Low Content Quote Thread

[ClaytonB]

@Bert: Wow, that Nietzsche quote is amazing. I need to get off my butt and read Nietzsche and Stirner.

[Bert_B]

Sometimes I get lost in Nietzsche, which I put on his rather elusive writing style.

A part of Amidst Birds of Prey

Oh Zarathustra,
Cruelest nimrod!
Recently still a hunter of God,
The snare of all virtue,
The arrow of evil!
Now —
Hunted by yourself,
Your own prey,
Bored into yourself …

Now —
Alone with yourself,
Paired in your own knowledge,
Amid a hundred reflections
Before your false self,
Amid a hundred dubious
Memories,
Weary from every hurt,
Chilled by every frost,
Strangled by your own rope,
Self-knower!
Self-hangman!

Why did you bind yourself
With the rope of your wisdom?
Why did you seduce yourself
Into the paradise of the ancient serpent?
Why did you crawl into yourself
In you—into you?

There’s a different translation the band Blood Axis used that I prefer a bit more

Oh Zarathustra
Cruelest nimrod!
Of late still a hunter of God
A spider’s web, to capture virtue
An arrow of evil
Now hunted by thyself
Thine own prey
Caught in the grip of thine own soul

Now lonely to me and thee
Twofold in thine own knowledge
'Mid a hundred mirrors
False to thyself
'Mid a hundred memories
Uncertain and weary from every wound
shivering at every frost
Throttled in thine own noose
Self-knower
Self-hangman

One of my favorite poems.

[Fool_on_the_Hill]

“If we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event - and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.” ~ Nietzsche, The Will to Power

[Fool_on_the_Hill]

The State . . . is the most flagrant, the most cynical, and the most complete negation of humanity. It shatters the universal solidarity of all men on the earth, and brings some of them into association only for the purpose of destroying, conquering, and enslaving all the rest …

This flagrant negation of humanity which constitutes the very essence of the State is, from the standpoint of the State, its supreme duty and its greatest virtue . . . Thus, to offend, to oppress, to despoil, to plunder, to assassinate or enslave one’s fellowman is ordinarily regarded as a crime. In public life, on the other hand, from the standpoint of patriotism, when these things are done for the greater glory of the State, for the preservation or the extension of its power, it is all transformed into duty and virtue. And this virtue, this duty, are obligatory for each patriotic citizen; everyone if supposed to exercise them not against foreigners only but against one’s own fellow citizens . . . whenever the welfare of the State demands it.

This explains why, since the birth of the State, the world of politics has always been and continues to be the stage for unlimited rascality and brigandage . . . This explains why the entire history of ancient and modern states is merely a series of revolting crimes; why kings and ministers, past and present, of all times and all countries – statesmen, diplomats, bureaucrats, and warriors – if judged from the standpoint of simple morality and human justice, have a hundred, a thousand times over earned their sentence to hard labour or to the gallows. There is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege, or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been or is not daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the states, under no other pretext than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible: ‘for reasons of state.’

~ Mikhail Bakunin

[Smiling_Dave]

He got that right, FOTH

[Bert_B]

Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring to the point of recklessness. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life brings with it in any case, not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes lonely, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing one like that comes to grief, this happens so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it nor sympathize. And he cannot go back any longer. Nor can he go back to the pity of men.-

• Beyond Good and Evil

I should have been taking notes while reading this, there were some interesting lines on the subject of will and choice.

[Jargon]

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

-Mencken

[Jargon]

So, looking back, as people are prone to do at this time of year, we can clearly see the telltale signs of the financial disaster that struck the financial markets last autumn: the terrible credit crunch, the “frozen” credit that portended a complete economic “meltdown” unless the government took drastic measures to head it off. (The government’s spokespersons and the media’s talking heads never got straight whether the thing was very cold or very hot, as they reached for horrifying metaphors in all directions at once.)

-Robert Higgs

[Fool_on_the_Hill]

[T]he inequality of fortune . . . introduces among men a degree of authority and subordination which could not possibly exist before. It thereby introduces some degree of that civil government which is indispensably necessary for its own preservation . . . [and] to maintain and secure that authority and subordination. The rich, in particular, are necessarily interested to support that order of things which can alone secure them in the possession of their own advantages. Men of inferior wealth combine to defend those of superior wealth in the possession of their property, in order that men of superior wealth may combine to defend them in the possession of theirs . . . [T]he maintenance of their lesser authority depends upon that of his greater authority, and that upon their subordination to him depends his power of keeping their inferiors in subordination to them. They constitute a sort of little nobility, who feel themselves interested to defend the property and to support the authority of their own little sovereign in order that he may be able to defend their property and to support their authority. Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

---

In a society of an hundred thousand families, there will perhaps be one hundred who don’t labour at all, and who yet, either by violence, or by the more orderly oppression of law, employ a greater part of the labour of society than any other ten thousand in it. The division of what remains, too, after this enormous defalcation, is by no means made in proportion to the labour of each individual. On the contrary those who labour most get least. The opulent merchant, who spends a great part of his time in luxury and entertainments, enjoys a much greater proportion of the profits of his traffic, than all the Clerks and Accountants who do the business. These last, again, enjoying a great deal of leisure, and suffering scarce any other hardship besides the confinement of attendance, enjoy a much greater share of the produce, than three times an equal number of artisans, who, under their direction, labour much more severely and assiduously. The artisan again, tho’ he works generally under cover, protected from the injuries of the weather, at his ease and assisted by the convenience of innumerable machines, enjoys a much greater share than the poor labourer who has the soil and the seasons to struggle with, and, who while he affords the materials for supplying the luxury of all the other members of the common wealth, and bears, as it were, upon his shoulders the whole fabric of human society, seems himself to be buried out of sight in the lowest foundations of the building.

---

Our merchants and master manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.

~ Adam Smith

[WilliamtheGreat]

Non-violence is not a quality to be evolved or expressed to order. It is an inward growth depending for sustenance upon intense individual effort.
~ Mahatma Gandhi

[MJGreen]

Of all the times Adam Smith is quoted, how often do you figure it accurately reflects his context and argument?

I’m reading David Hart’s thesis on French liberals Charles Dunoyer and Charles Comte. It’d be nice if their works were some day translated and published in English, but Hart has plenty of excerpts.

In short, the factory owner, the banker, the judge, the soldier, men of all the professions, can be men of industry since they are able to direct their abilities to activities which are very useful, very productive, and very suited to increasing the faculties of such or such a race. But if the soldier puts his sword in the service of despotism, if the judge sells his conscience to it, if the banker lends it his money, if the factory owner buys unjust privileges from it, it is clear that they ought to be given another name. Likewise, one cannot call a “man of industry” the man from Nantes who engages in the black slave trade, or the man from Tripoli who trades in whites, or the munitions manufacturer who rents his ships to the murderers of the Greeks, or the imperial officer who assists them with his sword, or the money trader who offers his services to all solvent tyrannies, or the man of state who deals with his advisers. In whatever manner one participates in a harmful action, one is not a “man of industry” if one takes part. I am not saying that there is always virtue in producing. What I do say is that crime is never productive. I say that as a result of a bad action there is destruction or displacement of wealth but never an increase in the world’s total wealth. In one word I say that brigandage, by whatever instruments it employs or whatever way it uses them, ought always to be distinguished very carefully from industry.

-Dunoyer

By “legal regime” is meant exclusively the state of a people who only obey the laws of their own nature, those laws which contribute to their own development and prosperity. By “arbitrary regime” is meant the state of all people who are subject to a harmful power no matter how this power is exercised. It is evident that a government falls into arbitrariness the moment it commands or forbids actions which are not required or prohibited by the laws of our nature. It is of little importance whether these orders or prohibitions are written or not written, and whether they are or are not observed in all cases where they apply. These circumstances do not make arbitrariness disappear. The name “law” ought to be exclusively reserved for those powers which are part of the nature of man or the nature of things, and which are not in the power of any individual to alter. The orders or prohibitions of government are more properly called “ordonnances” and have been so called for centuries.

If we observe the factors which cause one part of the human species to act upon other parts we find among the principle causes the desire to obtain physical enjoyments and the desire to avoid pain of the same kind. It is in order to avoid the pain of labor and to obtain plentiful subsistance, agreeable clothing and spacious accommodation that some men come to possess other men called slaves. It is to achieve the same end that, in all nations, one part of the population dominates or seeks to dominate the others, and it is to avoid the more or less burdensome physical evils that the group of men called the governed, subjects or slaves obey or attempt to avoid the action imposed upon them. The history of the human species is comprised, in one word, of struggles which have arisen from the desire to seize the physical enjoyments of the entire species and to impose upon others all the pain of the same kind.

-Comte

[Fool_on_the_Hill]

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” ~ Warren Buffet

[Bert_B]

Mithras, God of the Morning, our trumpets waken the wall
Rome is above the nations, but thou art over all
Now as the names are answered, and the guards are marched away
Mithras, also a soldier, give us strength for the day

Mithras, God of the Noontide, thy heather swims in the heat
Our helmets scorch our foreheads, our sandals burn our feet
Now in the ungirt hour, now ere we blink and drowse
Mithras, also a soldier, keep us true to our vows

Mithras, God of the Sunset, low on the Western main
Thou descending immortal, immortal to rise again
Now when the watch is ended, now when the wine is drawn
Mithras, also a soldier, keep us pure till the dawn

Mithras, Lord of the Midnight, here where the great bull dies
Look on thy children in darkness, oh take our sacrifice
Many roads thou hast fashioned, all of them lead to the light
Mithras, also a soldier, teach us to die aright

Something a bit different, A Song to Mithras by Rudard Kipling.

[Bert_B]

It is true that widely accepted ideas are never the personal property of their so-called author; on the contary, he is the bond-servant of his ideas. Impressive ideas which are hailed as truths have something peculiar to themselves. Although they come into being at a definite time, they are and have always been timeless; they arise from that realm of procreative, psychic life out of which the ephemeral mind of the single human being grows like a plant that blossoms, bears fruit and seed, and then withers and dies. Ideas spring from a source that is not contained within one man’s personal life. We do not create them; they create us.

• Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

[vive_la_insurrection]

'What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In this deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor."

Edmund Burke

[ClaytonB]

In this age, the word philosophy has little meaning unless accompanied by some other qualifying term. The body of philosophy has been broken up into numerous isms more or less antagonistic, which have become so concerned with the effort to disprove each other’s fallacies that the sublimer issues of divine order and human destiny have suffered deplorable neglect. The ideal function of philosophy is to serve as the stabilizing influence in human thought. By virtue of its intrinsic nature it should prevent man from ever establishing unreasonable codes of life. Philosophers themselves, however, have frustrated the ends of philosophy by exceeding in their woolgathering those untrained minds whom they are supposed to lead in the straight and narrow path of rational thinking.

Manly P. Hall - Introduction, The Secret Teachings of All Ages

[MJGreen]

That an unjust action has more demerit than an ungenerous one: That a generous action has more merit than a merely just one: That no man ought to be blamed for what it was not in his power to hinder: That we ought not to do to others what we would think unjust or unfair to be done to us in like circumstances.

-Thomas Reid

If it were necessary to raise the sum required from those who individually agreed in the necessity of war, we should have the strongest guarantee for the preservation of peace… Compulsory taxation means everywhere the persistent probability of a war made by the ambitions or passions of politicians.

Between the some purposes and the all purposes I can find no settled boundary. You cannot draw, and no living man can draw, a [line demarcating the just and unjust use of force]. If you sat down with Mr. Gladstone today to do it, tomorrow his exigencies would have eaten out the line, and its authority would be gone, at all events for our planet. Do not let us play with these things, and build up pleasant fictions that are of no value. Either a state of liberty-that is, a state where no physical force is applied by man to man-is the moral one, or we must recognize force as rightly applied by those who possess it for all purposes that they think right.

Sir F. Stephen… tells us not to employ compulsion, even if calculated to obtain a good object, if it involves ‘too great an expense.’ What possible binding power is there in such a rule over the minds of men? Where is the common standard of measurement? Who sees with the same eyes the accompanying expense or the resulting good? It is far better to look the truth in the face and to say that when you sanction force for good purposes you sanction it for all occasions which the holders of power think good.

If you tie a man’s hands there is nothing moral about his not committing murder. Such an abstaining from murder is a mechanical act; and just the same in kind, though less in degree, are all the acts which men are compelled to do under penalties imposed upon them by their fellow-men. Those who would drive their fellow-men into the perfomance of any good actions do not see that the very elements of morality-the free act following on the free choice-are as much absent in those upon whom they practice their legislation as in a flock of sheep penned in by hurdles. You cannot see too clearly that force and reason-which last is the essence of the moral act-are at the two opposite poles. When you act by reason you are not acting under the compulsion of other men; when you act under compulsion you are not acting under the guidance of reason.

The man who compels his neighbor is not the man who reasons with and convinces him, who seeks to influence him by example, who rouses him to make exertions to save himself. He takes upon himself to treat him, not as a being with reason, but as an animal in whom reason is not. The old saying, that any fool can govern with bayonets, is one of the truest sayings which this generation has inherited and neglected. Any fool can reform the surface of things, can drive children by the hundreds of thousands into schools, can drive prostitutes out of public sight, can drive dram drinking into cellars, can provide out of public funds pensions for the old, hospitals for the sick, and lodging houses for the poor, can call into existence a public department and a population of officials and inspectors, provided that he has the handling of money that does not belong to him, and a people not trained to inquire beyond the present moment, and ready to applaud what has a surface look of philanthroty; but what is the good of it all when he has done it? To be compelled into virtue is only to live in order to die of dry rot.

-Auberon Herbert

[ClaytonB]

@Michael J Green: Holy crap those are some good quotes…

[Bert_B]

Something I made.

[Bert_B]

After the annihilation of faith Feuerbach thinks to put in to the supposedly safe harbor of love. “The first and highest law must be the love of man to man. Homo homini Deus est – this is the supreme practical maxim, this is the turning point of the world’s history.” But, properly speaking, only the god is changed – the deus; love has remained: there love to the superhuman God, here love to the human God, to homo as Deus. Therefore man is to me – sacred. And everything “truly human” is to me – sacred! “Marriage is sacred of itself. And so it is with all moral relations. Friendship is and must be sacred for you, and property, and marriage, and the good of every man, but sacred in and of itself.” Haven’t we the priest again there? Who is his God? Man with a great M! What is the divine? The human! Then the predicate has indeed only been changed into the subject, and, instead of the sentence “God is love,” they say “love is divine”; instead of “God has become man,” “Man has become God,” etc. It is nothing more or less than a new – religion. "All moral relations are ethical, are cultivated with a moral mind, only where of themselves (without religious consecration by the priest’s blessing) they are counted religious. " Feuerbach’s proposition, “Theology is anthropology,” means only “religion must be ethics, ethics alone is religion.”

• Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own

vive might have a better grasp of this than I do, but for the first part of (The Spirit, The Possessed) he seems to be criticizing atheists as well. My girlfriend and I were talking about some atheists who’s religion is that of science and man, and ironically enough capital M Man. I found this passage rather fitting, because the mentality and dogmatism can be the same, just the other end of the spectrum. The line “Man has become God,” etc. It is nothing more or less than a new – religion, seems to hit the mark on this. Just as a fundamentalist the atheist may also have “fixed ideas,” that would make him “possessed” by ideology.