Goodreads helps you follow your favorite authors. Be the first to learn about new releases!
Start by following Charles Fourier.
Showing 1-28 of 28
“The Civilized… murder their children by producing too many of them without being able to provide for their well-being. Morality or theories of false virtue stimulate them to manufacture cannon fodder, anthills of conscripts who are forced to sell themselves out of poverty. This improvident paternity is a false virtue, the selfishness of pleasure.”
―
―
“The method of doubt must be applied to civilization; we must doubt its necessity, its excellence, and its permanence.”
―
―
“Despots prefer the friendship of the dog, who, unjustly mistreated and debased, still loves and serves the man who wronged him.”
―
―
“The philosophers say that the passions are too lively, too fiery; in truth they are weak and languid. All around one sees the mass of men endure the persecution of a few masters and the despotism of prejudices without offering the slightest resistance... their passions are too weak to permit them to derive audacity from despair.”
―
―
“The peoples of civilization see their wretchedness increase in direct proportion to the advance of industry.”
―
―
“Philosophy was right to vaunt liberty; it is the foremost desire of all creatures. But philosophy forgot that in civilized societies liberty is illusory if the common people lack wealth. When the wage-earning classes are poor, their independence is as fragile as a house without foundations. The free man who lacks wealth immediately sinks back under the yoke of the rich. The newly freed slave takes fright at the need of providing for his own subsistence and hastens to sell himself back into slavery in order to escape this new anxiety that hangs over him like Damocles' sword. In thoughtlessly giving him liberty without wealth, you merely replace his physical torment with a mental torment. He finds life burdensome in his new state... Thus when you give liberty to the people, it must be bolstered by two supports which are the guarantee of comfort and industrial attraction...”
―
―
“Social progress and changes of historical period take place in proportion to the advance of women toward liberty, and social decline occurs as a result of the diminution of the liberty of women.”
―
―
“the family is a group that needs to escape from itself...”
―
―
“Under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself.”
―
―
“The unity of man and nature is the fundamental principle of a sound society.”
―
―
“To speak frankly, the family bond in the civilized regime causes fathers to desire the death of their children and children to desire the death of their fathers.”
―
―
“Love in the Phalanstery is no longer, as it is with us, a recreation which detracts from work; on the contrary it is the soul and the vehicle, the mainspring, of all works and of the whole of universal attraction.”
―
―
“It is easy to compress the passions by violence. Philosophy suppresses them with a stroke of the pen. Locks and the sword come to the aid of sweet morality, but nature appeals these judgments; she regains her rights in secret. Passion stifled at one point reappears at another like water held back by a dike; it is driven inward like the fluid of an ulcer closed to soon.”
―
―
“Wisdom, virtue, morality, all these have fallen out of fashion: everybody worships at the shrine of commerce.”
―
―
“T'is but too true, that for five and twenty centuries since the political and moral sciences have been cultivated, they have done nothing for the happiness of mankind. They have tended only to increase human perversity, to perpetuate indigence, and to reproduce the same evils under different forms. After all their fruitless attempts to ameliorate the social order, there remains to the authors of these sciences only the conviction of their utter incompetency. The problem of human happiness is one which they have been wholly unable to solve.
Meanwhile a universal restlessness attests that mankind has not attained to the destiny to which nature would lead it, and this restlessness would seem to presage some great event which shall radically change its social condition. The nations of the earth harassed by misfortune, and so deceived by political empirics, still hope for a better future, and resemble the invalid who looks for a miraculous cure.
Nature whispers in the ear of the human race, that for it is reserved a happiness, the means of attaining which are now unknown, and that some marvelous discovery will be made, which will suddenly dispel the darkness that now enshrouds the social world.”
―
Meanwhile a universal restlessness attests that mankind has not attained to the destiny to which nature would lead it, and this restlessness would seem to presage some great event which shall radically change its social condition. The nations of the earth harassed by misfortune, and so deceived by political empirics, still hope for a better future, and resemble the invalid who looks for a miraculous cure.
Nature whispers in the ear of the human race, that for it is reserved a happiness, the means of attaining which are now unknown, and that some marvelous discovery will be made, which will suddenly dispel the darkness that now enshrouds the social world.”
―
“The character of a society can be measured by the way it treats its most vulnerable members.”
―
―
“Ignorant as regards the unity of man with himself, the world is still more ignorant in respect to the two other unities - unity of man with God and the universe.”
―
―
“Civilization is built upon the unhappiness of others.”
―
―
“When we see civilization elated with this declining and decrepit phase of its career, we are reminded of a faded belle who, boasting of her attractions in her fiftieth year, excites at once the remark that she was fairer at twenty-five. So it is with civilization, which, dreaming of perfection and progress, is constantly deteriorating, and which will find but too soon in its industrial achievements new sources of political oppression, crimes and commotions.”
―
―
“Everything that exists is moral to the extent that it produces an equilibrium.”
―
―
“Civilization is the subordination of the individual to the welfare of the community.”
―
―
“There is a class of writers who are ever boasting of the progress of civilization and of the human mind in modern times. If we were to credit their pretensions, we should be led to believe that the science of society had reached its highest degree of perfection, because old metaphysical and economic theories have been somewhat refined upon.
In answer to their boasts of social progress, it is not sufficient to refer to the deeply-rooted social evils which exist, and which prey upon our boasted civilized social order. We will mention but a single one, the frightful increase of national debts and of taxation.”
―
In answer to their boasts of social progress, it is not sufficient to refer to the deeply-rooted social evils which exist, and which prey upon our boasted civilized social order. We will mention but a single one, the frightful increase of national debts and of taxation.”
―
“Eh! what does it matter that he begins at a young age with the job of butcher, since everything is linked in the system of societary studies! The work of butchery will lead like others to all sciences. Indeed, Nero will learn early to judge by eye the difference in the flesh and fat of animals fed with such and such fodder, fattened according to such and such system. These remarks are linked to the rivalries which exist between the butchers of Tibur and those of the neighboring phalanxes, then between the Tiburians partisans or rivals of such and such system of fertilizer. Nero will thus become an agronomist on fodder and vegetables given to livestock. This knowledge will lead him to others.
Let us add that the young Nero, raised in a Phalanx, will have satisfied there from the age of 4 twenty other inclinations that the wise Seneca would have stifled for the good of morality, and these various tastes, developed early, will lead the young Nero to twenty kinds of useful studies. Little by little he will find himself initiated into all the sciences by the sole impulse of these inclinations reputed to be vicious in Civilization and repressed in children.
What happens today with this repression? Nature is hindered, but it is not destroyed; it was not able, from a young age, to exercise itself usefully on industry, it will reappear later, usque recurret , and the bloodthirsty inclinations of Nero will be exercised at the expense of humanity. It is therefore not Nero who is vicious, it is Civilization which did not know how to use its inclinations, and which forces them to reappear in countermarch or recurrence, an effect which is always disastrous and which disguises the passions and makes them as harmful as they would have been useful.”
―
Let us add that the young Nero, raised in a Phalanx, will have satisfied there from the age of 4 twenty other inclinations that the wise Seneca would have stifled for the good of morality, and these various tastes, developed early, will lead the young Nero to twenty kinds of useful studies. Little by little he will find himself initiated into all the sciences by the sole impulse of these inclinations reputed to be vicious in Civilization and repressed in children.
What happens today with this repression? Nature is hindered, but it is not destroyed; it was not able, from a young age, to exercise itself usefully on industry, it will reappear later, usque recurret , and the bloodthirsty inclinations of Nero will be exercised at the expense of humanity. It is therefore not Nero who is vicious, it is Civilization which did not know how to use its inclinations, and which forces them to reappear in countermarch or recurrence, an effect which is always disastrous and which disguises the passions and makes them as harmful as they would have been useful.”
―
“What! the passions of a Nero, of a Tiberius, could be useful? - Without doubt, very useful in corporate industry. Let us explain this mystery.
Nero is a being born with bloodthirsty inclinations. Nature wants him to take sides in some of the butchery groups of his phalanx from the age of three. If he had a horror of bloodshed, he could not passionately exercise a job in the butcheries, get used to it for pleasure from an early age, and become at twenty a very skilled butcher, as nature wants.
But I hear Agrippina reply: What a ridiculous vision! to pretend that my son, heir to the throne of the world, is made for the profession of butcher! - On this, Agrippina has her son indoctrinated by Seneca and other scholars who will teach him that nature is vicious, that bloodthirsty inclinations are odious, that a young prince should love only commerce and the Charter, and that he would debase himself by sneaking around with butchers.
Here, then, is one passion of young Nero hindered, and twenty other of his tastes will be similarly thwarted by the healthy doctrines of gentle and pure morality. Such will be the opinion of Seneca; but Horace and La Fontaine are of a very different opinion, and judge much more soundly when they say:
If you chase her out the door,
she comes back through the window.”
―
Nero is a being born with bloodthirsty inclinations. Nature wants him to take sides in some of the butchery groups of his phalanx from the age of three. If he had a horror of bloodshed, he could not passionately exercise a job in the butcheries, get used to it for pleasure from an early age, and become at twenty a very skilled butcher, as nature wants.
But I hear Agrippina reply: What a ridiculous vision! to pretend that my son, heir to the throne of the world, is made for the profession of butcher! - On this, Agrippina has her son indoctrinated by Seneca and other scholars who will teach him that nature is vicious, that bloodthirsty inclinations are odious, that a young prince should love only commerce and the Charter, and that he would debase himself by sneaking around with butchers.
Here, then, is one passion of young Nero hindered, and twenty other of his tastes will be similarly thwarted by the healthy doctrines of gentle and pure morality. Such will be the opinion of Seneca; but Horace and La Fontaine are of a very different opinion, and judge much more soundly when they say:
If you chase her out the door,
she comes back through the window.”
―
“This miracle of social concord would result not from direct conciliation, which would be impossible, but from the development of new interests, and especially from the amazement with which the minds of men would be filled on being convinced of the radical falseness of the civilized social order by comparison with the associative or combined, and of the errors in which the social world has been so long plunged - misled by speculative philosophy, which upholds and extols this order with all its defects to the entire neglect of the study of association.”
―
―
“Without fortune, old age in Civilization becomes for both sexes an anticipated hell, and yet the great majority of old people are without fortune. People pretend to love old people, and to speak frankly no one loves them; everything that surrounds them, except childhood, proscribes and mocks them in secret, and in the class of villagers and artisans, to whom they are a burden, they are mistreated, they are openly cursed. As for the present, old age is most often only a long torture. Thus life in Civilization is only a painful journey to arrive at an even more unfortunate lodging since the goal is old age.”
―
―
“The passions in domestic mechanism are an orchestra with 1620 instruments: our philosophers in wanting to direct them are comparable to a legion of children who would introduce themselves to the orchestra of the opera, seize the instruments and make a terrible hullabaloo; should we conclude from this that music is the enemy of man, and that we must repress the violins, stop the basses, stifle the flutes? No; we should chase away these little goslings, and give the instruments to expert musicians. Thus the passions are no more the enemies of man than musical instruments: man has no enemies except the philosophers who want to direct the passions, without having the least knowledge of the mechanism assigned to them by nature.”
―
―
“The French are the greatest cuckolds to be found in the world. There is unquestionably less cuckoldry in Germany.”
― The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy
― The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy
