Skip to main content
1 week ago

Ye fools, did not he that made that which is without make that which is within also?

0
0
Source
source
11:40 (KJV)
1 month 5 days ago

The only justifiable stopping place for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism. This means that all beings with the capacity to feel pleasure or pain should be included; we can improve their welfare by increasing their pleasures and diminishing their pains.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 4, Reason, p. 120
2 months 2 weeks ago

In the New Testament sense, to be a Christian is, in an upward sense, as different from being a man as, in a downward sense, to be a man is different from being a beast. A Christian in the sense of the New Testament, although he stands suffering in the midst of life's reality, has yet become completely a stranger to this life; in the words of the Scripture and also of the Collects (which still are read-O bloody satire!-by the sort of priests we now have, and in the ears of the sort of Christians that now live) he is a stranger and a pilgrim-just think, for example of the late Bishop Mynster intoning, We are strangers and pilgrims in this world! A Christian in the New Testament sense is literally a stranger and a pilgrim, he feels himself a stranger, and everyone involuntarily feels that this man is a stranger to him.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Neither did the dispensation of God vary in the times after our Saviour came into the world; for our Saviour himself did first show His power to subdue ignorance, by His conference with the priests and doctors of the law, before He showed His power to subdue nature by His miracles. And the coming of this Holy Spirit was chiefly figured and expressed in the similitude and gift of tongues, which are but vehicula scientiæ.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

Most of the texts... preserved from this period come from writers... either... affiliated with the aristocratic party, or... distrustful of democratic or radically democratic institutions.

0
0
1 week ago

Behold, we go up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man shall be betrayed unto the chief priests and unto the scribes, and they shall condemn him to death, And shall deliver him to the Gentiles to mock, and to scourge, and to crucify him: and the third day he shall rise again.

0
0
Source
source
20:18-19 (KJV)
1 month 2 weeks ago

That what we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.

0
0
Source
source
Fate
1 month 1 week ago

It has no sense and cannot just unless it comes to terms with death. Mine as (well as) that of the other. Between life and death, then, this is indeed the place of a sententious injunction that always feigns to speak the just.

0
0
Source
source
Exordium
2 months 4 days ago

Earnest in practicing the ordinary virtues, and careful in speaking about them, if, in his practice, he has anything defective, the superior man dares not but exert himself; and if, in his words, he has any excess, he dares not allow himself such license. Thus his words have respect to his actions, and his actions have respect to his words; is it not just an entire sincerity which marks the superior man?

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

The true Enlightenment thinker, the true rationalist, never wants to talk anyone into anything. No, he does not even want to convince; all the time he is aware that he may be wrong. Above all, he values the intellectual independence of others too highly to want to convince them in important matters. He would much rather invite contradiction, preferably in the form of rational and disciplined criticism. He seeks not to convince but to arouse - to challenge others to form free opinions.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Mr. Galton ...in his English Men of Science, has given ...cases showing individual variations in the type of memory... Some have it verbal. Others... for facts and figures, others for form. Most say... [it] must first be rationally conceived and assimilated.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 16
2 months 1 week ago

Such was the vast power which the god settled in the lost island of Atlantis; and this he afterwards directed against our land for the following reasons, as tradition tells: For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well-affectioned towards the god, whose seed they were; for they possessed true and in every way great spirits, uniting gentleness with wisdom in the various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one another.

0
0
2 weeks 2 days ago

Only in America do people choose between health and financial ruin. Medical bankruptcy is policy choice, not inevitable outcome. We could have universal healthcare but choose a system that destroys families financially while claiming to provide care. The cruelty is the point.

0
0
1 month 2 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
1 week 4 days ago

Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

It is absurd to excite reason against the primary postulates of pure time, as, for example, continuity, etc., since they follow from laws prior and superior to which nothing is found, and since reason herself in the use of the principle of contradiction cannot dispense with the support of this concept, so primitive and original is it.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 1 (p. 14)

The Hebrews took for their idol, not something made of metal or wood, but a race, a nation, something just as earthly. Their religion is essentially inseparable from such idolatry, because of the notion of the "chosen people".

0
0
Source
source
Section 2
2 months 1 week ago

Korell is that frequent phenomenon in history: the republic whose ruler has every attribute of the absolute monarch but the name. It therefore enjoyed the usual despotism unrestrained even by those two moderating influences in the legitimate monarchies: regal, honor and court etiquette.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Insurrection ... never brings about the desired improvement. For insurrection lacks discernment; it generally harms the innocent more than the guilty. Hence, no insurrection is ever right, no matter how right the cause it seeks to promote.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 62-63
1 month 2 weeks ago

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2: Dreams and Facts
1 week 4 days ago

What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

To be taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psychotherapy knows how to deliver; to be re-made after some pattern of "normality" hatched in a Viennese laboratory to which I never professed allegiance; to know that this process will never end until either my captors have succeeded or I have grown wise enough to cheat them with apparent success-who cares whether this is called Punishment or not? "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment"

0
0
Source
source
1949

This tendency towards a Christian-European Universal Monarchy has shown itself successively in the several States which could make pretensions to such a dominion, and, since the fall of the Papacy, it has become the sole animating principle of our History. We by no means seek to determine whether this notion of Universal Monarchy has ever been distinctly entertained as a definite plan .... Thus each State either strives to attain this Universal Christian Monarchy, or at least to acquire the power of striving after it;-to maintain the Balance of Power when it is in danger of being disturbed by another; and, in secret, for power, that it may eventually disturb it itself.

0
0
Source
source
P. 213-214

Feeling does not succeed in converting consolation into truth, nor does reason succeed in converting truth into consolation.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

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

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12
2 weeks 1 day ago

We are only puppets, our strings are being pulled by unknown forces.

0
0
Source
source
Act II.
1 month 1 week ago

This Europe, which in its ruinous blindness is forever on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on one side and America on the other. From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same: the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man...

0
0

All law relations are determined by this principle: each one must restrict his freedom by the possibility of the freedom of the other. ... My freedom is limited by the freedom of the other only on condition that he limits his freedom by the conception of mine. Otherwise he is lawless. Hence, if a law-relation is to result from my cognition of the other, the cognition and the consequent limitation of freedom must have been mutual. All law-relation between persons is, therefore, conditioned by their mutual cognition of each other, and is, at the same time, completely determined thereby.

0
0
Source
source
P. 173-175
1 month 2 weeks ago

Do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

0
0
Source
source
par. 43
1 month 1 week ago

If beings are grasped as will to power, the "should" which is supposed to hang suspended over them, against which they might be measured, becomes superfluous. If life itself is will to power, it is itself the ground, principium, of valuation. Then a "should" does not determine being. Being determines a "should." "When we talk of values we are speaking under the inspiration or optics of life: life itself compels us to set up values; life itself values through us whenever we posit values."

0
0
Source
source
(VIII, 89) p. 32
2 months 1 week ago

Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across of thousands of high walls, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.

0
0

The materialists say, it is by means of a series of straight lines more or less perfect that one imagines the perfect straight line as an ideal limit. That is right, but the progression in itself necessarily contains what is infinite; it is in relation to the perfect straight line that one can say that such and such a straight line is less twisted than some other. ... Either one conceives the infinite or one does not conceive at all.

0
0
Source
source
p. 87
1 month 4 days ago

The friendship of one wise man is better than the friendship of a host of fools.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

0
0
Source
source
The Prince (1513), Ch. 22
1 month 3 weeks ago

He who does not give himself leisure to be thirsty cannot take pleasure in drinking.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 42
1 month 1 week ago

The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence...the soul is the effect and instrument of political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

0
0
2 months 1 week ago

The important thing isn't the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

Careful thought about this will reveal how few there are who are truly converted from evil habits, especially among those who have prolonged their lives of sin right up to the end. The path down to evil is quick, slippery, and easy. But to turn and "to go forth to the upper air . . . this is effort, this is toil." Think of Aesop's goat before you descend and remember that climbing out is not easy.

0
0
Source
source
p. 147
1 month 3 weeks ago

I think, therefore I am.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.

0
0
Source
source
Book I, Ch. 25
1 month 3 weeks ago

The end of the republic is to enervate and to weaken all other bodies so as to increase its own body.

0
0
Source
source
Book 2, Ch. 3 (translation by Mansfield and Tarcov)
1 month 3 weeks ago

For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 13
1 month 1 week ago

Yes, I am so free. And what a superb absence is my soul.

0
0
Source
source
Orestes, Act 1
1 week 4 days ago

It is sometimes difficult to avoid the impression that there is a sort of foreknowledge of the coming series of events.

0
0
Source
source
p. 94

Yes, you see the Trinity if you see charity.

0
0
Source
source
De Trinitate VIII 8,12.
2 months 1 week ago

Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets.

0
0
2 weeks 2 days ago

Carbon taxes punish consumers for systemic problems corporations created. Individual responsibility rhetoric obscures corporate culpability. You're told to reduce your footprint while hundred companies produce most emissions. Carbon taxes are class warfare disguised as environmental policy.

0
0
1 month 1 week ago

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

0
0
Source
source
On the Execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Libération
2 weeks 1 day ago

We scarce ever had a prince, who by fraud, or violence, had not made some infringement on the constitution. We scarce ever had a parliament which knew, when it attempted to set limits to the royal authority, how to set limits to its own. Evils we have had continually calling for reformation, and reformations more grievous than any evils. Our boasted liberty sometimes trodden down, sometimes giddily set up, and ever precariously fluctuating and unsettled; it has only been kept alive by the blasts of continual feuds, wars, and conspiracies.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia