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I saw the Emperor-this world-soul-riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.

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Hegel to Niethammer, October 13, 1806, in Hegel: the Letters (1998) translated by Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler, p. 114. Hegel: the Letters
2 months 1 day ago

The ground of democratic ideas and practices is faith in the potentialities of individuals, faith in the capacity for positive developments if proper conditions are provided. The weakness of the philosophy originally advanced to justify the democratic movement was that it took individuality to be something given ready-made, that is, in abstraction from time, instead of as a power to develop.

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2 months 1 week ago

I take as my example the three notorious words, Humanity, Popularity, and Liberality. When these words are used in speaking to a German who has learnt no language but his own they are to him nothing but a meaningless noise, which has no relationship of sound to remind him of anything he knows already and so takes him completely out of his circle of observation and beyond any observation possible to him. ... Further, if in speaking to the German, instead of the words Popularity [Popularitdt] and Liberality [Liberalitat], I should use the expressions, " striving for favour with the great mob," and " not having the mind of a slave," which is how they must be literally translated, he would, to begin with, not even obtain a clear and vivid sense-image such as was certainly obtained by a Roman of old.

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The Chief Difference Between The Germans And The Other Peoples Of Teutonic Descent p. 64
2 months 1 week ago

In most cases, people, even the most vicious, are much more naive and simple-minded than we assume them to be. And this is true of ourselves too.

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2 months 6 days ago

Basically-I speak of life as it is and not of abstract philosophical constructs-life is only bearable because one does not go to the end; doing something is only possible when one has particular illusions and that holds also for friendships, for everything.

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3 months 1 week ago

Correct and accurate conclusions may be arrived at if we carefully observe the relation of the spheres of concepts, and only conclude that one sphere is contained in a third sphere, when we have clearly seen that this first sphere is contained in a second, which in its turn is contained in the third. On the other hand, the art of sophistry lies in casting only a superficial glance at the relations of the spheres of the concepts, and then manipulating these relations to suit our purposes, generally in the following way: - When the sphere of an observed concept lies partly within that of another concept, and partly within a third altogether different sphere, we treat it as if it lay entirely within the one or the other, as may suit our purpose.

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Vol. I, Ch. 10, as translated by R. B. Haldane
3 months 1 week ago

The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society, so far as this is, in the end, the cause of a lawful order among men.

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Fourth Thesis
4 months 6 days ago

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

And the central assertion of his philosophy is that this inner realm is the 'spiritual world' and that once man has learned to enter this realm, he realizes that it is not a mere imaginative reflection of the external world, but a world that possesses its own independent reality.

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p. 161
3 months ago

The sight of both eyes becomes one.

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fr. 88
2 months 2 weeks ago

In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it and he sells it before the roof is on. He plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing. He brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops. He embraces a profession and gives it up. He settles in a place which he soon afterward leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him any leisure he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics and if at the end of a year of unremitting labour he finds he has a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days to shake off his happiness.

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Chapter XXIX.
3 months 2 weeks ago

To which we may add this other Aristotelian consideration, that he who confers a benefit on any one loves him better than he is beloved by him again.

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Book II, Ch. 8. Of the Affections of Fathers
1 month 1 week ago

Art is anything you can get away with.

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3 months 1 week ago

I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker.

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As attributed in More Random Walks in Science : An Anthology (1982) by Robert L. Weber, p. 65
3 weeks 2 days ago

There is a strong affinity between the forces of empire and a politics of hate that justifies policies of domination and exclusion. So long as people's attention is focused on fear and hatred of foreigners or members of a particular religious group, such as Muslims, they are distracted from organizing to deal with the system of institutional domination and exploitation that is the real source of their insecurity.

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3 months 1 week ago

I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

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February 1855

I think he once told us his first short clothes were a hull made mostly or wholly of leather. We all only laughed, for it is now long ago. Thou dear father! Through what stern obstructions was thy way to manhood to be forced, and for us and for our travelling to be made smooth!

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3 months 1 week ago

That the human mind has a certain order of possible progress, in which some things must precede others, an order which governments and public instructors can modify to some, but not to an unlimited extent: that all questions of political institutions are relative, not absolute, and that different stages of human progress not only will have, but ought to have, different institutions: That government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is, does not depend on institutions, but institutions on it: That any general theory or philosophy of politics supposes a previous theory of human progress, and that this is the same thing with a philosophy of history.

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(p. 162)
2 months 2 days ago

We suppose, it would seem, that concepts grow in the individual mind like leaves on a tree, and we think to discover their nature by studying their growth; we seek to define them psychologically, in terms of the human mind. But this account makes everything subjective, and if we follow it through to the end, does away with truth. What is known as the history of concepts is really a history either of our knowledge of concepts or of the meanings of words.

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Translation J. L. Austin (Oxford, 1950) as quoted by Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (1972) Vol. 1, p. 56.
2 months 2 days ago

The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.

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The Message to the Planet (1989) p. 532.
1 month 3 weeks ago

The Outsider wants to cease to be an Outsider. He wants to be 'balanced'. He would like to achieve a vividness of sense-perception (Lawrence, Van Gogh, Hemingway) He would also like to understand the human soul and its working and, be 'possessed' by a Will topower, to more life. (Barbusse and Mitya Karamazov) He would like to escape triviality forever. Above all, he would like to know how to express himself because that is the means by which he can get to know himself and hi unknown possibilities.

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Chapter Seven, The Great Synthesis…
1 month 3 weeks ago

And this in turn makes it plain that the Right Man problem is a problem of highly dominant people. Dominance is a subject of enormous importance to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals - or human beings - seems to be amazingly constant. Bernard Shaw once asked the explorer H. M. Stanley how many other men could take over leadership of the expedition if Stanley himself fell ill; Stanley replied promptly: "One in twenty." "Is that exact or approximate?" asked Shaw. "Exact." And biological studies have confirmed this as a fact. For some odd reason, precisely five per cent - one in twenty - of any animal group are dominant - have leadership qualities. During the Korean War, the Chinese made the interesting discovery that if they separated out the dominant five per cent of American prisoners of war, and kept them in separate compound, the remaining ninety-five per cent made no attempt to escape.

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p. 216

It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours.

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Stobaeus, iii. 3. 51
1 month 3 weeks ago

It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", p. 258
3 months 1 week ago

We are, like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox.

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Prospects
2 months 1 week ago

Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.

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Ch. 6, The Formula of Justice
3 months 1 week ago

Always put the best interpretation on a tenet. Why not on Christianity, wholesome, sweet, and poetic? It is the record of a pure and holy soul, humble, absolutely disinterested, a trutn-speaker, and bent on serving, teaching, and uplifting men. Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to Jove the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love him was happiness,-to love him in other's virtues.

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3 months 1 week ago

You must read Plato. But you must hold him at arm's length and say, 'Plato, you have delighted and edified mankind for two thousand years. What have you to say to me?'

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Said to a young Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., as reported by Felix Frankfurter in Harlan Buddington Phillips, Felix Frankfurter Reminisces (1960), p. 59
3 months 2 weeks ago

There is, nevertheless, a certain respect and a general duty of humanity that ties us, not only to beasts that have life and sense, but even to trees and plants.

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Book II, Ch. 11. Of Cruelty
1 month 1 week ago

One touch of nature makes the whole world tin.

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1 month 3 days ago

There are evils, as someone has pointed out, that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever - money, for instance, or war.

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The Dean's December (1982) [Penguin Classics, 1998, ISBN 0-140-18913-0], ch. 13, p. 140
1 month 3 weeks ago

The most authentic Catholic ethic, monastic asceticism, is an ethic of eschatology, directed to the salvation of the individual soul rather than to the maintenance of society. And in the cult of virginity may there not perhaps be a certain obscure idea that to perpetuate ourselves in others hinders our own personal perpetuation?

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3 months 1 week ago

I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses, - mettle and bottom.

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Manners
3 months ago

States are doomed when they are unable to distinguish good men from bad.

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§ 5
3 months 1 week ago

To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.

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Ch. 18: The Taming of Power
1 month 3 weeks ago

Traditional philosophy's claim to totality, culminating in the thesis that the real is rational, is indistinguishable from apologetics.

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p. 7
3 months 2 weeks ago

It cannot be very difficult to determine who have been the contrivers of this whole mercantile system; not the consumers, we may believe, whose interest has been entirely neglected; but the producers, whose interests has been so carefully attended to; and among this later class our merchants and manufactures have been by far the principal architects. In the mercantile regulations, which have been taken notice of in this chapter, the interest of our manufacturers has been most peculiarly attended to;and the interest, not so much of the consumers, as that of some other sets of producers, has been sacrificed to it.

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Chapter VIII, p. 721.
2 months 6 days ago

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.

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2 months 6 days ago

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

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4 months 1 week ago
One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one makes.
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3 months 1 week ago

While it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.

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Religion and Science (1935), Ch. IX: Science of Ethics.

We have not a direct intuition of the equality of two intervals of time.

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2 months 6 days ago

True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.

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3 months 1 week ago

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?

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4 months 1 week ago

There was no denying that he would always be conscious of the fact that an Earthman was an Earthman. He couldn't help that. That was the result of a childhood immersed in an atmosphere of bigotry so complete that it was almost invisible, so entire that you accepted its axioms as second nature. Then you left it and saw it for what it was when you looked back.

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3 months 1 week ago

I do not think the resemblance between the Christian and the merely imaginative experience is accidental. I think that all things, in their own way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least. "Reflect" is the important word. This lower life of the imagination is not a beginning of, nor a step toward, the higher life of the spirit, merely an image.

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2 months 2 days ago

It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy;

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"The Irony of Liberalism"
2 months 6 days ago

"What is truth?" is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to "How to endure life?" And even this one pales beside the next: "How to endure oneself?" - That is the crucial question in which no one is in a position to give us an answer.

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3 months 1 week ago

Friends are not primarily absorbed in each other. It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up - painting, sailing ships, praying, philosophizing, fighting shoulder to shoulder. Friends look in the same direction. Lovers look at each other - that is, in opposite directions. To transfer bodily all that belongs to one relationship into the other is blundering.

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2 months 1 week ago

The supporters of the Development Hypothesis... can show that any existing species-animal or vegetable-when placed under conditions different from its previous ones, immediately begins to undergo certain changes fitting it for the new conditions. They can show that in successive generations these changes continue; until, ultimately, the new conditions become the natural ones. They can show that in cultivated plants, in domesticated animals, and in the several races of men, such alterations have taken place. They can show that the degrees of difference so produced are often, as in dogs, greater than those on which distinctions of species are in other cases founded.

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