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Plutarch
Plutarch
2 months 3 weeks ago
To one that promised to give...

To one that promised to give him hardy cocks that would die fighting, "Prithee," said Cleomenes, "give me cocks that will kill fighting."

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61 Cleomenes
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
3 months 3 weeks ago
Though absent from our eyes, Christ...

Though absent from our eyes, Christ our Head is bound to us by love. Since the whole Christ is Head and body, let us so listen to the voice of the Head that we may also hear the body speak.He no more wished to speak alone than He wished to exist alone, since He says: Behold, I am with you all days, unto the consummation of the world (Matt. 28:20). If He is with us, then He speaks in us, He speaks of us, and He speaks through us; and we too speak in Him.

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pp. 420-421
Philosophical Maxims
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
1 month 2 weeks ago
Schizophrenia is like love: there is...

Schizophrenia is like love: there is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon or entity; schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring machines, universal primary production as "the essential reality of man and nature".

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The Desiring Machine
Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
2 weeks 1 day ago
[B]oth natural selection and the historical...

[B]oth natural selection and the historical record offer powerful reasons for doubting the trustworthiness of our naive moral intuitions. So the possibility that human civilisation might be founded upon some monstrous evil should be taken seriously - even if the possibility seems transparently absurd at the time.

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The Antispeciesist Revolution, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 26 Jul. 2013
Philosophical Maxims
Susan Neiman
Susan Neiman
3 weeks 6 days ago
On members of the Nazi Party...

[On members of the Nazi Party] The most shocking, but also important thing, is they were not the uneducated masses. The majority had academic degrees. We like to think that education provides immunity to racist and fascist ideology. And it doesn't.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 4 weeks ago
In which the technical apparatus of...

In which the technical apparatus of production and distribution (with an increasing sector of automation) functions, not as the sum-total of mere instruments which can be isolated from their social and political effects, but rather as a system which determines a priori the product of the apparatus as well as the operations of servicing and extending it. In this society, the productive apparatus tends to become totalitarian to the extent to which it determines not only the socially needed occupations, skills, and attitudes, but also individual needs and aspirations. It thus obliterates the Opposition between the private and public existence, between individual and social needs.

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p. xlvii
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
1 month 3 weeks ago
The endeavor of scientific research to...

The endeavor of scientific research to see events in their more general connection in order to determine their laws, is a legitimate and useful occupation. Any protest against such efforts, in the name of freefom from restrictive conditions, would be fruitless if science did not naïvely identify the abstractions called rules and laws with the actually efficacious forces, and confuse the probability that B will follow A with the actual effort make B follow A.

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p. 150.
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
2 months 1 week ago
Consider any individual at any period...

Consider any individual at any period of his life, and you will always find him preoccupied with fresh plans to increase his comfort.

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Book Three, Chapter XXI.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 1 week ago
Thee might observe incidentally that if...

Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child - this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways.

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Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1894); published in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume 1: The Private Years (1884-1914)
Philosophical Maxims
Lucretius
Lucretius
3 months 3 weeks ago
For as children….

For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things that children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true. This terror, therefore, and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of daylight, but by the aspect and law of nature.

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Book II, lines 55-61 (tr. Rouse)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
1 month 4 weeks ago
And Beasts that have Deliberation, must...

And Beasts that have Deliberation, must necessarily also have Will.

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The First Part, Chapter 6, p. 28
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 5 days ago
...and if you are common, you...

...and if you are common, you can dress up as a woman, show you behind or write poems: there's nothing offensive about a naked behind if it's everybody's; each person will be mirrored in it.

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p. 463
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
3 months 5 days ago
Science does not rest upon solid...

Science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories arises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or 'given' base; and if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being.

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Ch. 5 "The Problem of the Empirical Basis", Section 30: Theory and Experiment, p. 94.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
3 months 1 week ago
Why has the Revolution of France...

Why has the Revolution of France been stained with crimes, which the Revolution of the United States of America was not? Men are physically the same in all countries; it is education that makes them different. Accustom a people to believe that priests or any other class of men can forgive sins, and you will have sins in abundance.

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Worship and Church Bells, 1797
Philosophical Maxims
Antisthenes
Antisthenes
2 months 3 weeks ago
I have enough to eat till...

I have enough to eat till my hunger is stayed, to drink till my thirst is sated; to clothe myself withal; and out of doors not Callias there, with all his riches, is more safe than I from shivering; and when I find myself indoors, what warmer shirting do I need than my bare walls? what ampler greatcoat than the tiles above my head?

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iv. 34
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
1 month 3 weeks ago
Even the most insensitive hit song...

Even the most insensitive hit song enthusiast cannot always escape the feeling that the child with a sweet tooth comes to know in the candy store.

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p. 290
Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
1 month 1 week ago
I am much more open about...

I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. I was never against the category of men. "As a Jew, I was taught it was ethically imperative to speak up" in Haaretz.

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24-Feb-10
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
1 month 4 weeks ago
In solitude it is possible to...

In solitude it is possible to love mankind; in the world, for one who knows the world, there can be nothing but secret or open war.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon
1 month 2 weeks ago
The principle of bounded rationality [is]...

The principle of bounded rationality [is] the capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world - or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality.

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p. 198.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 1 week ago
Belief in eternal hell fire was...

Belief in eternal hell fire was an essential item of Christian belief until pretty recent times. In this country, as you know, it ceased to be an essential item because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York dissented; but in this country our religion is settled by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy Council was able to override Their Graces and hell was no longer necessary to a Christian. Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must believe in hell. What is a Christian?

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1927
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
2 months 2 weeks ago
As long as Man continues to...

As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.

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Attribution to Pythagoras by Ovid, as quoted in The Extended Circle: A Dictionary of Humane Thought (1985) by Jon Wynne-Tyson, p. 260; also in Vegetarian Times, No. 168 (August 1991), p. 4
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 3 days ago
For those of us who have...

For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 6 days ago
I suppose you imagined I was...

I suppose you imagined I was so insanely in love with you that I could commit any folly. When will you women understand that one isn't insanely in love? All one asks for is a quiet life, which you won't allow one to have. I don't know what the devil ever induced me to marry you. It was all a damned stupid, practical joke. And now you go about saying I'm a murderer. I won't stand it.

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The Gioconda smile, in Mortal Coils, 1921
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
1 week 6 days ago
For those who live inside a...

For those who live inside a myth, it seems a self-evident fact. Human progress is a fact of this kind. If you accept it you have a place in the grand march of humanity. Humankind is, of course, not marching anywhere. 'Humanity' is a fiction composed from billions of individuals for each of whom life is singular and final. But the myth of progress is extremely potent. When it loses its power those who have lived by it are - as Conrad put it, describing Kayerts and Carlier - 'like those lifelong prisoners who, liberated after many years, do not know what use to make of their freedoms'. When faith in the future is taken from them, so is the image they have of themselves. If they then opt for death, it is because without that faith they can no longer make sense of living.

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An Old Chaos: The Call of Progress (pp. 6-7)
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 3 days ago
The greatest saving one can make...

The greatest saving one can make in the order of thought is to accept the unintelligibility of the world and to pay attention to man.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
1 month 3 weeks ago
Philosophy and religion are enemies, and...

Philosophy and religion are enemies, and because they are enemies they have need of one another. There is no religion without some philosophical basis, no philosophy without roots in religion. ... the attacks which are directed against religion from a presumed scientific or philosophical point of view are merely attacks from another but opposing religious point of view.

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Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
1 month 3 weeks ago
The more ideas have become automatic,...

The more ideas have become automatic, instrumentalized, the less does anybody see in them thoughts with a meaning of their own. They are considered things, machines. Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society.

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pp. 21-22.
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
2 months 1 week ago
Disturbances in society are never more...

Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.

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Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
1 month 2 weeks ago
The narcissistic, the domineering, the possessive...

The narcissistic, the domineering, the possessive woman can succeed in being a "loving" mother as long as the child is small. Only the really loving woman, the woman who is happier in giving than in taking, who is firmly rooted in her own existence, can be a loving mother when the child is in the process of separation.

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Ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
2 months 1 week ago
Genius is present in every age,...

Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 6 days ago
And therefore just as a brigand...

And therefore just as a brigand caught in broad daylight in the act cannot persuade us that he did not lift his knife in order to rob his victim of his purse, and had no thought of killing him, we too, it would seem, cannot persuade ourselves or others that the soldiers and policemen around us are not to guard us, but only for defense against foreign foes, and to regulate traffic and fetes and reviews; we cannot persuade ourselves and others that we do not know that the men do not like dying of hunger, bereft of the right to gain their subsistence from the earth on which they live; that they do not like working underground, in the water, or in the stifling heat, for ten to fourteen hours a day, at night in factories to manufacture objects for our pleasure. One would imagine it impossible to deny what is so obvious. Yet it is denied.

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Chapter XII, Conclusion-Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 1 week ago
Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference...

Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolitic.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 6 days ago
Music is an ocean, but the...

Music is an ocean, but the repertory is hardly even a lake; it is a pond.

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Interview, Time magazine, December 1957
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 6 days ago
The music that can deepest reach,...

The music that can deepest reach, And cure all ill, is cordial speech.

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Merlin's Song, II
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
3 weeks 4 days ago
It is surely delightful, Sir, to...

It is surely delightful, Sir, to look forward to that period when a series of liberal and prudent measures shall have delivered islands, so highly favoured by the bounty of Providence, from the curse inflicted on them by the frantic rapacity of man. Then the peasant of the Antilles will no longer crawl in listless and trembling dejection round a plantation from whose fruits he must derive no advantage, and a hut whose door yields him no protection; but, when his cheerful and voluntary labour is performed, he will return with the firm step and erect brow of a British citizen from the field which is his freehold to the cottage which is his castle.

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Speech to a meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society held in Freemasons' Tavern (25 June 1824), quoted in Report of the Committee of the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions, Volume I (1824), p. 77
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months 1 week ago
That which is good...

The Prince: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10827

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Main Content / General
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 5 days ago
"They would say," he answered, "that...

"They would say," he answered, "that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience."

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Ch. 7 : The Pendragon, section 2
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
4 months 1 week ago
She has forgotten speech and language...

She has forgotten speech and language and the restlessness of thoughts, has forgotten what is even greater restlessness, this self, has forgotten herself-she, the lost woman, who is now lost in her Savior, who, lost in him, rests at his feet-like a picture. He speaks about her; he says: Her many sins are forgiven her, because she loved much. Although she is present, it is almost as if she were absent; it is almost as if he changed her into a picture, a parable.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 5 days ago
Without the aid of trained emotions...

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that 'a gentleman does not cheat,' than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 1 week ago
As the chosen people bore in...

As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so the division of labour brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital.

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Vol. I, Ch. 14, Section 5, pg. 396.
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
3 months 3 weeks ago
He who created you without you...

He who created you without you will not justify you without you.

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169
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 6 days ago
I had wished to visit a...

I had wished to visit a slaughter-house, in order to see with my own eyes the reality of the question raised when vegetarianism is discussed. But at first I felt ashamed to do so, as one is always ashamed of going to look at suffering which one knows is about to take place, but which one cannot avert; and so I kept putting off my visit. But a little while ago I met on the road a butcher ... He is not yet an experienced butcher, and his duty is to stab with a knife. I asked him whether he did not feel sorry for the animals that he killed. He gave me the usual answer: 'Why should I feel sorry? It is necessary.' But when I told him that eating flesh is not necessary, but is only a luxury, he agreed; and then he admitted that he was sorry for the animals.

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Ch. IX
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
1 month 3 weeks ago
In the life of the mass-order,...

In the life of the mass-order, the culture of the generality tends to conform to the demands of the average human being. Spirituality decays through being diffused among the masses when knowledge is impoverished in every possible way by rationalisation until it becomes accessible to the crude understanding of all.

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Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
4 weeks 1 day ago
A novel is balanced between a...

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice.

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Nobel Prize lecture
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
Just now
Logic teaches…

Logic teaches us that on such and such a road we are sure of not meeting an obstacle; it does not tell us which is the road that leads to the desired end. For this, it is necessary to see the end from afar, and the faculty which teaches us to see is intuition. Without it, the geometrician would be like a writer well up in grammar but destitute of ideas.

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Part II. Ch. 2 : Mathematical Definitions and Education, p. 130
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
3 months 1 week ago
Consumption is the sole end and...

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.

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Chapter VIII, p. 719.
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
4 months 1 week ago
As for him who neither possesses...

As for him who neither possesses nor can acquire them, let him take to heart the words of Hesiod: He is the best of all who thinks for himself in all things. He, too, is good who takes advice from a wiser (person). But he who neither thinks for himself, nor lays to heart another's wisdom, this is a useless man.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
3 months 1 week ago
The community is a fictitious body,...

The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then is what? The sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.

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Ch. 1: Of the Principle of Utility
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
2 months 3 days ago
The conscious side of woman corresponds...

The conscious side of woman corresponds to the emotional side of man, not to his "mind." Mind makes up the soul, or better, the "animus" of woman, and just as the anima of a man consists of inferior relatedness, full of affect, so the animus of woman consists of inferior judgments, or better, opinions.

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The Secret of the Golden Flower (1931) Commentary by C.G.Jung in CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P. 60
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 4 weeks ago
You have heard that it was...

You have heard that it was said, "Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth." But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.

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5:38-41 (NIV)
Philosophical Maxims
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