Skip to main content
5 months 2 weeks ago

The refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics.

0
0
Source
source
204
8 months 2 weeks ago

Worry means always and invariably inhibition of associations and loss of effective power. Of course, the sovereign cure for worry is religious faith; and this, of course, you also know. The turbulent billows of the fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed, and to him who has a hold on vaster and more permanent realities the hourly vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem relatively insignificant things. The really religious person is accordingly unshakable and full of equanimity, and calmly ready for any duty that the day may bring forth.

0
0
Source
source
"The Gospel of Relaxation"
7 months 2 weeks ago

Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times dearer to the man who is deprived of freedom. If money is jingling in his pocket, he is half consoled, even though he cannot spend it. But money can always and everywhere be spent, and, moreover, forbidden fruit is sweetest of all.

0
0
Source
source
The House of the Dead (1862) ch. 1; as translated by Constance Garnett (1915), p. 16
8 months 2 weeks 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 4 weeks ago

God may not play dice but he enjoys a good round of Trivial Pursuit every now and again.

0
0
Source
source
"God"
5 months 4 days ago

A good judge condemns wrongful acts, but does not hate them.

0
0
Source
source
De Ira (On Anger): Book 1, cap. 16, line 6.
6 months 2 weeks ago

The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 5, translated by David Patterson, 1983
4 months 2 weeks ago

The idea of living beings as subject to 'disease' includes a recognition of a Final Cause in organization; for disease is a state in which the vital forces do not attain their 'proper ends'.

0
0
7 months 5 days ago

Statistically, myth is on the right. There, it is essential, well-fed, sleek, expensive, garrulous, it invents itself ceaselessly. It takes hold of everything, all aspects of the law, of morality, of aesthetics, of diplomacy, of household equipment, of Literature, of entertainment.

0
0
Source
source
p. 148

Life can be tragic...personally I don't ignore this...the tragic aspects are horrible, and I'd never feel comfortable making a statement like this. This is Cioran's polar opposite...😂

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Empire is a very stimulating account of globalisation, but it is hopelessly wrong on two central issues. The state has not withered away. Strong states still exist-USA, China, Germany, etc-but the difference with the past is that there is now only one Empire and this is not the nebulous entity imagined by Cultural Studies, but a real, living organism and it has a name; the United States of America.

0
0
Source
source
Tariq Ali, How Bush Used 9/11 to Remap the World. CounterPunch, 8 July 2002.

I am of course confident that I will fulfil my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.

0
0
Source
source
Open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers' Congress (16 May 1967); as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz
6 months 1 week ago

I hold agitation to be essential, not only to the obtaining of good and just measures, but to the existence of a free Government itself. If you choose to adopt the principle of Bishop Horsley, that the people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them, then, indeed, you may deprecate agitation; but, while we live in a free country, and under a free Government, your deprecation is vain and untenable... I say that the slave-trade would never have been abolished without agitation. I say that slavery would never have been abolished without agitation... What is agitation when it is examined, but the mode in which the people in the great outer assembly debate?

0
0
Source
source
Speech in the House of Commons, 29 January 1840
8 months 2 weeks ago

When I say that this phase is necessary, the word phase is perhaps not the most rigorous one. It is not a question of a chronological phase, a given moment, or a page that one day simply will be turned, in order to go on to other things. The necessity of this phase is structural; it is the necessity of an interminable analysis: the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself. Unlike those authors whose death does not await their demise, the time for overturning is never a dead letter.

0
0
Source
source
p. 41-42
8 months 2 weeks ago

Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Look (New York, 23 February 1954). Cf. Russell (1928), Sceptical Essays
8 months 3 weeks ago

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mould.... The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbour causes a war betwixt princes.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, Ch. 12. Apology for Raimond Sebond
8 months 3 weeks ago

Certainly it is true that Christians, so far as they themselves are concerned, are subject neither to law nor sword, and have need of neither. But take heed and first fill the world with real Christians before you attempt to rule it in a Christian and evangelical manner. This you will never accomplish; for the world and the masses are and always will be un-Christian, even if they are all baptized and Christian in name.

0
0
Source
source
p. 91
7 months 2 weeks ago

Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

The habits of study acquired at Universities are of the highest importance in after-life. At the season when you are in young years the whole mind is, as it were, fluid, and is capable of forming itself into any shape that the owner of the mind pleases to order it to form itself into. The mind is in a fluid state, but it hardens up gradually to the consistency of rock or iron, and you cannot alter the habits of an old man, but as he has begun he will proceed and go on to the last.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

I suggest that scientific knowledge, though logically more articulate and far more complex, is of this sort. The books and teachers from whom it is acquired present concrete examples together with a multitude of theoretical generalizations. Both are essential carriers of knowledge, and it is therefore Pickwickian to seek a methodological criterion that supposes the scientist can specify in advance whether each imaginable instance fits or would falsify his theory.

0
0
Source
source
"Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?", Criticism and the growth of knowledge edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave
7 months 2 weeks ago

For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Virtue is the same for a man and for a woman.

0
0
Source
source
§ 5
8 months 2 weeks ago

I should like to believe my people's religion, which was just what I could wish, but alas, it is impossible. I have really no religion, for my God, being a spirit shown merely by reason to exist, his properties utterly unknown, is no help to my life. I have not the parson's comfortable doctrine that every good action has its reward, and every sin is forgiven. My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.

0
0
Source
source
Greek Exercises (1888), written two days after his sixteenth birthday.
5 months 1 week ago

He seldom or never spoke except actually to convey an idea. Measured by quantity of words, he was a talker of fully average copiousness; by extent of meaning communicated, he was the most copious I have listened to. How in few sentences he would sketch you off an entire biography, an entire object or transaction, keen, clear, rugged, genuine, completely rounded In! His words came direct from the heart by the inspiration of the moment.

0
0
7 months 1 week ago

Life, individual or collective, personal or historic, is the one entity in the universe whose substance is compact of danger, of adventure. It is, in the strict sense of the word, drama. ... The primary, radical meaning of life appears when it is employed in the sense not of biology, but of biography. For the very strong reason that the whole of biology is quite definitely only a chapter in certain biographies, it is what biologists do in the portion of their lives open to biography.

0
0
Source
source
Chap.IX: The Primitive and the Technical
8 months 2 weeks ago

Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 5
6 months 2 weeks ago

A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 245)
8 months 2 weeks ago

Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society.

0
0
Source
source
p. 6
4 months 3 weeks ago

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

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) by Alan L. Mackay, p. 35
8 months 2 weeks ago

It is impossible to pursue this nonsense any further.

0
0
Source
source
(Bastiat and Carey), p. 813 (last text page, second last line).
7 months 2 weeks ago

The people should never be deceived, under any pretext or for any purpose. It would not only be criminal but detrimental to the revolutionary cause, for deception of any kind, by its very nature, is shortsighted, petty, narrow, always sewn with rotten threads, so that it inevitably tears and is exposed.

0
0
Source
source
"Appendix A"
9 months 2 days ago

Love and the gracious heart are a single thing...one can no more be without the otherthan the reasoning mind without its reason.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XVI (tr. Mark Musa)
8 months 3 weeks ago

To this I answer: That force is to be opposed to nothing, but to unjust and unlawful force. Whoever makes any opposition in any other case, draws on himself a just condemnation, both from God and man...

0
0
Source
source
Second Treatise of Government, Ch. XVIII, sec. 204
8 months 2 weeks ago

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.

0
0
7 months 6 days ago

We men do nothing but lie and make ourselves important. Speech was invented for the purpose of magnifying all of our sensations and impressions - perhaps so that we could believe in them.

0
0
Source
source
Niebla [Mist]
9 months 1 week ago

The superior man has neither anxiety nor fear. When internal examination discovers nothing wrong, what is there to be anxious about, what is there to fear?

0
0
7 months 5 days ago

One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love - to serve the loved one without his knowing it - is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism.

0
0
Source
source
Last Notebook (1942) p. 84
7 months 3 weeks ago

There's a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime feelings and our purest tenderness.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville
7 months 2 weeks ago

Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!

0
0
6 months 2 weeks ago

Adversity shows whether we have friends, or only the shadows of friends.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 35
3 weeks 1 day ago

Taking some time to think about this....

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

A Natural Group is steadily fixed, though not precisely limited; it is given in position, though not circumscribed; it is determined, not by a boundary without, but by a central point within; -not by what it strictly excludes, but by what it eminently includes; - by a Type, not by a Definition.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

But why,' (some ask), 'why, if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?' Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality. One can see the principle at work in his characterization. Much that in a realistic work would be done by 'character delineation' is here done simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?

0
0
Source
source
p. 89
8 months 2 weeks ago

The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.

0
0
Source
source
p. 486

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia