in those hands? If I kept such a faith (which in reality is no better than a fides latronum) with what is called the Company, I must break the faith, the covenant, the solemn, original, indispensable oath, in which I am bound, by the eternal frame and constitution of things, to the whole human race.

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Speech in the House of Commons on India (1 December 1783), quoted in The Parliamentary Register: Or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons, Volume XII (1782), p. 247

Fundamental ideas play the most essential role in forming a physical theory. Books on physics are full of complicated mathematical formulae. But thought and ideas, not formulae, are the beginning of every physical theory. The ideas must later take the mathematical form of a quantitative theory, to make possible the comparison with experiment.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

When the British came there was, throughout India, a system of communal schools, managed by the village communities. The agents of the East India Company destroyed these village communities, and took steps to replace the schools; even today, after a century of effort to restore them, they stand at only 66% of their number a hundred years ago. Hence, the 93 % illiteracy of India.

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(source: The Case for India - By Will Durant Simon and Schuster, New York. 1930 p.44).
1 month 1 day ago

In Deductive Reasoning, we cannot have any truth in the conclusion which is not virtually contained in the premises.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. 'Know thyself:' long enough has that poor 'self' of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to 'know' it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war. Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed.

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Totality and Infinity
1 month 1 week ago

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

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As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) by Alan L. Mackay, p. 35
1 month 1 week ago

Have you really looked at a seashell? There's not an aesthetic fault in it anywhere - it's absolutely perfect. Now, do you think that shells look at each other and critique each other's appearance? "Well, your markings are a little crooked and not very well spaced." Of course not, but that's what we do. Every one of us is marvellous and complicated and interesting and gorgeous just as we are. Really take a look at another person's eyes. They are jewelry beyond compare - just beautiful!

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p. 42
3 months 4 weeks ago

The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

I am often accused of expressing contempt and despising religious people. I don't despise religious people, I despise what they stand for. I like to quote the British journalist Johann Hari who said, "I have so much respect for you, that I cannot respect your ridiculous ideas."

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Reason Rally, National Mall, Washington, DC, 2012-03-24 Richard Dawkins and his Foundation at the Reason Rally, YouTube, 7 April 2012

It needs to realize that what happens to everyone-bad and good alike-is neither good nor bad.

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(Hays translation) IV, 39
3 months 4 weeks ago

What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!

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4 months 3 weeks ago

I have enough to eat till my hunger is stayed, to drink till my thirst is sated; to clothe myself withal; and out of doors not Callias there, with all his riches, is more safe than I from shivering; and when I find myself indoors, what warmer shirting do I need than my bare walls? what ampler greatcoat than the tiles above my head?

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iv. 34
2 months 3 weeks ago

Conquered people tend to be witty.

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Mr. Sammler's Planet, (1976), p. 98
4 months 2 days ago

Nor is there any embarrassment in the fact that we're ridiculous, isn't it true? For it's actually so, we are ridiculous, light-minded, with bad habits, we're bored, we don't know how to look, how to understand, we're all like that, all, you, and I, and they! Now, you're not offended when I tell you to your face that you're ridiculous? And if so, aren't you material? You know, in my opinion it's sometimes even good to be ridiculous, if not better: we can the sooner forgive each other, the sooner humble ourselves; we can't understand everything at once, we can't start right out with perfection! To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well. This I tell you, you, who have already been able to understand. .. and not understand ... so much. I'm not afraid for you now.

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Part 4, Chapter ?
5 months 3 weeks ago

Corpses are more fit to be cast out than dung.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

This idea is that laws which purport to be statements of what actually occurs are statistical in character as distinct from so-called dynamic laws that are abstract and mathematical, and disguised definitions. Recognition of the statistical nature of physical laws was first effected in the case of gases when it became evident that generalizations regarding the behavior of swarms of molecules were not descriptions or predictions of the behavior of any individual particle. A single molecule is not and cannot be a gas. It is consequently absurd to suppose that a scientific law is about the elementary constituents of a gas. It is a statement of what happens when a large number of such constituents interact with one another under certain conditions.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Other vices can be concealed and cherished in secret; anger shows itself openly and appears in the countenance, and the greater it is, the more plainly it boils forth. Do you not see how in all animals certain signs appear before they proceed to mischief, and how their entire bodies put off their usual quiet appearance and stir up their ferocity? Boars foam at the mouth and sharpen their teeth by rubbing them against trees, bulls toss their horns in the air and scatter the sand with blows of their feet

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3 months 1 week ago

I believe that none can "save" his fellow man by making a choice for him. To help him, he can indicate the possible alternatives, with sincerity and love, without being sentimental and without illusion. The knowledge and awareness of the freeing alternatives can reawaken in an individual all his hidden energies and put him on the path to choosing respect for "life" instead of for "death."

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2 months 1 week ago

Some days will be sublime. Others will be merely wonderful. But critically, there will be one particular texture ("what it feels like") of consciousness that will be missing from our lives; and that will be the texture of nastiness.

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"Feeling Groovy, Forever", Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 14 Mar. 2012
5 months 3 weeks ago

There are only the wise of the highest class, and the stupid of the lowest class, who cannot be changed.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

British rule in India is the most sordid and criminal exploitation of one nation by another in all recorded history. I propose to show that England has year by year been bleeding India to the point of death, and that self-government of India by the Hindus could not within any reasonable probability, have worse results than the present form of alien domination.

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5 months 2 days ago

Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man.

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p. 486
5 months 1 day ago

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

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Quotation and Originality
5 months 1 week ago

No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port.

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Book II, Ch. 1
3 months 4 weeks ago

The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness.

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2 months 1 week ago

We should always speak what would please the man of whom we expect a favour, like the hunter who sings sweetly when he desires to shoot a deer.

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...and if you are common, you can dress up as a woman, show you behind or write poems: there's nothing offensive about a naked behind if it's everybody's; each person will be mirrored in it.

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p. 463
3 months 4 weeks ago

Love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other. p. 111, first American edition

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1970
5 months 2 weeks ago

Life is one long struggle in the dark.

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Book II, line 54 (tr. Rouse)
1 month 3 weeks ago

Such parliamentary bagpipes I myself have heard play tunes, much to the satisfaction of the people.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The concept of freedom, as the Philosophy of Right has shown, follows the pattern of free ownership. As a result, the history of the world that Hegel looks out upon exalts and enshrines the history of the middle-class, which based itself on this pattern. There is a stark truth in Hegel's strangely certain announcement that history has reached its end. But it announces the funeral of a class, not of history.

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P. 227
1 month 1 day ago

I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.

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Letter to William Ludlow
1 month 1 week ago

I want to make one thing absolutely clear. I am not a Zen Buddhist, I am not advocating Zen Buddhism, I am not trying to convert anyone to it. I have nothing to sell. I'm an entertainer. That is to say, in the same sense, that when you go to a concert and you listen to someone play Mozart, he has nothing to sell except the sound of the music. He doesn't want to convert you to anything. He doesn't want you to join an organization in favor of Mozart's music as opposed to, say, Beethoven's. And I approach you in the same spirit as a musician with his piano or a violinist with his violin. I just want you to enjoy a point of view that I enjoy.

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Alan Watts, on Zen

Is any man afraid of change? Why what can take place without change?

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VII, 18
2 months 3 weeks ago

We should be clear that neither genuine religious nor genuine moral impulses will ever be expressed in terms that tie the two essentially together. If you view religion as necessary for ethics, you've reduced us to the ethical level of 4 year olds. "If you follow these commandments you'll go to heaven, if you don't' you'll burn in hell" is just a spectacular version of the carrots and sticks with which you raise your children.

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Remember that all is opinion.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

These things, which we state lightly enough here, are yet of deep import, and indicate a mighty change in our whole manner of existence. For the same habit regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions, for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.

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1 month 1 day ago

As pure a son of liberty as I have ever known.

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Statement about Tadeusz Kościuszko, in a letter to Horatio Gates

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