Skip to main content
4 months 2 weeks ago

A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

0
0
Source
source
An Apology for Idlers.
5 months 4 days ago

My own book Women, Race and Class was one of many that were published during that era, including, to name only a few, This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga, the work of bell hooks and Michelle Wallace, and the anthology All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies. So behind this concept of intersectionality is a rich history of struggle. A history of conversations among activists within movement formations, and with and among academics as well.

0
0
Source
source
Angela Davis Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (2015) p 19
6 months 3 weeks ago

It is sometimes said, common sense is very rare.

0
0
Source
source
Philosophical Dictionary ('Sens Commun') (1767). Compare Juvenal, Satires, viii:73: Original Latin: rarus enim ferme sensus communis in illa fortuna.
3 months 5 days ago

That most knowing of persons - gossip.

0
0
Source
source
Line 1.
6 months 2 weeks ago

What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

0
0
Source
source
On Revolution (1963), ch. 2
5 months 3 weeks ago

The single spirit doth simultaneously temper the whole together; this is the single soul of all things; all are filled with God.

0
0
Source
source
IV 9; as translated by Dorothea Waley Singer
6 months 3 weeks ago

The question was, whether, if the reformers of society and government could succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were free and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures.

0
0
Source
source
(pp. 145-146)
5 months 1 week ago

That science is incapable of solving in its own way those fundamental questions is no sufficient reason for slighting them.

0
0
Source
source
p. 14
4 months 4 weeks ago

Much early alchemy seems to have been adventure. You heated and mixed and burnt and pounded and to see what would happen. An adventure might suggest an hypothesis that can subsequently be tested, but adventure is prior to theory.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 4, Evidence, p. 36.
6 months 2 weeks ago

But when they have realized that it [society] rejects them forever, they themselves assume the ostracism of which they are victims so as not to leave the initiative to their oppressors.

0
0
Source
source
p. 65-6
7 months 6 days ago

Yes, you see the Trinity if you see charity.

0
0
Source
source
De Trinitate VIII 8,12.
4 months 6 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
7 months 2 weeks ago

In the course of my fight with the school, I couldn't help but notice that I became a pariah. [...] Once, however, a fellow faculty member, making sure we were unobserved, said to me, "Isaac, the faculty is proud of you for your courage in fighting the administration for academic freedom."I said, "There's no courage involved in it. Don't you know my definition of academic freedom?""No. What's your definition of academic freedom?"I said, "Independent income."

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

0
0
Source
source
Think Little
7 months 3 weeks ago

Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

We want no foreign examples to rekindle in us the flame of liberty. The example of our own ancestors is abundantly sufficient to maintain the spirit of freedom in its full vigour, and to qualify it in all its exertions. The example of a wise, moral, well-natured, and well-tempered spirit of freedom, is that alone which can be useful to us, or in the least degree reputable or safe. Our fabric is so constituted; one part of it bears so much on the other, the parts, are so made for one another, and for nothing else, that to introduce any foreign matter into it, is to destroy it.

0
0
Source
source
p. 471
4 months 2 weeks ago

The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property.

0
0
Source
source
(p. 122)
5 months 2 weeks ago

We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

It is better to correct your own faults than those of another.

0
0
7 months 2 weeks ago

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

0
0
5 months 3 days ago

An elaborated culture has a density, complexity, and historical-semantic value that is so strong as to make politics possible... Gramsci's insight is to have recognised that subordination, fracturing, diffusion, reproducing, as much as producing, creating, forcing, guiding, are necessary aspects of elaboration.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-335-15275-9), p. 248
3 months 5 days ago

Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.

0
0
Source
source
Line 18.
4 months 2 weeks ago

It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Every living creature is happy when he fulfills his destiny, that is, when he realizes himself, when he is being that which in truth he is. For this reason, Schlegel, inverting the relationship between pleasure and destiny, said, "We have a genius for what we like." Genius, man's superlative gift for doing something, always carries a look of supreme pleasure.

0
0
Source
source
pp. 16-17
2 months 2 weeks ago

...undefiled by pleasures, invulnerable to any pain, untouched by arrogance, unaffected by meanness, an athlete in the greatest of all contests-the struggle not to be overwhelmed by anything that happens.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) III, 4
3 months 2 weeks ago

Disobedience to authority is one of the most natural and healthy acts.

0
0
Source
source
210
7 months 2 weeks ago

Beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

Works of art express space as opportunity for movement and action.

0
0
Source
source
p. 217
6 months 3 weeks ago

I am sorry to say that at the moment I am so busy as to be convinced that life has no meaning whatever... I do not see that we can judge what would be the result of the discovery of truth, since none has hitherto been discovered.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Will Durant, 20 June, 1931
4 months 3 weeks ago

Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.

0
0
Source
source
Consciousness and Language (2002) p. 47.
6 months 2 weeks ago

We inherit the warlike type; and for most of the capacities of heroism that the human race is full of we have to thank this cruel history. Dead men tell no tales, and if there were any tribes of other type than this they have left no survivors. Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won't breed it out of us. The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of wars. Let public opinion once reach a certain fighting pitch, and no ruler can withstand it. In the Boer war both governments began with bluff, but they couldn't stay there; the military tension was too much for them.

0
0
4 months 2 weeks ago

The bow too tensely strung is easily broken.

0
0
Source
source
Maxim 388
3 months 1 week ago

Wisdom, if it were young, would cherish love, nursing it with devotion, deepening it with sacrifice, vitalizing with parentage, making all things subordinate to it till the end. Even though it consumes us in its service and overwhelms us with tragedy, even though it breaks us down with separations, let it be first. How can it matter what price we pay for love?

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2 : On Youth
5 months 2 weeks ago

I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.

0
0
5 months 3 weeks ago

They call, in fact, for the forfeiture, to a greater or less degree, of human liberty, to the point where, were I to attempt to sum up what socialism is, I would say that it was simply a new system of serfdom.

0
0
Source
source
Notes for a Speech on Socialism (1848). http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/tocqueville-s-critique-of-socialism-1848
5 months 1 week ago

For what is specific in the Catholic religion is immortalization and not justification, in the Protestant sense. Rather is this latter ethical. It is from Kant, in spite of what orthodox Protestants may think of him, that Protestantism derived its penultimate conclusions - namely, that religion rests upon morality, and not morality upon religion, as in Catholicism.

0
0
5 months 2 weeks ago

There are questions which, once approached, either isolate you or kill you outright.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

0
0
Source
source
Quoted in Library of Living Philosophers: The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, 1944
6 months 4 weeks ago

It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 6. Of Preparation, tr. E. J. Trechmann, 1927
5 months 4 days ago

If the passion for truthfulness is merely controlled and stilled without being satisfied, it will kill the activities it is supposed to support. This may be one of the reasons why, at the present time, the study of the humanities runs a risk of sliding from professional seriousness, through professionalization, to a finally disenchanted careerism.

0
0
Source
source
p. 3
2 months 2 weeks ago

All persons shall have full and free liberty of religious opinion; nor shall any be compelled to frequent or maintain any religious institution.

0
0
Source
source
Draft Constitution for Virginia
6 months 3 weeks ago

William James used to preach the "will-to-believe." For my part, I should wish to preach the "will-to-doubt." None of our beliefs are quite true; all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 12: Free Thought and Official Propaganda
5 months 2 weeks ago

Fear for the Other, fear for the other man's death is my fear, but is in no way an individual's taking fright.

0
0
Source
source
The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 84
6 months 3 weeks ago

Both in England and on the Continent a graduated property tax (l'impôt progressif) has been advocated, on the avowed ground that the state should use the instrument of taxation as a means of mitigating the inequalities of wealth. I am as desirous as any one that means should be taken to diminish those inequalities, but not so as to relieve the prodigal at the expense of the prudent.To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbours. It is not the fortunes which are earned, but those which are unearned, that it is for the public good to place under limitation.

0
0
Source
source
Book V, Chapter II
5 months 1 week ago

The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.

0
0
Source
source
Mark 2:27 (KJV)
5 months 2 weeks ago

Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes - desertion after desertion.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

I once had a conversation with a famous French philosopher who's a friend of mine. And I said to him, "Why the hell do you write so badly? Pourquoi tu écris si mal?" ... And this was Michel Foucault. He was a very smart guy and wrote a lot of very good stuff but in general he just wrote badly. When you heard him give a lecture in Berkeley, it was perfectly clear, just as clear as I am. ... And he said, "Well, in France, it would be regarded as somewhat childish and naive if you wrote clearly. ... In France you've got to have 10% incomprehensible."

0
0
Source
source
Otherwise people won't think it's deep. They won't think you're a profound thinker.

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia