Skip to main content
6 months 3 days ago

To none is life given in freehold; to all on lease.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, line 971 (tr. R. E. Latham)
5 months 3 weeks ago

That of beaver skins, of beaver wool, and of gum Senega, has been subjected to higher duties; Great Britain, by the conquest of Canada and Senegal, having got almost the monopoly of those commodities.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter II, Part II, Article IV, p. 954-955.
2 months 1 week ago

I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.

0
0

We set the treatment of bodies so high above the treatment of souls, that the physician occupies a higher place in society than the school-master. The governess is to have every one of God's gifts; she is to do that which the mother herself is incapable of doing; but our son must not degrade himself by marrying the governess, nor our daughter the tutor, though she might marry the medical man.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.

0
0
Source
source
What Modern Liberty Means, p. 64
5 months 1 week ago

Rather, we heirs of Enlightenment think of enemies of liberal democracy like Nietzsche or Loyola as, to use Rawls's word, "mad." We do so because there is no way to see them as fellow citizens of our constitutional democracy, people whose life plans might, given ingenuity and good will, be fitted in with those of other citizens. They are crazy because the limits of sanity are set by what we can take seriously. This, in turn, is determined by our upbringing, our historical situation.

0
0
4 months 2 days ago

The pornographic face says nothing. It has no expressivity or mystery.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

The ethical life... is maintained in being by a common culture, which also upholds the togetherness of society... Unlike the modern youth culture, a common culture sanctifies the adult state, to which it offers rites of passage.

0
0
Source
source
"Idle Hands" (p. 127)
5 months 3 weeks ago

If pains be to be taken to give him a manly air and assurance betimes, it is chiefly as a fence to his virtue when he goes into the world under his own conduct.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 70
5 months 3 weeks ago

All that is under heaven, says the sage, runs one law and one fortune.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
5 months 3 weeks ago

A witty saying proves nothing.

0
0
Source
source
Le dîner du comte de Boulainvilliers (1767): Deuxième Entretien
1 month 2 weeks ago

It is an axiom in my mind, that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the State to effect, and on a general plan.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to George Washington
2 months 4 days ago

Just as the schoolmen philosophized only inside the belief of the church, ... without ever throwing a doubt upon this belief; as authors fill whole folios on the State without calling in question the fixed idea of the State itself; as our newspapers are crammed with politics because they are conjured into the fancy that man was created to be a zoon politicon,-so also subjects vegetate in subjection, virtuous people in virtue, liberals in humanity, etc., without ever putting to these fixed ideas of theirs the searching knife of criticism. Undislodgeable, like a madman's delusion, those thoughts stand on a firm footing, and he who doubts them-lays hands on the sacred!

0
0
Source
source
Cambridge 1995, p. 44
4 months 2 weeks ago

I should not be surprized at seeing a French Army conveyed by a British Navy to an attack upon this Kingdom.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to French Laurence (12 May 1797) after hearing of the mutinies in the Royal Navy, quoted in R. B. McDowell (ed.)
1 month 2 weeks ago

There is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Henry Lee
6 months 2 weeks ago

A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

But perhaps I lack the gift. I see I've described her as being like a sword. That's true as far as it goes. But utterly inadequate by itself, and misleading. I ought to have said 'But also like a garden. Like a nest of gardens, wall within wall, hedge within hedge, more secret, more full of fragrant and fertile life, the further you explore.' And then, of her, and every created thing I praise, I should say 'in some way, in its unique way, like Him who made it.' Thus up from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith. to the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

If torture was so strongly embedded in legal practice, it was because it revealed truth and showed the operation of power. It assured the articulation of the written on the oral, the secret on the public, the procedure of investigation on the operation of the confession; it made it possible to reproduce the crime on the visible body of the criminal.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter One, pp.55
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.

0
0
Source
source
The Jefferson Lectures (1977), p. 139
4 months 1 week ago

Nationalism is always an effort in a direction opposite to that of the principle which creates nations. The former is exclusive in tendency, the latter inclusive. In periods of consolidation, nationalism has a positive value, and is a lofty standard. But in Europe everything is more than consolidated, and nationalism is nothing but a mania, a pretext to escape from the necessity of inventing something new, some great enterprise.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XIV: Who Rules The World?
5 months 1 week ago

This investigation aims to analyze the type "bourgeois public sphere". Its particular approach is required, to begin with, by the difficulties specific to an object whose complexity precludes exclusive reliance on the specialized methods of a single discipline. Rather, the category. "public sphere" must be investigated within the broad field formerly reflected in the perspective of the traditional science of "politics."' When particular social-scientific discipline, this object disintegrates. The problems that result from fusing aspects of sociology and economics, of constitutional law and political science, and of social and intellectual history are obvious: given the present state of differentiation and specialization in the social sciences, scarcely anyone will be able to master several, let alone all, of these disciplines.

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

Supply and demand constantly determine the prices of commodities; never balance, or only coincidentally; but the cost of production, for its part, determines the oscillations of supply and demand.

0
0
Source
source
Notebook I, The Chapter on Money, p. 58.
5 months 6 days ago

Agesilaus was very fond of his children; and it is reported that once toying with them he got astride upon a reed as upon a horse, and rode about the room; and being seen by one of his friends, he desired him not to speak of it till he had children of his own.

0
0
Source
source
Of Agesilaus the Great
4 months 2 days ago

Rituals are also symbolic practices... in the sense that they bring people together to create an alliance, a wholeness, a community.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?

0
0
Source
source
Truth of Intercourse.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Economics is on the side of humanity now.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

The object before us, to begin with, material production.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, p. 3, first text page, first line.
5 months 1 week ago

There is nothing outside the text," which Derrida opponents have characterized to mean that nothing exists but language.

0
0
Source
source
Il n'y a pas de hors-texte. Of Grammatology (1967). G. Spivak translated this as "
5 months 1 week ago

The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible mutual understanding.

0
0
Source
source
p. 21
5 months 2 weeks ago

Our sadness is not sad, but our cheap joys.

0
0
Source
source
Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 231
4 months 5 days ago

When at the beginning of the so-called modern age, at the Renaissance, the pagan sense of religion came to life again, it took the concrete form in the knightly ideal with its codes of conduct of love and honor. But it was a paganism Christianized, baptized. "Woman - la donna - was the divinity enshrined within those savage breasts. Whosoever will investigate the memorials of primitive times will find this ideal of woman in its full force and purity; the Universe is woman.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.

0
0
Source
source
"Selected Ideas (1799-1800)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (1968) #101
2 months 4 weeks ago

We are passengers, comprehended and displaced by metaphor.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 8, Performative Reflexivity, p. 137
2 months 4 weeks ago

Why expect a false theory of the world, i.e. classical physics, to yield a true account of consciousness?

0
0
Source
source
Social Media Unsorted Postings 2016
4 months 2 weeks ago

To fear is to die every minute.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

For he must rule as king until God has put all enemies under his feet. And the last enemy, death, is to be brought to nothing.

0
0
Source
source
Paul of Tarsus, 1 Corinthians 15: 25-26, NWT
2 months 1 week ago

Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

I have gathered a posy of other men's flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12: Of Physiognomy
5 months ago

Educate the children and it won't be necessary to punish the men.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists‎ (2007) by James Geary
4 months 1 week ago

When an active individual of sound common sense perceives the sordid state of the world, desire to change it becomes the guiding principle by which he organizes given facts and shapes them into a theory. The methods and categories as well as the transformation of the theory can be understood only in connection with his taking of sides. This, in turn, discloses both his sound common sense and the character of the world. Right thinking depends as much on right willing as right willing on right thinking.

0
0
Source
source
p. 162.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become.

0
0
Source
source
E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 347
6 months 3 days ago

And yet it is hard to believe that anything in nature could stand revealed as solid matter.The lightning of heaven goes through the walls of houses,like shouts and speech; iron glows white in fire; red-hot rocks are shattered by savage steam; hard gold is softened and melted down by heat; chilly brass, defeated by heat, turns liquid; heat seeps through silver, so does piercing cold;by custom raising the cup, we feel them bothas water is poured in, drop by drop, above.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, lines 487-496 (Frank O. Copley)
4 months 2 days ago

This, I feel, is missing a vital point: that the sceptic is often a totally honest person who, for perfectly good, sound reasons, simply cannot see a case for belief. In fact many -- like Courty Bryan -- admit that they would like to be convinced, but find it impossible.

0
0
Source
source
p. 77

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia