Skip to main content
5 months 1 day ago

When people were committed to the idea that in the field of religion only one plan must be adopted, bloody wars resulted. With the acknowledgment of the principle of religious freedom these wars ceased. The market economy safeguards peaceful economic co-operation because it does not use force upon the economic plans of the citizens. If one master plan is to be substituted for the plans of each citizen, endless fighting must emerge. Those who disagree with the dictator's plan have no other means to carry on than to defeat the despot by force of arms.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

Religion should be .... successively freed from all statutes based on history, and one purely moral religion rule over all, in order that God might be all in all. The veil must fall. The leading-string of sacred tradition with all its appendices becomes by degrees useless, and at last a fetter ... The humiliating difference between laymen and clergymen must disappear, and equality spring from true liberty. All this, however, must not be expected from an exterior revolution, which acts violently, and depends upon fortune In the principle of pure moral religion, which is a sort of divine revelation constantly taking place in the soul of man, must be sought the ground for a passage to the new order of things, which will be accomplished by slow and successive reforms.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in German Thought, From The Seven Years' War To Goethe's Death : Six Lectures (1880) by Karl Hillebrand, p. 208
9 months 1 week ago

Outside intelligences, exploring the Solar System with true impartiality, would be quite likely to enter the Sun in their records thus: Star X, spectral class G0, 4 planets plus debris.

0
0
9 months 2 weeks ago

I have gained this by philosophy ... I do without being ordered what some are constrained to do by their fear of the law.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Burden not the back of Aries, Leo, or Taurus, with thy faults, nor make Saturn, Mars, or Venus, guilty of thy Follies.

0
0
Source
source
Part III, Section VII
7 months 1 week ago

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

0
0
Source
source
A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970); 2001, p. 170.
6 months 1 week ago

The working classes may be injuriously degraded and oppressed in three ways: 1st - When they are neglected in infancy 2nd - When they are overworked by their employer, and are thus rendered incompetent from ignorance to make a good use of high wages when they can procure them. 3rd - When they are paid low wages for their labour.

0
0
Source
source
Two Memorials on Behalf of the Working Classes
6 months 4 weeks ago

Like Fichte, Brentano had one simple and powerful insight. He declared: there is a basic difference between a mental and physical act. if I slip on the snow and fall flat on my back, that is an unintentional physical act. But there is no such thing as an unintentional mental act. When I think, I have to think about something; I have to focus my mind on it. You could compare all mental acts (thinking, willing, loving, trying to remember something) to a searchlight beam stabbing into the darkness. There is an element of will, of 'intentionality,' in all mental activity. So it is quite inaccurate to compare mental activity to chemistry, or to a kind of drifting, like leaves on a stream. It flows purposefully or not at all.

0
0
Source
source
p. 35
5 months 3 weeks ago

Assume, provisionally at any rate, a utilitarian ethic. The abolitionist project follows naturally, in "our" parochial corner of Hilbert space at least. On its completion, if not before, we should aim to develop superintelligence to maximise the well-being of the fragment of the cosmos accessible to beneficent intervention. And when we are sure - absolutely sure - that we have done literally everything we can do to eradicate suffering elsewhere, perhaps we should forget about its very existence.

0
0
Source
source
Quantum Ethics? Suffering in the Multiverse, BLTC Research, 2008
4 months 5 days ago

No man can visualize four dimensions, except mathematically ... I think in four dimensions, but only abstractly. The human mind can picture these dimensions no more than it can envisage electricity. Nevertheless, they are no less real than electro-magnetism, the force which controls our universe, within, and by which we have our being.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

And of universal nature, the notion I would offer, should be something like this. Nature is the aggregate of the bodies, that make up the world, in its present state, considered as a principle, by virtue whereof, they act and suffer, according to the laws of motion, prescribed by the author of things.

0
0
Source
source
Sect. 2.
7 months 6 days ago

The demagogues, impresarios of alteracion, who have already caused the death of several civilizations, harass men so that they shall not reflect, see to it that they are kept herded together in crowds so that they cannot reconstruct their individuality in the one place where it can be reconstructed, which is in solitude.

0
0
Source
source
p. 33
8 months 2 weeks ago

Remorse sleeps during a prosperous period but wakes up in adversity. 

0
0
Source
source
Variant translations: Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity. Remorse goes to sleep during a prosperous period and wakes up in adversity.
7 months 2 weeks ago

The plea of anger or of drunkenness - as having placed the criminal for the moment beyond the control of his reason - relieves him from the charge of premeditated and malicious intent; but a rational legislation will rather provide more severe than milder punishment for such cases, particularly if such a state of mind is habitual with the accused; for a single unlawful act may well constitute an exception from an otherwise blameless life. But a person who pleads, "I habitually get so angry or so drunk as not to be any longer master of my senses!" confesses thereby that he changes himself into a beast on a fixed principle, and that he is, therefore, not fit to live among rational beings.

0
0
Source
source
P. 351
4 months 1 week ago

Opinion is so powerful in war that it can alter the nature of the same event and give it two different names, for no reason other than its own whim. A general throws his men between two enemy armies and he writes to his king, I have split him, he has lost. His opponent writes to his king, He has put himself between two fires, he is lost. Which of the two is mistaken? Whoever is seized by the cold goddess. Assuming that all things, especially size, are at least approximately equal, the only difference between the two positions is a purely moral one. It is imagination that loses battles.

0
0
Source
source
"Seventh Dialogue," p. 221
4 months 2 weeks ago

The government of the United States have no idea of paying their debt in a depreciated medium, and... in the final liquidation of the payments which shall have been made, due regard will be had to an equitable allowance for the circumstance of depreciation.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Jean Baptiste de Ternant, 1791. ME 8:247
6 months 1 week ago

They would receive the same care and attention as those who belong to the establishment. Nor will there be any distinction made between the children of those parents who are deemed the worst, and of those who may be esteemed the best members of society: indeed I would prefer to receive the offspring of the worst, if they shall be sent at an early age; because they really require more of our care and pity and by well-training these, society will be more essentially benefited than if the like attention were paid to those whose parents are educating them in comparatively good habits. On educating children of the poor, and of neighboring communities.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Nothing surpasses the pleasures of idleness: even if the end of the world were to come, I would not leave my bed at an ungodly hour.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.

0
0
6 months 1 day ago

All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.

0
0
Source
source
"On the Study of Biology"
8 months 2 weeks ago

The universe is the bible of a true Theophilanthropist. It is there that he reads of God. It is there that the proofs of his existence are to be sought and to be found. As to written or printed books, by whatever name they are called, they are the works of man's hands, and carry no evidence in themselves that God is the author of any of them. It must be in something that man could not make, that we must seek evidence for our belief, and that something is the universe; the true bible; the inimitable word, of God.

0
0
Source
source
A Discourse, &c. &c.
8 months 5 days ago

Mind is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing, but is alone itself by itself.

0
0
Source
source
Frag. B 12, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.
8 months 6 days ago

Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.

0
0
Source
source
p. 169.
7 months 3 weeks ago

This reasonable moderator, and equal piece of justice, Death.

0
0
Source
source
Section 38
9 months 1 week ago

Since those who rule in the city do so because they own a lot, I suppose they're unwilling to enact laws to prevent young people who've had no discipline from spending and wasting their wealth, so that by making loans to them, secured by the young people's property, and then calling those loans in, they themselves become even richer and more honored.

0
0
9 months 1 day ago

Thou hast made us for Thyself, and the heart never resteth till it findeth rest in Thee.

0
0
Source
source
p. 515
8 months 2 weeks ago

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.

0
0
Source
source
Part III: Man and Himself, Ch. 16: Ideas Which Have Become Obsolete, p. 158
8 months 2 weeks ago

No one has the right to obey.

0
0
Source
source
in a radio interview with Joachim Fest (9 November 1964)
5 months 5 days ago

Wisdom, if it were young, would cherish love, nursing it with devotion, deepening it with sacrifice, vitalizing with parentage, making all things subordinate to it till the end. Even though it consumes us in its service and overwhelms us with tragedy, even though it breaks us down with separations, let it be first. How can it matter what price we pay for love?

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2 : On Youth
8 months 2 weeks ago

Hypothetical liberty is allowed to everyone who is not a prisoner and in chains

0
0
Source
source
§ 8.23
8 months 2 weeks ago

I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.

0
0
Source
source
Letter (19 April 1951); published in Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966), p. 230
7 months 2 weeks ago

To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing.

0
0
8 months 4 weeks ago

This right which you have, is not founded any more than his upon any quality or any merit in yourself which renders you worthy of it. Your soul and your body are, of themselves, indifferent to the state of boatman or that of duke; and there is no natural bond that attaches them to one condition rather than to another.

0
0
6 months 4 days ago

A single breaker may recede; but the tide is evidently coming in.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 266-267

All science must start with some assumptions as to the ultimate analysis of the facts with which it deals. These assumptions are justified partly by their adherence to the types of occurrence of which we are directly conscious, and partly by their success in representing the observed facts with a certain generality, devoid of ad hoc suppositions.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 8: "The Quantum Theory", p. 189
6 months 3 weeks ago

To sum up: we have seen that of the three notions of 'partial interpretation' discussed, each is either unsuitable for Carnap's purposes (starting with observation terms), or incompatible with a rather minimal scientific realism; and, in addition, the second notion depends upon gross and misleading changes in our use of language. Thus in none of these senses is 'a partially interpreted calculus in which only the observation terms are directly interpreted' an acceptable model for a scientific theory.

0
0
Source
source
"What theories are not"
8 months 2 weeks ago

Jupiter: I committed the first crime by creating men as mortals. After that, what more could you do, you the murderers?

Aegisteus: Come on; they already had death in them: at most you simply hastened things a little.

0
0
Source
source
Act 2
7 months 1 week ago

No man's error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.

0
0
Source
source
The Second Part, Chapter 26, p. 144
7 months 2 weeks ago

By and large the literature of a democracy will never exhibit the order, regularity, skill, and art characteristic of aristocratic literature; formal qualities will be neglected or actually despised. The style will often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold. Writers will be more anxious to work quickly than to perfect details. Short works will be commoner than long books, wit than erudition, imagination than depth. There will be a rude and untutored vigor of thought with great variety and singular fecundity. Authors will strive to astonish more than to please, and to stir passions rather than to charm taste.

0
0
Source
source
Book One, Chapter XIII.
7 months 6 days ago

Now, apparently, many men are again feeling homesick for the herd. They devote themselves passionately to whatever there is left in them of the sheep. They want to march through life together, along the collective path, shoulder to shoulder, wool rubbing wool, and the head down. This is the reason why so many European peoples are looking for a shepherd and a sheep dog.

0
0
Source
source
p. 170
8 months 1 week ago

The world is all that is the case.

0
0
Source
source
(1) Original German: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.
5 months 3 weeks ago

There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.

0
0
Source
source
Fellini on Fellini (1976) edited by Anna Keel and Christian Strich; translated by Isabel Quigly.
8 months 2 weeks ago

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 13: Freedom in Society
8 months 6 days ago

It is now generally accepted that the roots of our ethics lie in patterns of behavior that evolved among our pre-human ancestors, the social mammals and that we retain within our biological nature elements of these evolved responses. We have learned considerably more about these responses, and we are beginning to to understand how they interact with our capacity to reason.

0
0
Source
source
Preface To The 2011 edition, p. xi

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia