Skip to main content
2 weeks 2 days ago

When nobody in the world loves any other, naturally the strong will overpower the weak, the many will oppress the few, the wealthy will mock the poor, the honoured will disdain the humble, the cunning will deceive the simple. Therefore all the calamities, strifes, complaints, and hatred in the world have arisen out of want of mutual love. Therefore the benevolent disapproved of this want.

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

If a woman becomes weary and at last dead from bearing, that matters not; let her only die from bearing, she is there to do it.

0
0
Source
source
Sermon Von dem ehelichen Stande (1519), p. 41 - as quoted in The Ethic of Freethought: A Selection of Essays and Lectures (1888) by Karl Pearson
4 months 1 week ago

Covetousness, and the desire of having in our possession, and under our dominion, more than we have need of, being the root of all evil, should be early and carefully weeded out, and the contrary quality of a readiness to impart to others, implanted. This should be encourag'd by great commendation and credit, and constantly taking care that he loses nothing by his liberality.

0
0
Source
source
Sec. 110
5 months 5 days ago

To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

0
0
3 months 4 days ago

Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? - that void is consciousness itself.

0
0

It is from the shadow of a cloister that there emerges one of mankind's greatest very greatest scourges. Luther appears; Calvin follows him. The Peasants' Revolt; the Thirty Years' War; the civil war in France; the massacre of the Low Countries; the massacre of Ireland; the massacre of the Cévennes; St Bartholomew's Day; the murders of Henry II, Henry IV, Mary Stuart, and Charles I; and finally, in our day, from the same source, the French Revolution.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter III, p. 27
2 months 3 weeks ago

Morally, it is wrong to suppose the source of evil is outside oneself, that one is a vessel of holiness running over with virtue. Such a disposition is the best soil for a hateful and cruel fanaticism. It is as wrong to impute every wickedness to Jews, Freemasons, "intellectuals," as it is to blame all crimes on the bourgeoisie, the nobility, and the powers that were. No; the root of evil is in me as well, and I must take my share of the responsibility and the blame. That was true before the revolution and it is true still.

0
0
Source
source
p. 128
1 week 2 days ago

God is imperiled. He is not almighty, that we may cross our hands, waiting for certain victory. He is not all-holy, that we may wait trustingly for him to pity and to save us. Within the province of our ephemeral flesh all of God is imperiled. He cannot be saved unless we save him with our own struggles; nor can we be saved unless he is saved. We are one. From the blind worm in the depths of the ocean to the endless arena of the Galaxy, only one person struggles and is imperiled: You. And within your small and earthen breast only one thing struggles and is imperiled: the Universe.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

Again, defenders of utility often find themselves called upon to reply to such objections as this-that there is not time, previous to action, for calculating and weighing the effects of any line of conduct on the general happiness. This is exactly as if any one were to say that it is impossible to guide our conduct by Christianity, because there is not time, on every occasion on which anything has to be done, to read through the Old and New Testaments. The answer to the objection is, that there has been ample time, namely, the whole past duration of the human species. During all that time mankind have been learning by experience the tendencies of actions.

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

Among human beings, the subjection of women is much more complete at a certain level of civilization than it is among savages. And the subjection is always reinforced by morality.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 15: Power and moral codes
1 week ago

On bourgeois ground ... change is impossible anyway even if it were desired. In fact, bourgeois interest would like to draw every other interest opposed to it into its own failure; so, in order to drain the new life, it makes its own agony apparently fundamental, apparently ontological. The futility of bourgeois existence is extended to be that of the human situation in general, of existence per se.

0
0
Source
source
The Principle of Hope (1959), N. Plaice, trans. (1986), p. 4
2 months 1 week ago

To attain this end we must secure a preponderance of virtue over vice and must endeavor to secure that the honest man may, even in this world, receive a lasting reward for his virtue. But in these great endeavors we are gravely hampered by the political institutions of today. What is to be done in these circumstances? To favor revolutions, overthrow everything, repel force by force?... No! We are very far from that. Every violent reform deserves censure, for it quite fails to remedy evil while men remain what they are, and also because wisdom needs no violence.

0
0
Source
source
Book V, Ch. 7
2 weeks 5 days ago

The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, however, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all life that comes within his reach. A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, and that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help. Only the universal ethic of the feeling of responsibility in an ever-widening sphere for all that lives - only that ethic can be founded in thought. ... The ethic of Reverence for Life, therefore, comprehends within itself everything that can be described as love, devotion, and sympathy whether in suffering, joy, or effort.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 13, p. 188
2 months 3 weeks ago

We all observe that the reality of sexual intercourse is far from perfect; yet this does not convince us that sex is a greatly overrated occupation. Every time a man glimpses a pretty girl pulling up her stocking, he catches a glimpse of what might be called the "primal sexual vision." It is unfortunate that there seems to be a certain disparity between this primal vision and most ordinary sexual experience. But it dances in front of us like a will-o'-the-wisp, luring us into tormented effort. It can lead novelists to write novels, poets to write poems, and musicians to write symphonies.

0
0
Source
source
p. 39
4 months 1 week ago

Our sadness is not sad, but our cheap joys.

0
0
Source
source
Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 231
4 months 1 week ago

Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

0
0
Source
source
George S. Patton: "Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way", as quoted in Pocket Patriot: Quotes from American Heroes (2005) edited by Kelly Nickell, p. 157
4 months 1 week ago

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.

0
0
Source
source
Attributed to Voltaire in Likharev, K.K. (2021). On Government and Politics. In: Likharev, K.K. (eds) Essential Quotes for Scientists and Engineers.
2 months 4 days ago

It may be that brain hardware has co-evolved with the internal virtual worlds that it creates. This can be called hardware-software co-evolution.

0
0
5 months 5 days ago

The papers were always talking about the debt owed to society. According to them, it had to be paid. But that doesn't speak to the imagination. What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them for eternity.

0
0
Source
source
Letter XV
4 months 3 weeks ago

Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.

0
0
Source
source
(5). (Enchiridion 5)
4 months 1 week ago

In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which to justify its privileges.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: In Praise of Idleness, p. 13
4 months 3 weeks ago

The philosophers who wished us to have the gods for our friends rank the friendship of the holy angels in the fourth circle of society, advancing now from the three circles of society on earth to the universe, and embracing heaven itself. And in this friendship we have indeed no fear that the angels will grieve us by their death or deterioration. But as we cannot mingle with them as familiarly as with men (which itself is one of the grievances of this life), and as Satan, as we read, sometimes transforms himself into an angel of light, to tempt those whom it is necessary to discipline, or just to deceive, there is great need of God's mercy to preserve us from making friends of demons in disguise, while we fancy we have good angels for our friends; for the astuteness and deceitfulness of these wicked spirits is equalled by their hurtfulness.

0
0
Source
source
XIX, 9
3 months 4 days ago

To think that so many have succeeded in dying!

0
0
5 months 6 days ago

It is by the Imperial Capital that contemporaries (and posterity, too) judge an Empire, and its magnificence impresses them mightily and leads them to judge the Emperor a great man and hero, even though it may all be based on robbery, and though the provinces of the Empire may be sunk in misery.

0
0
3 months 4 weeks ago

The core of ethics runs deep in our species and is common to human beings everywhere. It survives the most appalling hardships and the most ruthless attempts to deprive human beings of their humanity. Nevertheless, some people resist the idea that his core has a biological basis which we have inherited from our pre-human ancestors.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 2, The Biological Basis Of Ethics, p. 27
2 months 2 weeks ago

Organizations are systems of coordinated action among individuals and groups whose preferences, information, interests, or knowledge differ. Organization theories describe the delicate conversion of conflict into cooperation, the mobilization of resources, and the coordination of effort that facilitate the joint survival of an organization and its members.

0
0
Source
source
Simon (1993. p. 2); Cited in Mario Catalani, ‎Giuseppe F. Clerico (1996) Decision making structures. p. 1.
2 weeks 4 days ago

The most profound reason... why the metropolis conduces to the urge for the most individual personal existence... appears to me to be the following: the development of modern culture is characterized by the preponderance of what one may call the "objective spirit" over the "subjective spirit."

0
0
Source
source
p. 421 as cited in: Kenneth Allan (2009) Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory: Seeing the Social World. p. 212
3 months 1 week ago

If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can't deny a kind of respect for the great criminal.

0
0
3 months 1 day ago

Marx explains the alienation of labor as exemplified in, first, the relation of the worker to the product of his labor and, second, the relation of the worker to his own activity. P. 276

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story. The good ones last. A waltz which you can like only when you are waltzing is a bad waltz.

0
0
Source
source
"On Three Ways of Writing for Children" (1952) - in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1967), p. 24
2 months 4 days ago

I speak as a biologist. There aren't many absolutely clear distinctions in biology. Mostly what we have is a spectrum. But the male-female divide is exceptional in biology. It really is a true binary.

0
0
Source
source
Interviewed by Judith Woods, as cited in "Richard Dawkins interview: 'I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words'", The Telegraph
2 months 3 weeks ago

Without narration, life is purely additive.

0
0
1 month 2 weeks ago

For those who live inside a myth, it seems a self-evident fact. Human progress is a fact of this kind. If you accept it you have a place in the grand march of humanity. Humankind is, of course, not marching anywhere. 'Humanity' is a fiction composed from billions of individuals for each of whom life is singular and final. But the myth of progress is extremely potent. When it loses its power those who have lived by it are - as Conrad put it, describing Kayerts and Carlier - 'like those lifelong prisoners who, liberated after many years, do not know what use to make of their freedoms'. When faith in the future is taken from them, so is the image they have of themselves. If they then opt for death, it is because without that faith they can no longer make sense of living.

0
0
Source
source
An Old Chaos: The Call of Progress (pp. 6-7)
3 months 1 week ago

Man needed one moral constitution to fit him for his original state; he needs another to fit him for his present state; and he has been, is, and will long continue to be, in process of adaptation. And the belief in human perfectibility merely amounts to the belief that, in virtue of this process, man will eventually become completely suited to his mode of life. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is part of nature; all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower. The modifications mankind have undergone, and are still undergoing, result from a law underlying the whole organic creation; and provided the human race continues, and the constitution of things remains the same, those modifications must end in completeness.

0
0
Source
source
Pt. I, Ch. 2 : The Evanescence of Evil, concluding paragraph
4 weeks 1 day ago

I cannot call this Shakspeare a "Sceptic," as some do; his indifference to the creeds and theological quarrels of his time misleading them. No: neither unpatriotic, though he says little about his Patriotism; nor sceptic, though he says little about his Faith. Such "indifference" was the fruit of his greatness withal: his whole heart was in his own grand sphere of worship (we may call it such); these other controversies, vitally important to other men, were not vital to him.

0
0
3 months 4 weeks ago

In the beginning there were two primal spirits,Twins spontaneously active,These are the Good and the Evil, in thought, and in word, and in deed.

0
0
Source
source
Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 30, 3.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Do not ask who started it.

0
0
Source
source
Finish it A Dictionary of Thoughts (1908) by Tryon Edwards, p. 234
3 months 1 day ago

The eyes see only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

0
0
Source
source
Robertson Davies as quoted in The White Bedouin‎ (2007) by George Potter, p. 241
4 months 1 week ago

I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses, - mettle and bottom.

0
0
Source
source
Manners
2 months 3 weeks ago

One must give one power a ballast, so to speak, to put it in a position to resist another.

0
0
Source
source
Book V, Chapter 14.
1 month 2 days ago

It is only through science and art that civilization is of value. Some have wondered at the formula: science for its own sake; an yet it is as good as life for its own sake, if life is only misery; and even as happiness for its own sake, if we do not believe that all pleasures are of the same quality...Every act should have an aim. We must suffer, we must work, we must pay for our place at the game, but this is for seeing's sake; or at the very least that others may one day see.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?

0
0
Source
source
D 62
2 months 3 weeks ago

Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 43, November 11, 1947.

The, diverse states of the soul are always correlative with those of the body.

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 6, The Formula of Justice
4 months 4 days ago

The less somebody knows and understands himself the less great he is, however great may be his talent. For this reason our scientists are not great.

0
0
Source
source
p. 51e

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia