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6 months 2 weeks ago

Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken, and have there given reins to passion, without that proper deliberation and suspense, which can alone secure them from the grossest absurdities.

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§ 9.13 : Conclusion, Pt. 1
3 months 1 week ago

The mathematician is born, not made.

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3 months 1 week ago

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

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Ch. XV: "The Moralist in an Unbelieving World", §2, p. 324.
4 months 3 weeks ago

With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.

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E 76
6 months 2 weeks ago

The very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.

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"The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna," Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 7 November 1848.
2 months 1 week ago

Among Latin writers, the acceptations of the word nature are so many, that I remember, one author reckons up no less than fourteen or fifteen. Hence we see how easy 'tis for the generality of men, without excepting those who write of natural things, to impose upon others and themselves, in the use of a word so apt to be mis-employ'd. ..the very great ambiguity of this term, and the promiscuous use made of it, without sufficiently attending to its different significations, render many of the expressions wherein 'tis employ'd either unintelligible, improper, or false.

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Sect. 1
5 months 2 days ago

Any madness in us gains from being expressed, because in this way one gives a human form to what separates us from humanity.

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p. 76
6 months 6 days ago

And what he fears he cannot make attractive with his touch he abandons.

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Line 149 (tr. H. R. Fairclough)
6 months 6 days ago

It is better to fall in with crows than with flatterers; for in the one case you are devoured when dead, in the other case while alive.

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§ 4
2 months 2 weeks ago

The centuries are thick, dark waves that rise and fall, steeped in blood. Every moment is a gaping abyss. Gaze on the dark sea without staggering, confront the abyss every moment without illusion or impudence or fear. ... But this is not enough; take a further step: battle to give meaning to the confused struggles of man.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it; but when they are free to choose and can do just as they please, confusion and disorder become rampant.

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Book 1, Ch. 3 (as translated by LJ Walker and B Crick)
6 months 3 weeks ago

Every rich man is avaricious, in my opinion.

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Ch. 14
5 months 2 weeks ago

As there must be moderation in other things, so there must be moderation in self-criticism. Perpetual contemplation of our own actions produces a morbid consciousness, quite unlike that normal consciousness accompanying right actions spontaneously done; and from a state of unstable equilibrium long maintained by effort, there is apt to be a fall towards stable equilibrium, in which the primitive nature reasserts itself. Retrogression rather than progression may hence result.

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Ch. 10, General Conclusions
6 months 2 weeks ago

All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.

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A 146, B 185
5 months 1 week ago

The teacher of love teaches struggle. The teacher of lifeless isolation from the world teaches peace.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

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6 months 1 week ago

To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.

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Journal entry (8 July 1916), p. 74e
6 months 1 week ago

Technology is in its essence something that human beings cannot master of their own accord.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The man is making preparations for a year, and does not know that he will die before evening. And I remembered God's second saying, "Learn what is not given to man." 'What dwells in man" I already knew. Now I learnt what is not given him. It is not given to man to know his own needs.

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Ch. XI
4 months 3 weeks ago

Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?

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A 14
2 months 2 weeks ago

Congress itself can punish Alexandria, by repealing the law which made it a town, by discontinuing it as a port of entry or clearance, and perhaps by suppressing it's banks. But I expect all will go off with impunity. If our government ever fails, it will be from this weakness. No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as of duty. Good men will obey the last, but bad ones the former only.

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Letter to John Wayles Eppes (9 September 1814). 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. 11, pp. 425-426
2 months 2 weeks ago

Whensoever hostile aggressions...require a resort to war, we must meet our duty and convince the world that we are just friends and brave enemies.

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Letter to Andrew Jackson
4 months 1 week ago

By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

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316
6 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing is yet in its true form.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The second matter in which Mill's principles condemn existing legislation is homosexuality. If two adults voluntarily enter into such a relation, this is a matter which concerns them only, and in which, therefore, the community ought not to intervene. If it were still believed, as it once was, that the toleration of such behavior would expose the community to the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, the community would have every right to intervene. But it does not acquire a right to intervene merely on the ground that such conduct is thought wicked. The criminal law may rightly be invoked to prevent violence or fraud inflicted upon unwilling victims, but it ought not to be invoked when whatever damage there may be is suffered only by the agents-always assuming that the agents are adults.

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p. 139
6 months 2 weeks ago

We may well be ashamed to tell what things we have read or heard in our day. I do not know why my news should be so trivial, - considering what one's dreams and expectations are, why the developments should be so paltry. The news we hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. It is the stalest repetition.

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p. 491
5 months 2 weeks ago

When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves.

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"Patriotism", p. 126
6 months ago

Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not.

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As quoted in Theaetetus by Plato section 152a
5 months 2 weeks ago

Death is the most blessed dream.

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Act II.
7 months 2 weeks ago

Every human being is tried this way in the active service of expectancy. Now comes the fulfillment and relieves him, but soon he is again placed on reconnaissance for expectancy; then he is again relieved, but as long as there is any future for him, he has not yet finished his service. And while human life goes on this way in very diverse expectancy, expecting very different things according to different times and occasions and in different frames of mind, all life is again one nightwatch of expectancy.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Let the eye of vigilance never be closed.

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Letter to Spencer Roane, 9 March 1821
4 months 2 weeks ago

No one knows what he can do till he tries.

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Maxim 786
3 months 1 day ago

Dumb creatures have not human feelings, but have certain impulses which resemble them: for if it were not so, if they could feel love and hate, they would likewise be capable of friendship and enmity, of disagreement and agreement. Some traces of these qualities exist even in them, though properly all of them, whether good or bad, belong to the human breast alone.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

You can take better care of your secret than another can.

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1863
6 months 2 weeks ago

Men did not make the earth... It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property... Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds.

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Agrarian Justice
5 months 1 week ago

The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form-an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.

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p. 69
5 months 2 days ago

The human soul has need of consented obedience and of liberty. Consented obedience is what one concedes to an authority because one judges it to be legitimate. It is not possible in relation to a political power established by conquest or coup d'etat nor to an economic power based upon money. Liberty is the power of choice within the latitude left between the direct constraint of natural forces and the authority accepted as legitimate. The latitude should be sufficiently wide for liberty to be more than a fiction, but it should include only what is innocent and should never be wide enough to permit certain kinds of crime.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Self-command is the main elegance.

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p. 205
5 months 1 week ago

The Register of Knowledge of Fact is called History.

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The First Part, Chapter 9, p. 40
6 months 2 weeks ago

What is there in 'Paradise Lost' to elevate and astonish like Herschel or Somerville?

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Quoted in Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson, the Mind On Fire (Univ. of Calif Press 1995), p. 124
5 months 1 week ago

Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

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5 months 1 week ago

It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher. To an earlier age knowledge was power - merely that and nothing more; to us it is life and the summum bonum. Emancipation from the bonds of self, of one's own prepossessions, importunately sought at the hands of that rational power before which all must ultimately bow, - this is the characteristic that distinguishes all the great figures of nineteenth-century science from those of former periods.

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"The Century's Great Men in Science" in The 19th Century : A Review of Progress During the Past One Hundred Years in the Chief Departments of Human Activity (1901), published by G. P. Putnam's Sons.
4 months 2 weeks ago

One is ashamed to say how little is needed for all men to be delivered from those calamities which now oppress them; it is only needful not to lie.

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Ch. 17
2 months 6 days ago

Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.

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Objecting to the placing of observables at the heart of the new quantum mechanics, during Heisenberg's 1926 lecture at Berlin; related by Heisenberg, quoted in Unification of Fundamental Forces (1990) by Abdus Salam
2 months 3 weeks ago

A reasonable naturalist then settles down to this life with a sort of animal satisfaction. As Chinese illiterate women put it, "Others gave birth to us and we give birth to others. What else are we to do?".... Life becomes a biological procession and the very question of immortality is sidetracked. For that is the exact feeling of a Chinese grandfather holding his grandchild by the hand and going to the shops to buy some candy, with the thought that in five or ten years he will be returning to his grave or to his ancestors. The best that we can hope for in this life is that we shall not have sons and grandsons of whom we need to be ashamed.

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p. 23
4 months 2 weeks ago

Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

If terms are systematically good, they are not to be rejected because they are etymologically inaccurate.

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5 months 1 week ago

The Greek word for philosopher (philosophos) connotes a distinction from sophos. It signifies the lover of wisdom (knowledge) as distinguished from him who considers himself wise in the possession of knowledge. This meaning of the word still endures: the essence of philosophy is not the possession of the truth but the search for truth. ... Philosophy means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question.

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Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy (1951) as translated by Ralph Mannheim, Ch. 1, What is Philosophy?, p. 12

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