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8 months 1 week ago

Mr. Galton ...in his English Men of Science, has given ...cases showing individual variations in the type of memory... Some have it verbal. Others... for facts and figures, others for form. Most say... [it] must first be rationally conceived and assimilated.

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Ch. 16
7 months 1 week ago

Man is a sun and his senses are the planets.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.

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7 months 4 days ago

Intuition is a method of feeling one's way intellectually into the inner heart of a thing to locate what is unique and inexpressible in it.

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Quoted in Georgia O'Keeffe, 1887-1986 : Flowers in the Desert (2000) by Britta Benke, p. 28
7 months 2 weeks ago

Gaiety - a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

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"Diseases"
9 months 1 week ago

A person can perhaps succeed in hiding his sins from the world, he can perhaps be foolishly happy that he succeeds, or yet, a little more honest, admit that it is a deplorable weakness and cowardliness that he does not have the courage to become open-but a person cannot hide his sins from himself.

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4 weeks ago

I rail on identity particularity a lot (religion, racism, class ideology, nationalism). But, there is identity universality. It's the particularity that turns people against each other, not the identity aspect. Universality starts with what is, not an ideal.

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8 months 6 days ago

There is object proof that homosexuality is more interesting than heterosexuality. It's that one knows a considerable number of heterosexuals who would wish to become homosexuals, whereas one knows very few homosexuals who would really like to become heterosexuals.

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As quoted in Who's Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History: From World War II to the Present Day (2001) by Robert Aldrich and Gary Wotherspoon ISBN 041522974X
6 months 1 week ago

To recognize this clearly is enough to drive a man out of his senses or to make him shoot himself. And this is just what does happen, and especially often among military men. A man need only come to himself for an instant to be impelled inevitably to such an end.

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Chapter V, Contradiction Between our Life and our Christian Conscience
7 months 1 week ago

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

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8 months 1 week ago

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, and no force of character can make any stand against good wit.

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The Comic
4 months 1 day ago

I believe in intuition and inspiration. ... At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason. When the eclipse of 1919 confirmed my intuition, I was not in the least surprised. In fact I would have been astonished had it turned out otherwise. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Too many of our preferences reflect nasty behaviours and states of mind that were genetically adaptive in the ancestral environment. Instead, wouldn't it be better if we rewrote our own corrupt code?

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The Abolitionist Project, Talks given at the FHI (Oxford University) and the Charity International Happiness Conference, 2007
8 months 2 weeks ago

Insurrection ... never brings about the desired improvement. For insurrection lacks discernment; it generally harms the innocent more than the guilty. Hence, no insurrection is ever right, no matter how right the cause it seeks to promote.

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pp. 62-63
1 month 4 weeks ago

He said this before 1970....

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8 months 1 week ago

So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.

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The Moral Equivalent of War
6 months 3 weeks ago

When I'm bored, my sense of values goes to sleep. But it's not dead, only asleep. A crisis can wake it up and make the world seem infinitely important and interesting. But what I need to learn is the trick of shaking them awake myself . . . And incidentally, another name for the sense of values is intelligence. A stupid person is a person whose values are narrow.

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p. 57
4 months 1 week ago

In the morning, when thou art sluggish at rousing thee, let this thought be present; "I am rising to a man's work."

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Meditations. v. 1.
8 months 3 weeks ago

Behold a God more powerful than I who comes to rule over me.

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Chapter I (tr. Barbara Reynolds); of love.
6 months 3 weeks ago

But now we come to the real paradox: that something as explosive as sexual excitement can nevertheless become a matter of habit, But then that applies to all our pleasures. We discover some new product in the supermarket, and become addicted to it. Then our tastebuds become accustomed to its flavour, and or interest fades. In the same way a honeymoon couple may find an excuse to hurry off to the bedroom half a dozen times a day; but after a month or so sex has taken its place among the many routines of their lives. They still enjoy it, but it no longer has quite the same power to excite the imagination. Sex, like every other pleasure, can become mechanical.

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p. 14
6 months 1 week ago

The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without authority, there could not be worse violence than that of authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution. "To establish Anarchy." "Anarchy will be instituted." But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require protection from governmental power, and by there being more and more people who will be ashamed of applying this power.

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"On Anarchy", in Pamphlets : Translated from the Russian (1900) as translated by Aylmer Maude, p. 22
8 months 1 week ago

Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.

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p. 53e
6 months 2 weeks ago

Whereas economic man maximizes - selects the best alternative from among all those available to him, his cousin, administrative man, satisfices - looks for a course of action that is satisfactory or "good enough."

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p. xxix.
8 months 2 weeks ago

It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.

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Aphorism 81
7 months 1 week ago

The great problems of life - sexuality, of course, among others - are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious. These images are really balancing or compensating factors which correspond with the problems life presents in actuality. This is not to be marvelled at, since these images are deposits representing the accumulated experience of thousands of years of struggle for adaptation and existence.

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Ch. 5, p. 271
4 months 1 week ago

There's nothing under the ground that's worthmore than the little layer of topsoil sitting on top of it.

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9 months 2 weeks ago
Where there have been powerful governments, societies, religions, public opinions, in short wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated; for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force it way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart.
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6 months 3 weeks ago

Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair. If one truly responds to man and his future, ie, concernedly and "responsibly." one can respond only by faith or by despair. Rational faith as well as rational despair are based on the most thorough, critical knowledge of all the factors that are relevant for the survival of man.

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p. 483
4 months 1 week ago

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

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Letter to William Charles Jarvis
2 months 3 weeks ago

Here's the thing, if you're arguing against fundamental human rights...I don't care if the argument is good enough for you. In fact, certain hand gestures are relevant, and we'll work back from that.....

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9 months 1 week ago

Generals are usually a conservative force who can be relied on to oppose social change.

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8 months 1 week ago

Shallow men believe in luck.

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Worship
6 months 3 weeks ago

Marriage as a community of interests unfailingly means the degradation of the interested parties, and it is the perfidy of the world's arrangements that no one, even if aware of it, can escape such degradation. The idea might therefore be entertained that marriage without ignominy is a possibility reserved for those spared the pursuit of interests, for the rich. But the possibility is purely formal, for the privileged are precisely those in whom the pursuit of interests has become second-nature-they would not otherwise uphold privilege.

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E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 10
8 months 1 week ago

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.

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8 months 1 week ago

And the cost of a thing it will be remembered as the amount of life it requires to be exchanged for it.

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After December 6, 1845
7 months 1 week ago

We cannot hope to give here a final clarification of the essence of fact, judgement, object, property; this task leads into metaphysical abysses; about these one has to seek advice from men whose name cannot be stated without earning a compassionate smile-e.g.

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Fichte. Hermann Weyl, Das Kontinuum. Kritische Untersuchungen uber die Grundlagen der Analysis (1918)
8 months 1 week ago

So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person's genius is confined to a very few hours.

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Quoted in Simon Brown (ed.) The New England Farmer, vol. 9 (January 1857) p. 18
5 months 2 weeks ago

As the Genesis story teaches, knowledge cannot save us from ourselves. If we know more than before, it means only that we have greater scope to enact our fantasies. But - as the Genesis myth also teaches - there is no way we can rid ourselves of what we know. If we try to regain a state of innocence, the result can only be a worse madness. The message of Genesis is that in the most vital areas of human life there can be no progress, only an unending struggle with our own nature.

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An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (pp. 79-80)
9 months 1 week ago

The bodies of which the world is composed are solids, and therefore have three dimensions. Now, three is the most perfect number, it is the first of numbers, for of one we do not speak as a number, of two we say both, but three is the first number of which we say all. Moreover, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

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7 months 4 days ago

The present stage redefines the possibilities of man and nature in accordance with the new means available for their realization.

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p. 65
8 months 1 week ago

If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.

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Act 1
8 months 2 weeks ago

Let us keep to Christ, and cling to Him, and hang on Him, so that no power can remove us.

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p. 433
6 months 2 weeks ago

What we have is a device for producing sentences in response to sentences. But none of these sentences is at all connected to the real world. If one coupled two of these machines and let them play the Imitation Game with each other, then they would go on 'fooling' each other forever, even if the rest of the world disappeared! There is no more reason to regard the machine's talk of apples as referring to real world apples than there is to regard the ant's 'drawing' as referring to Winston Churchill.

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Chap. 1 : Brains in a vat
2 months 3 weeks ago

Eh...Affinity's liquify tool...we'll get some cool stuff going. I know stuff like this makes things tough to read...we'll see...

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8 months 1 week ago

The law of the table is beauty, a respect to the common soul of the guests. Everything is unreasonable which is private to two or three, or any portion of the company. Tact never violates for a moment this law; never intrudes the orders of the house, the vices of the absent, or a tariff of expenses, or professional privacies; as we say, we never "talk shop" before company. Lovers abstain from caresses, and haters from insults, while they sit in one parlor with common friends.

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Social Aims
7 months 4 days ago

If man has learned to see and know what really is, he will act in accordance with truth, Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.

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p. 125

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