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not in an exaggerated form, for very little handles will move men and women to as strange performances, as any Toy was ever made to undertake.
“But, of course, it is not for their language that the tribalists are fighting: they are fighting to protect their level of awareness, their mental passivity, their obedience to the tribe, and their desire to ignore the existence of outsiders.”
― The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution
― The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution
“After belabouring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby.”
― Heretics
― Heretics
“That is no casual thing: a special preference for Mephistopheles. He was especially fond of Mephistopheles’s line from Faust: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”79 This is no surprise; it reflects the very thinking of the man who in letters called for the “ruthless criticism of all that exists,”80 who in the Manifesto declared that communism seeks to “abolish the present state of things,” and who at the close of the Manifesto called for “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”
― The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration
― The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration
“There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine that attacked (or “limited”) reason, which did not also preach submission to the power of some authority.”
― The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution
― The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution
“Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man. We must not conclude merely upon a man's haranguing upon liberty, and using the charming sound, that he is fit to be trusted with the liberties of his country. It is not unfrequent to hear men declaim loudly upon liberty, who, if we may judge by the whole tenor of their actions, mean nothing else by it but their own liberty, — to oppress without control or the restraint of laws all who are poorer or weaker than themselves. It is not, I say, unfrequent to see such instances, though at the same time I esteem it a justice due to my country to say that it is not without shining examples of the contrary kind; — examples of men of a distinguished attachment to this same liberty I have been describing; whom no hopes could draw, no terrors could drive, from steadily pursuing, in their sphere, the true interests of their country; whose fidelity has been tried in the nicest and tenderest manner, and has been ever firm and unshaken.
The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people.”
―
The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people.”
―
Asderathos’s 2025 Year in Books
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60 books
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286 books
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31 books
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