Skip to main content
3 weeks 4 days ago

Himmler approved the idea of recruiting divisions of the Waffen-SS with volunteers from all nations under the banner of the struggle against Communist Russia and in defence of Europe and its civilisation. This was the restoration of the function that the Order of Teutonic Knights had in the beginning as guardian of the East and, at the same time, of the spirit that had animated the Freikorps, the voluntary groups that, on their own initiative, had fought against the Bolsheviks in the eastern regions and the Baltic countries after the end of the First World War. In the end, more than seventeen nations were represented in the Waffen-SS, often with their own complete divisions: French, Belgians, Dutch, Scandinavians, Ukrainians, Spaniards, even Swiss, with a total of about 800,000 men, of whom only a part came from the Germanic area.

0
0
3 months 1 day ago

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. II, ch. 1, sec. 1.
2 months 4 weeks ago

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.

0
0
Source
source
"Preface (2003)"
4 months 2 weeks ago

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

0
0
Source
source
Section 1, paragraph 18, lines 12-14.
2 months 2 weeks ago

What is left when honor is lost?

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 265
3 months 2 weeks ago

To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 13 Variant: Of all the infirmities we have, 'tis the most savage to despise our being. (Charles Cotton translation)
4 months 4 weeks ago

Nothing is more common than good things: the point in question is only to discriminate them; and it is certain that they are all natural and within our reach and even known to all mankind.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

This poor amphibious Pope too gives loaves to the Poor; has in him more good latent than he is himself aware of. His poor Jesuits, in the late Italian Cholera, were, with a few German Doctors, the only creatures whom dastard terror had not driven mad: they descended fearless into all gulfs and bedlams; watched over the pillow of the dying, with help, with counsel and hope; shone as luminous fixed stars, when all else had gone out in chaotic night: honour to them!

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Germany is now a field of cadavers, soon she will be a paradise.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

To say that the cross emblazoned with the papal coat of arms, and set up by the indulgence preachers, is equal in worth to the cross of Christ is blasphemy.

0
0
Source
source
Thesis 79
3 weeks 4 days ago

All men and women have passions, natural desires and noble ambitions, and also a conscience; they have sex, hunger, fear, anger, and are subject to sickness, pain, suffering and death. Culture consists in bringing about the expression of these passions and desires in harmony.

0
0
Source
source
p. 20
4 months 1 week 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.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Every philosophical, ethical, and political idea-its lifeline connecting it with its historical origins having been severed-has a tendency to become the nucleus of a new mythology, and this is one of the reasons why the advance of enlightenment tends at certain points to revert to superstition and paranoia. The majority principle ... has become the sovereign force to which thought must cater. It is a new god, not in the sense in which the heralds of the great revolutions conceived it, namely, as a power of resistance to existing injustice, but as a power of resistance to anything that does not conform.

0
0
Source
source
p. 30.
3 months 1 week ago

Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

0
0
Source
source
19:18-19 (KJV)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.

0
0
Source
source
F 144
3 months 1 week ago

Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

All sources of energy upon which industry depends are wasted when they are employed; and industry is expending them at a continually increasing rate. Already coal has been largely replaced by oil, and oil is being used up so fast that East and West alike conceive it necessary to their own prosperity to destroy the industry of the other. And what is true of oil is equally true of other natural resources. Every day, many square miles of forest are turned into newspaper, but there is no known process by which newspaper can be turned into forest. You will say that this need not worry us, since newspapers will be replaced by radio, but radio requires electricity, electricity requires power, and power depends upon raw materials.

0
0
Source
source
Part I: Man and Nature, Ch. 4: The Limits of Human Power, p. 30
4 months 2 weeks ago

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2 "Further Psychological Observations" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
2 months 2 weeks ago

The anger of lovers renews the strength of love.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 24
4 months 2 weeks ago

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity", and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, Chapter 2, "Some Objections"
3 months 1 week ago

The species with eyes appears suddenly, capriciously as it were, and it is this species which changes the environment by creating its visible aspect. The eye does not come into being because it is needed. Just the contrary; because the eye appears it can henceforth be applied as a serviceable instrument. Each species builds up its stock of useful habits by selecting among, and taking advantage of, the innumerable useless actions which a living being performs out of sheer exuberance.

0
0
Source
source
p. 17

Resignation as to knowledge of the world is for me not an irretrievable plunge into a scepticism which leaves us to drift about in life like a derelict vessel. I see in it that effort of honesty which we must venture to make in order to arrive at the serviceable world-view which hovers within sight. Every world-view which fails to start from resignation in regard to knowledge is artificial and a mere fabrication, for it rests upon an inadmissible interpretation of the universe.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organised, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children!

0
0
Source
source
Philo to Cleanthes, Part XI
1 month 6 days ago

The news of this barbaric orgy of military sadism was kept from the world for half a year. A belated commission of inquiry was appointed by the Government. A committee appointed by the Indian National Congress made a more through investigation and reported 1,200 killed, and 3,600 wounded. Gen. Dyer was censured by the House of Commons, exonerated by the House of Lords, and was retired on a pension. Thinking this was insufficient the militarists of the Empire raised a fund of $150,000 for him and presented him with a jeweled sword of honor. (source: The Case for India - By Will Durant Simon and Schuster, New York. 1930 p. This book was banned by the British Government. Durant held the view that no part of the world suffered so much poverty andoppression as India did and that this was largely due to British imperialism).

0
0
3 months 1 day ago

Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Amiri Baraka and other black male leaders have righteously supported patriarchy. They have all argued that it is absolutely necessary for black men to relegate black women to a subordinate position both in the political sphere and in home life.

0
0
3 months 2 weeks ago

Nor is prescription of government formed upon blind unmeaning prejudices-for man is a most unwise, and a most wise, being. The individual is foolish. The multitude, for the moment, is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it almost always acts right.

0
0
Source
source
Speech in the House of Commons against William Pitt's motion for parliamentary reform (7 May 1782)
4 months 1 week ago

Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 4, Reason, p. 88
3 months ago

The case is a good example of what Van Vogt came to call "the violent man" or the "Right Man." He is a man driven by a manic need for self-esteem - to feel that he is a "somebody." He is obsessed by the question of "losing face," so will never, under any circumstances, admit that he might be in the wrong.

0
0
Source
source
p. 211
3 months 4 weeks ago

Hear gladly!

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

We may suppose that everyone has in himself the whole form of a moral conception.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter I, Section 9, pg. 50
1 month 2 days ago

All rational action is economic. All economic activity is rational action. All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.

0
0
Source
source
Part II : The Economics of a Socialist Community, § I : The Economics of an Isolated Socialist Community, Ch. 5 : The Nature of Economic Activity, p. 97
2 weeks 3 days ago

In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12
1 month 1 week ago

The most remarkable piece of reading that you may be recommended to take and try if you can study is a book by Goethe-one of his last books, which he wrote when he was an old man, about seventy years of age-I think one of the most beautiful he ever wrote, full of mild wisdom, and which is found to be very touching by those who have eyes to discern and hearts to feel it. It is one of the pieces in "Wilhelm Meister's Travels." I read it through many years ago; and, of course, I had to read into it very hard when I was translating it (applause), and it has always dwelt in my mind as about the most remarkable bit of writing that I have known to be executed in these late centuries. I have often said, there are ten pages of that which, if ambition had been my only rule, I would rather have written than have written all the books that have appeared since I came into the world.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Nature paints the best part of a picture, carves the best parts of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.

0
0
Source
source
Art
4 months 2 weeks ago

If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.

0
0
Source
source
The Poverty of Historicism (1957) Ch. 29 The Unity of Method
4 months 2 weeks ago

The capitalist cannot store labour-power in warehouses after he has bought it, as he may do with the raw material.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. II, Ch. XV, p. 285.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Rascals are always sociable - more's the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others' company.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 1, Ch. 5, § 9
2 weeks 3 days ago

I agree ... that a professorship of Theology should have no place in our institution. But we cannot always do what is absolutely best. Those with whom we act, entertaining different views, have the power and the right of carrying them into practice. Truth advances, and error recedes step by step only; and to do to our fellow men the most good in our power, we must lead where we can, follow where we cannot, and still go with them, watching always the favorable moment for helping them to another step.

0
0
Source
source
Comment on establishing the University of Virginia, in a letter to Thomas Cooper (7 October 1814); published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1905) edited by Andrew Adgate Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol VII, p. 200
2 months 3 weeks ago

The empirical research of the last fifteen years on the structure of large organizations seems to confirm the hypothesis of Herbert Simon that human cognitive limits are a basic limiting factor in determining organization structures .

0
0
Source
source
Jay R. Galbraith, "Organization design: An information processing view." Organizational Effectiveness Center and School 21 (1977). p. 21
4 months 2 weeks ago

The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual's own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.

0
0
Source
source
Part 3, Ch. 12, § 3
3 months 1 week ago

The teacher of love teaches struggle. The teacher of lifeless isolation from the world teaches peace.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult-to begin a war and to end it.

0
0
Source
source
Book Three, Chapter XXII.
5 months 1 week ago

Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this?

0
0
2 weeks 3 days ago

Pain is not the only essence of our God, nor is hope in a future life or a life on this earth, neither joy nor victory. Every religion that holds up to worship one of these primordial aspects of God narrows our hearts and our minds. The essence of our God is STRUGGLE. Pain, joy, and hope unfold and labor within this struggle, world without end.

0
0
3 months 1 day ago

No epoch is homogeneous; whatever you may have assigned as the dominant note of a considerable period, it will always be possible to produce men, and great men, belonging to the same time, who exhibit themselves as antagonistic to the tone of their age.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 4: "The Eighteenth Century", p. 93

In the Koran as in the Bible, politics is divinized, and human reason, crushed by the religious ascendancy, cannot insinuate its isolating and corrosive poison into the mechanisms of government, so that citizens are believers whose loyalty is exalted to faith, and obedience to enthusiasm and fanaticism.

0
0
Source
source
p. 78

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia