Skip to main content
5 months 3 weeks ago

For wherever violence is used, and injury done, though by hands appointed to administer Justice, it is still violence and injury, however colour'd with the Name, Pretences, or Forms of Law, the end whereof being to protect and redress the innocent, by an unbiassed application of it, to all who are under it; wherever that is not bona fide done, War is made upon the Sufferers, who having no appeal on Earth to right them, they are left to the only remedy in such Cases, an appeal to Heaven.

0
0
Source
source
Two Treatises of Government. The Second Treatise. Chapter 3: The State of War, §20 p. 281 books.google
2 months 1 week ago

We have Divine Wisdom in the mortal body.Whatever does harm to the body, ruins the House of the Eternal.

0
0

In countries where associations are free, secret societies are unknown. In America there are factions, but no conspiracies.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XII.
5 months 4 weeks ago

My philosophical views approach somewhat closely those of the late Countess of Conway, and hold a middle position between Plato and Democritus, because I hold that all things take place mechanically as Democritus and Descartes contend against the views of Henry More and his followers, and hold too, nevertheless, that everything takes place according to a living principle and according to final causes - all things are full of life and consciousness, contrary to the views of the Atomists.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Thomas Burnet (1697), as quoted in Platonism, Aristotelianism and Cabalism in the Philosophy of Leibniz (1938) by Joseph Politella, p. 18
3 months 5 days ago

Skills are called hidden treasure as they save like a mother in a foreign country.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Indeed, it may well be argued that one reason for the decline in science, art, and literature was the increasing absorption of the better minds into a new sort of intellectual pursuit, theology.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Even then [at the time of Peter's speech in Acts 2] it was the last days; how much more so now, when there must still be as much time till the end of the world as has passed since the ascension of the Lord! We do not know the end of the world, because it is not for us to know the times or the seasons that the Father has set in his power; but we know that, like the apostles, we live in the last times, in the last days, in the last hour. Those who lived after the apostles and before us were more in what we call the last times, and we ourselves are in them even more than they; those who will come after us will be so much more, till one gets to those who will be, if one may say so, the last of the last, and finally till that day, the very last, of which the Lord means to speak when he said, "And I will raise him up on the last day". How far are we from that day? That is an impenetrable secret.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

The object before us, to begin with, material production.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction, p. 3, first text page, first line.
5 months 4 weeks ago

Our island is this earth; and the most striking object we behold is the sun. As soon as we pass beyond our immediate surroundings, one or both of these must meet our eye. Thus the philosophy of most savage races is mainly directed to imaginary divisions of the earth or to the divinity of the sun.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. VII
5 months 2 weeks ago

Poverty is a virtue which one can teach oneself.

0
0
Source
source
Stobaeus, iv. 32a. 19
2 months 3 weeks ago

Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in: Fayek S. Hourani (2012) Daily Bread for Your Mind and Soul, p. 336
5 months 1 week ago

Neither will the horse be adjudged to be generous, that is sumptuously adorned, but the horse whose nature is illustrious; nor is the man worthy who possesses great wealth, but he whose soul is generous.

0
0
Source
source
Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
5 months 3 weeks ago

I don't think that there are any sinister persons deliberately trying to rob people of their freedom but I do think, first of all, that there are a number of impersonal forces which are pushing in the direction of less and less freedom. And I also thing there are a number of technological devices which anybody who wishes to use, can use, to accelerate this process of going away from freedom, of imposing control.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

I'll know how to die with courage; that is easier than living.

0
0
Source
source
Act II.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.

0
0
Source
source
Commonweal, Vol. 58 (1953), p. 557
1 month 3 weeks ago

We cling in our public life to a brutal hypocrisy. In our century of almost universal violence of humans against fellow humans, and against our natural and cultural commonwealth, hypocrisy has been inescapable because our opposition to violence has been selective or merely fashionable. Some of us who approve of our monstrous military budget and our peacekeeping wars nonetheless deplore "domestic violence" and think that our society can be pacified by "gun control." Some of us are against capital punishment but for abortion. Some of us are against abortion but for capital punishment.

0
0
5 months 4 weeks ago

If I had as clear an idea of ghosts, as I have of a triangle or a circle, I should not in the least hesitate to affirm that they had been created by God; but as the idea I possess of them is just like the ideas, which my imagination forms of harpies, gryphons, hydras, &c., I cannot consider them as anything but dreams, which differ from God as totally as that which is not differs from that which is.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Hugo Boxel (October 1674) The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (1891) Tr. R. H. M. Elwes, Vol. 2, Letter 58 (54).
2 months 1 week ago

If you have been given a talent, exercise it freely and happily like the sun: give everyone from your splendour.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

It is wrong to think that belief in freedom always leads to victory; we must always be prepared for it to lead to defeat. If we choose freedom, then we must be prepared to perish along with it. Poland fought for freedom as no other country did. The Czech nation was prepared to fight for its freedom in 1938; it was not lack of courage that sealed its fate. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 - the work of young people with nothing to lose but their chains - triumphed and then ended in failure. ... Democracy and freedom do not guarantee the millennium. No, we do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things - and above all on ourselves.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

Death takes the mean man with the proud; The fatal urn has room for all.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, ode i, line 14 (trans. John Conington)
4 months 2 weeks ago

An integral part of totalitarian control is the attack on critical and independent thought. The appeal to facts is substituted for the appeal to reason. No reason can sanction a regime that uses the greatest productive apparatus man has ever created in the interest of an increasing restriction on human satisfactions-no reason except the fact that the economic system can be retained in no other way. Just as the Fascist emphasis on action and change prevents the insight into necessity of rational courses of action and change, [Giovanni] Gentile's deification of thinking prevents the liberation of thought from the shackles of 'the given.'

0
0
Source
source
P. 405
5 months 3 weeks ago

No one has the right to obey.

0
0
Source
source
in a radio interview with Joachim Fest (9 November 1964)
6 months 1 week ago

One who liberates his country by killing a tyrant is to be praised and rewarded.

0
0
Source
source
Trans. J.G. Dawson (Oxford, 1959), 44, 2 in O’Donovan, pp. 329-30
2 months 3 days ago

If the rulers sincerely desire the empire to be wealthy and dislike to have it poor, desire to have it orderly and dislike to have it chaotic, they should bring about universal love and mutual aid. This is the way of the sage-kings and the way to order for the world, and it should not be neglected.

0
0
Source
source
Book 4; Universal Love II
4 months 2 weeks ago

The State is always, whatever be its form - primitive, ancient, medieval, modern - an invitation issued by one group of men to other human groups to carry out some enterprise in common. That enterprise, be its intermediate processes what they may, consists in the long run in the organisation of a certain type of common life. ... [As Renan says,] "To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together; to wish to do greater; these are the essential conditions which make up a people.... In the past, an inheritance of glories and regrets; in the future, one and the same programme to carry out.... The existence of a nation is a daily plebiscite."

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XIV: Who Rules The World?
4 months 3 weeks ago

The manufacturing worker almost always lives in the countryside and in a more or less patriarchal relation to his landlord or employer; the proletarian lives, for the most part, in the city and his relation to his employer is purely a cash relation. The manufacturing worker is torn out of his patriarchal relation by big industry, loses whatever property he still has, and in this way becomes a proletarian.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Democracy, which means despair of finding any Heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them,-alas, thou too, mein Lieber, seest well how close it is of kin to Atheism, and other sad Isms: he who discovers no God whatever, how shall he discover Heroes, the visible Temples of God?

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

All poetry is supposed to be instructive but in an unnoticeable manner; it is supposed to make us aware of what it would be valuable to instruct ourselves in; we must deduce the lesson on our own, just as with life.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter
2 months 6 days ago

Listen intently to a voice singing without words. It may charm you into crying, force you to dance, fill you with rage, or make you jump for joy. You can't tell where the music ends and the emotions begin, for the whole thing is a kind of music-the voice playing on your nerves as the breath plays on a flute. All experience is just that, except that its music has many more dimensions than sound. It vibrates in the dimensions of sight, touch, taste, and smell, and in the intellectual dimension of symbols and words-all evoking and playing upon each other.

0
0
Source
source
p. 95
4 months 3 weeks ago

All became so jealous of the rights of their own personality that they did their very utmost to curtail and destroy them in others, and made that the chief thing in their lives. Slavery followed, even voluntary slavery; the weak eagerly submitted to the strong, on condition that the latter aided them to subdue the still weaker. Then there were saints who came to these people, weeping, and talked to them of their pride, of their loss of harmony and due proportion, of their loss of shame. They were laughed at or pelted with stones.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

To this end they make a shield of their hypocritical zeal for religion. They go about invoking the Bible, which they would have minister to their deceitful purposes. Contrary to the sense of the Bible and the intention of the holy Fathers, if I am not mistaken, they would extend such authorities until even in purely physical matters - where faith is not involved - they would have us altogether abandon reason and the evidence of our senses in favor of some biblical passage, though under the surface meaning of its words this passage may contain a different sense.

0
0
2 months 3 days ago

I am here to speak on freedom of speech. It is a great topic, and I am going to make my speech as free as possible. But you know that this cannot be done, for when anyone announces that he is going to speak his mind freely, everyone is frightened. This shows that there is no such thing as true freedom of speech. No one can afford to let his neighbors know what he is thinking about them. Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.

0
0
Source
source
"Of Freedom of Speech", lecture given in China
5 months 3 weeks ago

In some lyceums they tell me that they have voted to exclude the subject of religion. But how do I know what their religion is, and when I am near to or far from it? I have walked into such an arena and done my best to make a clean breast of what religion I have experienced, and the audience never suspected what I was about.

0
0
Source
source
p. 490
3 months 3 weeks ago

High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

0
0
Source
source
Introduction to Our Time Is Now: Notes From the High School Underground, John Birmingham, ed.
5 months 2 days ago

Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.

0
0
Source
source
His famous response to his judges upon his conviction as a heretic, prior to his transfer to the civil authorities for execution. (16 February 1600); as quoted by Gaspar Schopp of Breslau in a letter to Conrad Rittershausen
5 months 3 weeks ago

Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.

0
0
Source
source
Montaigne; or, The Skeptic
2 months 2 weeks ago

...shall we say that the difference between a vegetarian and a cannibal is just a matter of taste?

0
0
Source
source
"The Idolatry of Politics", New Republic, 1986-June-16, page 31.
4 months 1 week ago

We used to pay too little attention to utopias, or even disregard them altogether, saying with regret they were impossible of realisation. Now indeed they seem to be able to be brought about far more easily than we supposed, and we are actually faced by an agonising problem of quite another kind: how can we prevent their final realisation? ... Utopias are more realisable than those 'realist politics' that are only the carefully calculated policies of office-holders, and towards utopias we are moving. But it is possible that a new age is already beginning, in which cultured and intelligent people will dream of ways to avoid ideal states and to get back to a society that is less 'perfect' and more free.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 187-188. Aldous Huxley used this passage (in French translation) as the epigraph to Brave New World.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don't know why, unless it springs from long efforts to avoid priggery.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1894). Smith was a Quaker, thus the archaic use of "Thee" in this and other letters to her.
6 months 3 days ago

The diversity of physical arguments and opinions embraces all sorts of methods.

0
0
Source
source
Book III, Ch. 13. Of Experience
2 months 1 week ago

If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.

0
0
Source
source
Planning for Freedom (1952), p. 44
4 months 2 weeks ago

Movement in direct experience is alteration in the qualities of objects, and space as experienced is an aspect of this qualitative change. Up and down, back and front, to and fro, this side and that- or right and left- here and there, feel differently. The reason they do is that they are not static points in something itself static, but objects in movement, qualitative changes of value. For "back" is short for backwards and front for forwards. So with velocity. Mathematically there are no such things as fast and slow. They mark simply greater and less on a number scale. As experienced they are qualitatively as unlike as noise and silence, heat and cold, black and white. To be forced to wait a long time for an important event to happen is a length very different from that measured by the movements of the hands of a clock. It is something qualitative.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

In physical reality one cause does not produce a given effect, but a multitude of distinct causes contribute to produce it, without our having any means of discriminating the part of each of them. ...Causes which have produced a certain effect will never be reproduced except approximately.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

Truth is the ultimate end of the whole universe.

0
0
Source
source
I, 1, 2
1 month 3 weeks ago

Rememberest the gods, and that they wish not to be flattered, but wish all reasonable beings to be made like themselves; and... rememberest that what does the work of a fig-tree is a fig-tree, and that what does the work of a dog is a dog, and that what does the work of a bee is a bee, and that what does the work of a man is a man.

0
0
Source
source
X, 8
5 months 3 weeks ago

What modern apologists call 'true' Christianity is something depending upon a very selective process. It ignores much that is to be found in the Gospels: for example, the parable of the sheep and the goats, and the doctrine that the wicked will suffer eternal torment in Hell fire. It picks out certain parts of the Sermon on the Mount, though even these it often rejects in practice. It leaves the doctrine of non-resistance, for example, to be practised only by non-Christians such as Gandhi. The precepts that it particularly favours are held to embody such a lofty morality that they must have had a divine origin. And yet ... these precepts were uttered by Jews before the time of Christ.

0
0
Source
source
"Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?", in Stockholm newspaper Dagens Nyheter, part II., 11/11/1954
1 month 3 weeks ago

It may indeed be true that in order to act we need a certain amount of self-confidence and intellectual self-assurance. It may also be true that the very form of expression, in which we clothe our thoughts, tends to impose upon them an absolute tone.

0
0

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia