31 Friday Jul 2015
Posted in capitalism
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“We must discard the present philosophy of work as a good in itself, in the knowledge that centuries of labour have but resulted in the demoralisation of the few and the degradation of the many”.
Henry Salt, Richard Jefferies: His Life and His Ideals
30 Thursday Jul 2015
Posted in civilization, land, spirituality
“Will we let ourselves be destroyed in our turn without a struggle, give up our homes, our country, bequeathed to us by the Great Spirit, the graves of our dead and everything that is dear and sacred to us? I know you will cry with me, Never! Never!”
Tecumseh of the Shawnees
29 Wednesday Jul 2015
Posted in civilization, magic, spirituality
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“It was the abandonment of magic which made possible the upsurge of technology, not the other way round. Indeed, as Max Weber stressed, magic was potentially ‘one of the most serious obstructions to the rationalisation of economic life’. The technological primacy of Western civilization, it can be argued, owes a sizeable debt to the fact that in Europe recourse to magic was to prove less ineradicable than in other parts of the world”.
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic
28 Tuesday Jul 2015
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“So simple a category as ‘theft’ may turn out to be, in certain circumstances, evidence of protracted attempts by villagers to defend ancient common right usages or by labourers to defend customary perquisites”.
E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common
27 Monday Jul 2015
Posted in existentialism, Quote
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“The act of accepting meaningless is in itself a meaningful act”.
Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be
26 Sunday Jul 2015
Posted in anarchism, spirituality
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“As soon as the Ideal is put before mankind, all former ideals will fade away as the stars fade before the rising sun”.
Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom
25 Saturday Jul 2015
Posted in anarchism
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“Now the Outsider is not necessarily the rebel, but the rebel is undoubtedly a most important type of Outsider. The rebel attempts to assert that existence comes before essence, that Will comes before authority”.
Colin Wilson, Religion and the Rebel
24 Friday Jul 2015
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“At the same time as they proclaim their urgent desire to liberate themselves from the dead hand of tradition, anarchists like to believe that their roots run deep into the past, and the paradox is only apparent”.
George Woodcock, The Anarchist Reader
23 Thursday Jul 2015
Posted in capitalism, media
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“Corporations clearly have far greater financial resources at their disposal. As pressure groups, they can invest millions of dollars into grassroots organising, polls, lawyers, computer and satellite technology, video news releases, and professional advice to put their case directly to politicians and government officials and to garner public support”.
Sharon Beder, Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism
22 Wednesday Jul 2015
Posted in anarchism, capitalism
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“The worker’s liberty, so much exalted by the economists, jurists, and bourgeois republicans, is only a theoretical freedom, lacking any means for its possible realization, and consequently it is only a fictitious liberty, an utter falsehood. The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession of terms of serfdom – voluntary from the juridical point of view but compulsory in the economic sense – broken up by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is real slavery”.
Michael (Mikael) Bakunin, Philosophical Considerations
