Skip to main content
3 months 2 weeks ago

They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 4, The Sea Chest.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.

0
0
Source
source
The Civil War in France : "The Third Address", May 1871
4 months 3 days ago

And this in turn makes it plain that the Right Man problem is a problem of highly dominant people. Dominance is a subject of enormous importance to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals - or human beings - seems to be amazingly constant. Bernard Shaw once asked the explorer H. M. Stanley how many other men could take over leadership of the expedition if Stanley himself fell ill; Stanley replied promptly: "One in twenty." "Is that exact or approximate?" asked Shaw. "Exact." And biological studies have confirmed this as a fact. For some odd reason, precisely five per cent - one in twenty - of any animal group are dominant - have leadership qualities. During the Korean War, the Chinese made the interesting discovery that if they separated out the dominant five per cent of American prisoners of war, and kept them in separate compound, the remaining ninety-five per cent made no attempt to escape.

0
0
Source
source
p. 216
5 months 2 weeks ago

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

0
0
Source
source
"Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus)"
4 months 1 week ago

But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.

0
0
Source
source
5:22, King James Version.
5 months 2 weeks ago

No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture II, What Pragmatism Means
3 months 2 weeks ago

All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?

0
0
Source
source
316

"For what is life but a play in which everyone acts a part until the curtain comes down?"
- Desiderius Erasmus

See biography for Desiderius Erasmus:
https://civilsimian.com/DesideriusErasmus

Read Desiderius Erasmus's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/50/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Many evils, no doubt, were produced by the civil war. They were the price of our liberty.

0
0
Source
source
p. 39
5 months 3 weeks ago

Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter x, Part II, p. 168.
5 months 4 weeks ago

Nay, number (itself) in armies, importeth not much, where the people is of weak courage; for (as Virgil saith) it never troubles the wolf how many the sheep be.

0
0
Source
source
Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral (1597), XXIX: "Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates."
5 months 4 weeks ago

Many have been deceived by outward appearances and have proceeded to write and teach about good works and how they justify without even mentioning faith. ... Wearying themselves with many works, they never come to righteousness.

0
0
Source
source
p. 75
3 months 4 days ago

Simplicity and nonviolence are the basis of an economy of wellbeing, and such an economy must be localised.

0
0

In Mohammedanism the narrow principle of the Jews is expanded into universality and thereby overcome. Here, God is no longer, as in the Far East, regarded as existent in an immediately sensory way but is conceived as the one infinite power elevated above all the multiplicity of the world. Mohammedanism is, therefore, in the strictest sense of the word, the religion of sublimity.

0
0
Source
source
Hegel, Philosophy of Mind (quoted by W. Wallace & A. V. Miller in Philosophy of Mind, Oxford 2010; also quoted in other words by Slavoj Žižek in A Glance into the Archives of Islam, Lacan dot com, 1997).
2 months 6 days ago

The interventionists do not approach the study of economic matters with scientific disinterestedness. Most of them are driven by an envious resentment against those whose incomes are larger than their own. This bias makes it impossible for them to see things as they really are. For them the main thing is not to improve the conditions of the masses, but to harm the entrepreneurs and capitalists even if this policy victimizes the immense majority of the people.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

Remorse sleeps during a prosperous period but wakes up in adversity. 

0
0
Source
source
Variant translations: Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity. Remorse goes to sleep during a prosperous period and wakes up in adversity.
2 months 1 day ago

We await the Indian thinker who will expound to us the mysticism of spiritual union with infinite Being as it is in itself, not as it is set down in the ancient texts or according to the meaning read into them by their interpreters. It belongs to the nature of mysticism that it is timeless and appeals to no other authority than that of the truth which it carries within it. The pathway from imperfect to perfect recognised truth leads through the valley of reality.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. XVI : Looking Backward and Forward, p. 256
2 months 1 week ago

The sense of mercy is found in all men; the sense of shame is found in all men; the sense of respect is found in all men; the sense of right and wrong is found in all men.

0
0
Source
source
6A:6
5 months 3 weeks ago

Thus, because Christian morals leave animals out of consideration ... therefore in philosophical morals they are of course at once outlawed; they are merely "things," simply means to ends of any sort; and so they are good for vivisection, for deer-stalking, bull-fights, horse-races, etc., and they may be whipped to death as they struggle along with heavy quarry carts. Shame on such a morality ... which fails to recognize the Eternal Reality immanent in everything that has life, and shining forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun!

0
0
Source
source
Part II, Ch. VI, pp. 94-95
1 month 2 weeks 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
4 months 3 weeks ago

In America, conscription is unknown; men are enlisted for payment. Compulsory recruitment is so alien to the ideas and so foreign to the customs of the people of the United States that I doubt whether they would ever dare to introduce it into their law.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XIII.
4 months 1 week ago

The total victimization of the individual that takes place is encouraged for the specific benefit of the industrial and political bureaucracy. It therefore cannot be justified on the ground of the individual's true interest. National Socialist ideology simply states that true human existence consists in unconditional sacrifice, that it is of the essence of the individual's life to abbey and to serve-'service which never comes to an end because service and life coincide.'

0
0
Source
source
P. 416
5 months 2 weeks ago

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

0
0
Source
source
Act 5, sc. 3
1 month 2 weeks ago

When public opinion changes, it is with the rapidity of thought.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey (6 January 1816) ME 14:384
5 months 2 weeks ago

A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye. For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die.

0
0
Source
source
p. 50e
3 months 1 week ago

A millennial belief in a Holy God may have the effect of deepening the soul, but it is also obviously archaic, and modern influences would presently bring me up to date and reveal how antiquated my origins were. To turn away from those origins, however, has always seemed to me an utter impossibility. It would be a treason to my first consciousness to un-Jew myself.

0
0
Source
source
Part I, p. 26
1 month 2 weeks ago

I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master. Could the contrary of this be proved, I should conclude either that there is no god, or that he is a malevolent being.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to David Hartley
5 months 1 week ago

Human social institutions can effect the course of human evolution. Just as climate-change, food supply, predators, and other natural forces of selection have molded our nature, so too can our culture.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 6, A New Understanding Of Ethics, p. 172
1 month 2 weeks ago

The State legislatures should be immediately urged to relinquish the right of establishing banks of discount. Most of them will comply, on patriotic principles, under the convictions of the moment; and the non-complying may be crowded into concurrence by legitimate devices.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Thomas Cooper, 1814. ME 14:190
6 months 2 weeks ago

I recognize the necessity of animal experiments with my mind but not with my heart.

0
0
1 month 3 weeks ago

The entire Earth, with her trees and her waters, with her animals, with her men and her gods, calls from within your breast. Earth rises up in your brains and sees her entire body for the first time.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

My enemy is not the man who wrongs me, but the man who means to wrong me.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.

0
0
5 months 4 weeks ago

Omnipotence and foreknowledge of God, I repeat, utterly destroy the doctrine of 'free-will' ... doubtless it gives the greatest possible offense to common sense or natural reason, that God, Who is proclaimed as being full of mercy and goodness, and so on, should of His own mere will abandon, harden and damn men, as though He delighted in the sins and great eternal torments of such poor wretches. It seems an iniquitous, cruel, intolerable thought to think of God; and it is this that has been such a stumbling block to so many great men down through the ages. And who would not stumble at it? I have stumbled at it myself more than once, down to the deepest pit of despair, so that I wished I had never been made a man.

0
0
Source
source
(That was before I knew how health-giving that despair was, and how close to grace p. 217)
5 months 3 weeks ago

This art is music. It stands quite apart from all the others. In it we do not recognize the copy, the repetition, of any Idea of the inner nature of the world. Yet it is such a great and exceedingly fine art, its effect on man's innermost nature is so powerful, and it is so completely and profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely universal language, whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself, that in it we certainly have to look for more than that.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. III, The World As Representation: Second Aspect, as translated by Eric F. J. Payne, 1958
4 months 1 week ago

All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given. For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.

0
0
Source
source
19:11-12 (KJV)
5 months 1 week ago

Ill repute is a good thing and much the same as pain.

0
0
Source
source
§ 5
3 months 2 weeks ago

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 132)
5 months 2 weeks ago

When I say that this phase is necessary, the word phase is perhaps not the most rigorous one. It is not a question of a chronological phase, a given moment, or a page that one day simply will be turned, in order to go on to other things. The necessity of this phase is structural; it is the necessity of an interminable analysis: the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself. Unlike those authors whose death does not await their demise, the time for overturning is never a dead letter.

0
0
Source
source
p. 41-42
4 months 4 days ago

The more Lil' Kim distorted her natural beauty to become a cartoonlike caricature of whiteness, the larger her success.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated. 

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in Communications and History : Theories of Knowledge, Media and Civilization (1988) by Paul Heyer, p. 125
5 months 3 weeks ago

We may well be ashamed to tell what things we have read or heard in our day. I do not know why my news should be so trivial, - considering what one's dreams and expectations are, why the developments should be so paltry. The news we hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. It is the stalest repetition.

0
0
Source
source
p. 491
4 months 3 weeks ago

I have come across men of letters who have written history without taking part in public affairs, and politicians who have concerned themselves with producing events without thinking about them. I have observed that the first are always inclined to find general causes whereas the second, living in the midst of disconnected daily facts, are prone to imagine that everything is attributable to particular incidents, and that the wires they pull are the same as those that move the world. It is to be presumed that both are equally deceived.

0
0
Source
source
Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, p. 80
4 months 3 days ago

Capitalism dislikes silence.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Commoners are weightless. But he was a royal bon vivant who, no matter what, always weighed 125 kilos. I would be very surprised if he didn't have a few pounds left.

0
0
Source
source
A soldier in Argos, speaking of the dead King Agamemnon, Act 2
6 months 3 weeks ago
Man has an invincible inclination to allow himself to be deceived and is, as it were, enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist tells him epic fables as if they were true, or when the actor in the theater acts more royally than any real king. So long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free; it is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more daring.
0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all. Only I must observe, that the common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common.

0
0
Source
source
Definitions - Scholium
3 months 4 weeks ago

Philosophy was never just ontotheology, and even when philosophers were concerned with ontotheology, they were concerned with much more than that. That is the first reason that the idea of a fundamental "crisis" in philosophy and of the "end of philosophy" is deeply mistaken. And if the questions of philosophy are indeed "unsettleable," in the sense that they will always be with us, that is a wonderful thing, not something to be regretted.

0
0
Source
source
Science and Philosophy

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia