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4 months 2 weeks ago

The idea that the citizen owes loyalty to a country, a territory, a jurisdiction and all those who reside within it - the root assumption of democratic politics, and one that depends upon the nation as its moral foundation - that idea has no place in the minds and hearts of many who now call themselves citizens of European states.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life. To risk one's life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to the objective form or to any determined existence - as not-bound to life.

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p. 237, 1998 edition
5 months 5 days ago

Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.

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5 months 1 week ago

More and more it is becoming evident that what the West can most readily give to the East is its science and its scientific outlook. This is transferable from country to country, and from race to race, wherever there is a rational society.

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Ch. 1: "The Origins of Modern Science", p. 4
5 months 1 week ago

What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.

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"Le monde où l'on catche"
6 months 3 weeks ago

Science, ever since the time of the Arabs, has had two functions: (1) to enable us to know things, and (2) to enable us to do things.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

When, in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Investigate what is, and not what pleases.

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Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt (The Attempt as Mediator of Object and Subject)
6 months 3 weeks ago

Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.

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B xxxiv

A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.

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F 69
6 months 3 weeks ago

Ancient histories, as one of our wits has said, are but fables that have been agreed upon.

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Jeannot et Colin, 1764
5 months 1 week ago

Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

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On History.
6 months 3 weeks ago

You shall find, that there cannot be a greater spur to the attaining what you would have the eldest learn, and know himself, than to set him upon teaching it his younger brothers and sisters.

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Sec. 119
5 months 2 weeks ago

The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.

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E. Jephcott, trans., p. 17.
3 months 4 days ago

A new theory by the author has been added, which draws the physical inferences consequent on the extension of the foundations of geometry beyond Reimann... and represents an attempt to derive from world-geometry not only gravitational but also electromagnetic phenomena. Even if this theory is still only in its infant stage, I feel convinced that it contains no less truth than Einstein's Theory of Gravitation-whether this amount of truth is unlimited or, what is more probable, is bounded by the Quantum Theory.

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From the Author's Preface to Third Edition
6 months 1 week ago

Those who have a well-ordered character lead also a well-ordered life.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

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18:14 NIV
2 months 3 weeks ago

The return to order will not be painful, because it will be natural and because it will be favoured by a secret force whose action is wholly creative. We will see precisely the opposite of what we have seen. Instead of these violent commotions, painful divisions, and perpetual and desperate oscillations, a certain stability, and indefinable peace, a universal well-being will announce the presence of sovereignty. There will be no shocks, no violence, no punishment even, except those which the true nation will approve. Even crime and usurpation will be treated with a measured severity, with a calm justice that belongs to legitimate power only. The king will bind up the wounds of the state with a gentle and paternal hand. In conclusion, this is the great truth with which the French cannot be too greatly impressed: the restoration of the monarchy, what they call the counter-revolution, will be not a contrary revolution, but the contrary of revolution.

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Chapter X, p. 105
4 months 3 weeks ago

In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.

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"Innovation is obsolete", Evergreen review, Volume 15, Issues 86-94, Grove Press, 1971, p. 64
3 months 2 weeks ago

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.

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Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis
5 months 1 day ago

In closing, I can only apologize for not having given any positive account of either mathematical truth or mathematical necessity. I can only say that I have not given such an account because I think that the search for such an account is a fundamental mistake. It is not that there is nothing special about mathematics; it is that, in my opinion, the investigation of mathematics must presuppose and not seek to account for the truth of mathematics. But this is the beginning of another paper and not the end of this one.

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"Truth and necessity in mathematics"
2 months 3 weeks ago

God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

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Letter to William Stephens Smith (13 November 1787). Manuscript at the Library of Congress.
3 weeks 3 days ago

So...I'm not a communist....😁....but, Marx and Engels were amazing thinkers and we should all learn from them....

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6 months 3 weeks ago

It seems to me that science has a much greater likelihood of being true in the main than any philosophy hitherto advanced (I do not, of course, except my own). In science there are many matters about which people are agreed; in philosophy there are none. Therefore, although each proposition in a science may be false, and it is practically certain that there are some that are false, yet we shall be wise to build our philosophy upon science, because the risk of error in philosophy is pretty sure to be greater than in science. If we could hope for certainty in philosophy, the matter would be otherwise, but so far as I can see such a hope would be chimerical.

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Logical Atomism, 1924
5 months 1 week ago

Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.

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Religion in the Making (February 1926), Lecture IV: "Truth and Criticism".
6 months 3 weeks ago

Free in this world as the birds in the air, disengaged from every kind of chains, those who have practiced the Yoga gather in Brahmin the certain fruit of their works. Depend upon it; rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully. This Yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he heard wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him and he goes, he acts as animating original matter. To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a Yogi.

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Letter to H. G. O. Blake, November 20, 1849
5 months 6 days ago

The Kropotkins, the Perovskayas, the Breshkovskayas, and hosts of others repudiated wealth and station and refused to serve King Mammon. They went among the people, not to lift them up but themselves to be lifted up, to be instructed, and in return to give themselves wholly to the people. That accounts for the heroism, the art, the literature of Russia, the unity between the people, the mujik and the intellectual. That to some extent explains the literature of all European countries, the fact that the Strindbergs, the Hauptmanns, the Wedekinds, the Brieux, the Mirbeaus, the Steinlins and Rodins have never dissociated themselves from the people.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Animal Liberation is Human Liberation too.

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Preface
7 months 3 weeks ago

It is of this sort of divine service I used the expression that, in comparison with the Christianity of the New Testament, it is playing Christianity. The expression is essentially true and characterizes the thing perfectly. For what does it mean to play, when one reflects how the word must be understood in this connection? It means to imitate, to counterfeit, a danger when there is no danger, and to do it in such a way that the more art is applied to it, the more delusive the pretense is that the danger is present.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

I would mind more if I could claim that The Selfish Gene had become severely outmoded and superseded. Unfortunately (from one point of view) I cannot. Details have changed and factual examples burgeoned mightily. But, with an exception that I shall discuss in a moment, there is little in the book that I would rush to take back now, or apologize for.

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Arthur Cain, late Professor of Zoology at Liverpool and one of my inspiring tutors at Oxford in the sixties, described The Selfish Gene in 1976 as a 'young man's book'.
7 months 1 day ago

We have now completed both the spiritual and the temporal government, that is, the divine and the paternal authority and obedience. But here now we go forth from our house among our neighbors to learn how we should live with one another, every one himself toward his neighbor. Therefore God and government are not included in this commandment nor is the power to kill, which they have taken away. For God has delegated His authority to punish evil-doers to the government instead of parents, who aforetime (as we read in Moses) were required to bring their own children to judgment and sentence them to death. Therefore, what is here forbidden is forbidden to the individual in his relation to any one else, and not to the government.

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[The Large Catechism] by Martin Luther, Translated by F. Bente and W.H.T. Dau Published in: Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Ev. Lutheran Church (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921) pp. 565-773,
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV.

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(p. 53)
6 months 3 weeks ago

The woman wants to dominate, the man wants to be dominated.

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 220
2 months 2 weeks ago

In the army, capitalist development leads to the extension of obligatory military service to the reduction of the time of service and consequently to a material approach to a popular militia. But all of this takes place under the form of modern militarism in which the domination of the people by the militarist State and the class character of the State manifest themselves most clearly.

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Ch.8
6 months 3 weeks ago

I dislike Communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.

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Unarmed Victory (1963), p. 14
4 months 3 weeks ago

The Quakers sent me books, from which I learnt how they had, years ago, established beyond doubt the duty for a Christian of fulfilling the command of non-resistance to evil by force, and had exposed the error of the Church's teaching in allowing war and capital punishment.

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Chapter I, The Doctrine of Non-resistance to Evil by Force has been Professed by a Minority of Men from the Very Foundation of Christianity
7 months 3 weeks ago

It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences.

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3 months 2 weeks 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.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

That books do not take the place of experience, and that learning is no substitute for genius, are two kindred phenomena; their common ground is that the abstract can never take the place of the perceptive.

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E. Payne, trans., Vol. II, Ch. 7, p. 74
7 months 1 day ago

To an atheist all writings tend to atheism: he corrupts the most innocent matter with his own venom.

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Ch. 12
7 months 3 weeks ago

Knowledge of the fact differs from knowledge of the reason for the fact.

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5 months 1 week ago

Racism has always been a divisive force separating black men and white men, and sexism has been a force that unites the two groups.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

If you want to deserve Hell, you need only stay in bed. The world is iniquity; if you accept it, you are an accomplice, if you change it you are an executioner.

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Act 3, sc. 6
6 months 3 weeks ago

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

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Author's prefaces to the First Edition.

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