Skip to main content
3 months 1 week ago

Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.

0
0
Source
source
p. 65
3 months 1 week ago

When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times? A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas.

0
0
Source
source
16:2-4 (KJV)
4 months 2 weeks ago

I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

No criticism can be brought against a branch of technical science from outside; no thought fitted out with the knowledge of a period and setting its course by definite historical aims could have anything to say to the specialist. Such thought and the critical, dialectical element it communicates to the process of cognition, thereby maintaining conscious connection between that process and historical life, do not exist for empiricism; nor do the associated categories, such as the distinction between essence and appearance, identity in change, and rationality of ends, indeed, the concept of man, of personality, even of society and class taken in the sense that presupposes specific viewpoints and directions of interest.

0
0
Source
source
p. 145.
1 week 2 days ago

Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Phyllis Wright (January 24, 1936), published in Dear Professor Einstein: Albert Einstein's Letters to and from Children (Prometheus Books, 2002), p. 129
1 month 1 week ago

When the British came there was, throughout India, a system of communal schools, managed by the village communities. The agents of the East India Company destroyed these village communities, and took steps to replace the schools; even today, after a century of effort to restore them, they stand at only 66% of their number a hundred years ago. Hence, the 93 % illiteracy of India.

0
0
Source
source
(source: The Case for India - By Will Durant Simon and Schuster, New York. 1930 p.44).
4 weeks 1 day ago

All characteristics of material things as they are presented to us in the acts of external perception (e.g. colour) are endowed with the separateness of spatial extension, but it is only when we build up a single connected real world out of all our experiences that the spatial extension, which is a constituent of every perception, becomes a part of one and the same all-inclusive space. ... every material thing can, without changing content, equally well occupy a position in Space different from its present one. This immediately gives us the property of the homogeneity of space which is the root of the conception, Congruence.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction
3 months 2 weeks ago

All those instances to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted Nature recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction of their youth.

0
0
Source
source
No. 1, volume v, p. 286
2 months 2 weeks ago

We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

0
0
Source
source
Preface to the first edition
2 months 1 day ago

The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenceless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenceless against ourselves.

0
0
Source
source
"Man and Hunger: The Perspectives of History", Speech to the World Food Congress (4 June 1963)
2 weeks 3 days ago

As there are many to whom the beauty and harmony of economic laws are hidden, and to whom the inspiring thought of a social order in which there should be work for all, leisure for all, and abundance for all - in which all might be at least as true, as generous and as manful as they wish to be - is shut out by the deference paid to economic authorities who have as it were given bonds not to find that for which they profess to seek, so there are many to-day to whom any belief in the spiritual element, in the existence of God and in a future life, is darkened or destroyed, not so much by difficulties they themselves find, but by what they take to be the teachings of science.

0
0
Source
source
Conclusion : The Moral of this Examination
5 months 2 weeks ago

Therefore create me! You, the most esteemed, cultured public, are in possession of nervus rerum gerendarum [the moving force to accomplish something]. Just a word from you, a promise to purchase what I write, or, if it is possible, so that everything can be in order immediately, a little advance payment, and I am an author; I shall remain one as long as this favor lasts.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

With the exception of professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be history of its successive regrets and impotences.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

And I myself, in Rome, heard it said openly in the streets, "If there is a hell, then Rome is built on it." That is, "After the devil himself, there is no worse folk than the pope and his followers."

0
0
Source
source
Against the Roman Papacy, An Institution of the Devil
2 weeks 4 days ago

Truths obtained by Induction are made compact and permanent by being expressed in 'Technical Terms'.

0
0
2 weeks 1 day ago

The times when the centre of gravity of political development and the crystallising agent of capitalist contradictions lay on the European continent, are long gone by. To-day Europe is only a link in the tangled chain of international connections and contradictions.

0
0
2 months 4 weeks ago

It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.

0
0
Source
source
A 26
4 months 1 week ago

One day, observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away the cup from his wallet with the words, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living."

0
0
Source
source
Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 37
5 months 2 weeks ago

Hungary conquered and in chains has done more for freedom and justice than any people for twenty years. But for this lesson to get through and convince those in the West who shut their eyes and ears, it was necessary, and it can be no comfort to us, for the people of Hungary to shed so much blood which is already drying in our memories. In Europe's isolation today, we have only one way of being true to Hungary, and that is never to betray, among ourselves and everywhere, what the Hungarian heroes died for, never to condone, among ourselves and everywhere, even indirectly, those who killed them. It would indeed be difficult for us to be worthy of such sacrifices.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Everyone knows what made Berkeley notorious. He said that there were no material objects. He said the external world was in some sense immaterial, that nothing existed save ideas - ideas and their authors. His contemporaries thought him very ingenious and a little mad.

0
0
2 weeks 4 days ago

The Palætiological Sciences depend upon the Idea of Cause; but the leading conception which they involve is that of 'historical cause', not mechanical cause.

0
0
3 months 1 day ago

When we can't dream any longer we die.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted by Margaret C. Anderson in "Emma Goldman in Chicago", Mother Earth magazine
1 month 4 days ago

If the press was to be free, nothing would be so important as precisely its liberation from every coercion that could be put on it in the name of a law. And, that it might come to that, I my own self should have to have absolved myself from obedience to the law.

0
0
Source
source
Cambridge 1995, p. 249
3 months 2 days ago

What so impressed me on that first reading was the self-containedness of Tolkien's world. I suppose there are a few novelists who have created worlds that are uniquely their own -- Faulkner, for example, or Dickens. But since their world is fairly close to the actual world, it cannot really be called a unique creation. The only parallel that occurs to me is the Wagner Ring cycle, that one can only enter as if taking a holiday on a strange planet.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 8-9
2 months 4 days ago

The question of questions for mankind-the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other-is the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of things.

0
0
Source
source
Ch.2, p. 71
3 months 4 days ago

Paradoxical as it may seem, a Latin prose or a geometry problem, even though they are done wrong, may be of a great service one day, provided we devote the right kind of effort to them. Should the occasion arise, they can one day make us better able to give someone in affliction exactly the help required to save him, at the supreme moment of his need.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

A naturall foole that could never learn by heart the order of numerall words, as one, two, and three, may observe every stroak of the Clock, and nod to it, or say one, one, one; but can never know what houre it strikes.

0
0
Source
source
The First Part, Chapter 4, p. 14
1 month 1 week ago

What is all Knowledge too, but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials.

0
0
Source
source
On History.

Every start upon an untrodden path is a venture which only in unusual circumstances looks sensible and likely to be successful.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 9 : I Resolve to Become a Jungle Doctor
3 months 2 weeks ago

Try as I will, I don't see what might exist...

0
0
4 months ago

Dispose thy Soul to all good and necessary things!

0
0
3 weeks 6 days ago

However, what is really required to defend 'the West' against the sudden rise of these barbaric and elemental forces is the strengthening, to an extent perhaps still unknown to Western man, of a heroic vision of life. Apart from the military-technical apparatus the world of the 'Westerners' has at its disposal only a limp and shapeless substance - and the cult of the skin, the myth of 'safety' and of 'war on war', and the ideal of the long, comfortable guaranteed, 'democratic' existence, which is preferred to the ideal of the fulfilment which can be grasped only on the frontiers between life and death in the meeting of the essence of living with the extreme of danger.

0
0
Source
source
p. 152
2 months 2 weeks ago

Amid a multitude of projects, no plan is devised.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 319
4 months 2 weeks ago

If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, your church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind or generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.

0
0
Source
source
p. 32
4 months 2 weeks ago

There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and, at the same time, all-powerful Being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be.

0
0
Source
source
"On the Sufferings of the World"
2 months 4 weeks ago

Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.

0
0
Source
source
L 34
4 months 3 weeks ago

Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature: these are the spur and reins whereby all mankind are set on work, and guided.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 54
3 months 1 week ago

I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.

0
0
Source
source
"The Irony of Liberalism"
4 months 2 weeks ago

In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 12 (p. 113)
2 months 2 weeks ago

It is generally characteristic of arms races, including human ones, that although all would be better off if none of them escalated, so long as one of them escalates none can afford not to.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 7 "Constructive Evolution" (p. 184)
8 months 3 weeks ago

I believe in clear-cut positions. I think that the most arrogant position is this apparent, multidisciplinary modesty of "what I am saying now is not unconditional, it is just a hypothesis," and so on. It really is a most arrogant position. I think that the only way to be honest and expose yourself to criticism is to state clearly and dogmatically where you are. You must take the risk and have a position.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 20, § 242
4 months 2 weeks ago

For those who want 'to change life", 'to reinvent love,' God is nothing but a hindrance.

0
0
Source
source
p. 500
4 months 1 week ago

You can't lead the people if you don't love the people. You can't save the people, if you don't serve the people.

0
0
Source
source
Hope on a Tightrope: Words and Wisdom (2008); also on "The Way I See It" Starbucks Coffee Cup #284
1 month 3 weeks ago

Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 7 : Distributive Justice, Section I, The Entitlement Theory, p. 151
3 months 2 weeks ago

This world is empty to him alone who does not understand how to direct his libido towards objects, and to render them alive and beautiful for himself, for Beauty does not indeed lie in things, but in the feeling that we give to them.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.

0
0
Source
source
p. 64e

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia