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7 months 2 days ago

All natural philosophers, who wished to proceed mathematically in their work, have hence invariably (although unknown to themselves) made use of metaphysical principles, and must make use of such, it matters not how energetically they may otherwise repudiate any claim of metaphysics on their science.

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Preface, Tr. Bax, 1883
5 months 1 day ago

I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever.

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Physicist, Purge Thyself in the Chicago Tribune Magazine
3 months 4 weeks ago

Of course, not everything old is beautiful, any more than everything black, or everything white, or everything young. But the notion that old means ugly is every bit as harmful as the prejudice that black is ugly. In one way it is even more pernicious. The notion that only what is new and young is beautiful poisons our relationship to the past and to our own future. It keeps us from understanding our roots and the greatest works of our culture and other cultures. It also makes us dread what lies ahead of us and leads many to shirk reality.

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Time is an Artist (1978) Epilogue : Old is Beautiful
6 months 3 weeks ago

The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphroditism" made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of "perversity"; but it also made possible the formation of a "reverse" discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or "naturality" be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.

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Vol. I, p. 101
7 months 2 weeks ago

The Path is not far from man. When men try to pursue a course, which is far from the common indications of consciousness, this course cannot be considered The Path.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose. And whenever the conscious mind clings to hard and fast concepts and gets caught in its own rules and regulations-as is unavoidable and of the essence of civilized consciousness-nature pops up with her inescapable demands.

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Alchemical Studies
3 months 1 week ago

It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.

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As quoted in The Genius of Science: A Portrait Gallery (2000) by Abraham Pais, p. 24
6 months 2 weeks ago

He who does wrong is more unhappy than he who suffers wrong.

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7 months 2 days ago

The offender never forgives.

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Émile et Sophie, ou Les Solitaires, "Lettre Première", 1781
5 months 3 weeks ago

To suppose universal laws of nature capable of being apprehended by the mind and yet having no reason for their special forms, but standing inexplicable and irrational, is hardly a justifiable position. Uniformities are precisely the sort of facts that need to be accounted for. That a pitched coin should sometimes turn up heads and sometimes tails calls for no particular explanation; but if it shows heads every time, we wish to know how this result has been brought about. Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

It seems that I have spent my entire time trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.

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As quoted in The Observer (17 August 1986).
5 months 1 week ago

Economic man deals with the "real world" in all its complexity. Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastic simplified model... He makes his choices using a simple picture of the situation that takes into account just a few of the factors that he regards as most relevant and crucial.

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p. xxix; As cited in: Jesper Simonsen (1994) Administrative Behavior: How Organizations can be Understood in Terms of Decision Processes. Roskilde Universitet.
3 months 1 week ago

Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.

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As quoted in Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007) by Karen Michelle Barad, p. 254
7 months 1 week ago

My mind is calm, for my fortune is not my felicity. I know I have clean hands and a clean heart, and I hope a clean house for friends or servants; but Job himself, or whoever was the justest judge, by such hunting for matters against him as hath been used against me, may for a time seem foul, especially in a time when greatness is the mark and accusation is the game.

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Quoted by Thomas Fowler in "Francis Bacon 1561-1626
7 months 1 week ago

There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

At my age one's got to be sincere. Lying's too much effort.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than that only freedom can make security secure.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 21 "An Evaluation of the Prophecy"
6 months 2 weeks ago

My cares and my inquiries are for decency and truth, and in this I am wholly occupied.

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Book I, epistle i, line 11
7 months 2 weeks ago

Some of their faults people readily admit, but others not so readily.

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Book II, ch. 21, 1
7 months 2 weeks ago

This happy state can only be obtained by a prudent care of the body, and a steady government of the mind. The diseases of the body are to be prevented by temperance, or cured by medicine, or rendered tolerable by patience.

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5 months 1 week ago

To-day is the parent of to-morrow. The present casts its shadow far into the future. That is the law of life, individual and social. Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society. The means used to prepare the future become its cornerstone.

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Let us suppose that a man believes in eternal life on Christ's word. In that case he believes without any fuss about being profound and searching and philosophical and racking his brains.

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7 months 1 day ago

Define your terms, you will permit me again to say, or we shall never understand one another.

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"Miracles", 1764
5 months 3 weeks ago

Poets and priests were one in the beginning, and they only separated in later times. But the real poet is always a priest, just as the real priest always remains a poet.

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Fragment No. 71
6 months 4 weeks ago

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

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Behavior
3 months 2 weeks ago

1) Preserve Life
2) State of war (opportunism)
3) Relativism
4) Confusion

Civilization, goodness, justice, fairness all contained inside the first option. Under # 1 (Universal Humanism):


1) Survive.
2) Don't prevent another from surviving.
3) Help the less fortunate.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Understand however that every man is worth just so much as the things are worth about which he busies himself.

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VII, 3
2 months 4 weeks ago

The result of your fifty or sixty years of religious reading in the four words: 'Be just and good,' is that in which all our enquiries must end.

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Letter to John Adams
2 months 4 weeks ago

I see too many proofs of the imperfection of human reason, to entertain wonder or intolerance at any difference of opinion on any subject; and acquiesce in that difference as easily as on a difference of feature or form; experience having long taught me the reasonableness of mutual sacrifices of opinion among those who are to act together for any common object, and the expediency of doing what good we can, when we cannot do all we would wish.

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Letter to John Randolph (1 December 1803), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 109, pp. 54
3 months 3 weeks ago

The political program of nation building in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq is one central example of the productive project of biopower and war. Nothing could be more postmodernist and antiessentialist than this notion of nation building.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

A rolling stone gathers no moss.

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Maxim 524
2 months 3 weeks ago

The art of life is more like the wrestler's art than the dancer's, in respect of this, that it should stand ready and firm to meet onsets which are sudden and unexpected.

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VII, 61
7 months ago

In a social order dominated by capitalist production even the non-capitalist producer is gripped by capitalist conceptions.

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Vol. III, Ch. I, Cost Price and Profit, p. 39.
5 months 2 weeks ago

At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too.

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S.4
6 months 4 weeks ago

I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'

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"Sermons in Cats"
4 months 1 week ago

Being a planetary citizen does not need space travel. It means being conscious that we are part of the universe and of the earth. The most fundamental law is to recognise that we share the planet with other beings, and that we have a duty to care for our common home.

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6 months 5 days ago

There is surely a piece of Divinity within us, something that was before the Elements, and owes no homage unto the Sun.

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Section 11
6 months 2 weeks ago

False men and shams talk big and do nothing.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

It is our fatalest misery just now, not easily alterable, and yet urgently requiring to be altered, That no British man can attain to be a Statesman, or Chief of Workers, till he has first proved himself a Chief of Talkers: which mode of trial for a Worker, is it not precisely, of all the trials you could set him upon, the falsest and unfairest?

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The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.

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p. 486

I cannot escape from the conclusion that the great ages of progress have depended upon a small number of individuals of transcendent ability. 

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Ch. 8: Western Civilisation
3 weeks 2 days ago

"We reason deeply, when we forcibly feel."
- Mary Wollstonecraft

See biography for Mary Wollstonecraft:
https://civilsimian.com/Mary-Wollstonecraft

Read Mary Wollstonecraft's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/126/content

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

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7 months 1 week ago

If you are a preacher of mercy, do not preach an imaginary but the true mercy. If the mercy is true, you must therefore bear the true, not an imaginary sin. God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners. Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong (sin boldly), but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides. We, however, says Peter (2. Peter 3:13) are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth where justice will reign.

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Letter 99, Paragraph 13. Erika Bullmann Flores, Tr. from: Dr. Martin Luther's Saemmtliche SchriftenDr. Johann Georg Walch Ed. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, N.D.), Vol. 15, cols. 2585-2590.
7 months 1 day ago

And if he be too forward to venture upon his own strength and skill, and perplexity and trouble of a misadventure now and then, that reaches not his innocence, his health, or reputation, may not be an ill way to teach him more caution.

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Sec. 94
5 months 3 weeks ago

Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail.

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Democracy and Human Nature, Freedom and Culture

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