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Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
3 months 2 weeks ago
The attitude that living things are...

The attitude that living things are placed here for our benefit still dominates our culture, even where its underpinnings have disappeared. We now need, for purposes of scientific understanding, to find a less human-centered view of the natural world.

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Chapter 8, "Pollen Grains and Magic Bullets" (p. 258)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
4 months 1 week ago
The same, without such opinion, DESPAIRE....

The same, without such opinion, DESPAIRE.

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The First Part, Chapter 6, p. 25
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
3 months 6 days ago
We have always thought that Mr....

We have always thought that Mr. Darwin has unnecessarily hampered himself by adhering so strictly to his favourite "Natura non facit saltum." We greatly suspect that she does make considerable jumps in the way of variation now and then, and that these saltations give rise to some of the gaps which appear to exist in the series of known forms.

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Philosophical Maxims
B. F. Skinner
B. F. Skinner
2 months 2 weeks ago
It is a mistake to suppose...

It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.

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"I have been misunderstood" An interview with B.F.Skinner, Center Magazine (March/April 1972), pp. 63
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
4 months 1 week ago
In books of psychology written from...

In books of psychology written from the spiritualist point of view, it is customary to begin the discussion of the existence of the soul as a simple substance, separable from the body, after this style: There is in me a principle which thinks, wills and feels... Now this implies a begging of the question. For it is far from being an immediate truth that there is in me such a principle; the immediate truth is that I think, will and feel. And I - the I that thinks, wills and feels - am immediately my living body with the states of consciousness which it sustains. It is my living body that thinks, wills and feels.

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Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
5 months 3 weeks ago
The superfluous…

The superfluous, a very necessary thing. 

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Variant translation: The superfluous is very necessary, Le Mondain, 1736
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 3 weeks ago
Science seems to be at war...

Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.

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An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940), Introduction, p. 15
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Hölderlin
Friedrich Hölderlin
4 months 3 weeks ago
What is all that men have...

What is all that men have done and thought over thousands of years, compared with one moment of love. But in all Nature, too, it is what is nearest to perfection, what is most divinely beautiful! There all stairs lead from the threshold of life. From there we come, to there we go.

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Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
4 months 3 days ago
The emptiness of Zen Buddhism... creates...

The emptiness of Zen Buddhism... creates a neighborly nearness between things.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 1 week ago
A mystic bond of brotherhood makes...

A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.

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Essays, Goethe's Works.
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 months 2 weeks ago
It is as if thinking....
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Cornel West
Cornel West
5 months 2 weeks ago
My aim is not to provide...

My aim is not to provide excuses for black behavior or to absolve blacks of personal responsibility. But when the new black conservatives accent black behavior and responsibility in such a way that the cultural realities of black people are ignored, they are playing a deceptive and dangerous intellectual game with the lives and fortunes of disadvantaged people. We indeed must criticize and condemn immoral acts of black people, but we must do so cognizant of the circumstances into which people are born and under which they live. By overlooking these circumstances, the new black conservatives fall into the trap of blaming black poor people for their predicament. It is imperative to steer a course between the Scylla of environmental determinism and the Charybdis of a blaming-the-victims perspective.

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(p56)
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
2 months 2 weeks ago
Yet when we speak of time......

Yet when we speak of time... do we not unconsciously adopt this hypothesis... and put ourselves in the place of this imperfect god... Do not even the atheists put themselves in the place where god would be..?

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Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
4 months 1 week ago
Prosperity, both for individuals and for...

Prosperity, both for individuals and for states, means possessions; and possessions mean burdens and harness and slavery; and slavery for the mind, too, because it is not only the rich man's time that is pre-empted, but his affections, his judgement, and the range of his thoughts.

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"The Irony of Liberalism"
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 4 weeks ago
Labour not after riches first, and...

Labour not after riches first, and think thou afterwards wilt enjoy them. He who neglecteth the present moment, throweth away all that he hath. As the arrow passeth through the heart, while the warrior knew not that it was coming; so shall his life be taken away before he knoweth that he hath it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
5 months 3 weeks ago
Good and strong will. Mechanism must...

Good and strong will. Mechanism must precede science (learning). Also in morals and religion? Too much discipline makes one narrow and kills proficiency. Politeness belongs, not to discipline, but to polish, and thus comes last.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 9
Philosophical Maxims
Will Durant
Will Durant
2 months 1 week ago
Sir William Hunter, estimated that 40,000,000...

Sir William Hunter, estimated that 40,000,000 of the people of India were seldom or never able to satisfy their hunger. In 1901, 272,000 died of plague introduced from abroad, in 1902, 500,000 died of plague; in 1903, 800,000; in 1904, 1,000,000. We can now understand why there are famines in India. Their cause, in plain terms, is not the absence of food, but the inability of the people to pay for it. It was hoped the railways would solve the problem...the fact that the worst famines have come since the building of the railways...behind all these, as the fundamental source of the terrible famines in India, lies such merciless exploitation, such unbalanced exploitation of goods, and such brutal collection of high taxes in the very midst of famine....

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(source: The Case for India - By Will Durant Simon and Schuster, New York. 1930 p.50-53).
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
4 months 3 days ago
The fundamental tenet of Steiner's teaching...

The fundamental tenet of Steiner's teaching is that if we take the trouble to recognize the independent existence of the inner worlds of thought, and keep the mind turned in that direction, we shall soon become increasingly conscious of their reality. We are not, as Sartre believed, stranded in the universe of matter like a whale on a beach. That inner world is our natural home. Moreover, once we grasp this truth, we can also recognize that we ourselves possess an "essential ego," a "true self," a fundamental identity that goes far beyond our usual feeble sense of being "me."

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p. 26
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
5 months 3 weeks ago
Capacity for the nobler feelings is...

Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by the mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in existence.

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Ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
4 months 1 week ago
Diogenes, in his mud-covered sandals, tramps...

Diogenes, in his mud-covered sandals, tramps over the carpets of Aristippus. The cynic pullulated at every corner, and in the highest places. This cynic did nothing but saboter the civilisation of the time. He was the nihilist of Hellenism. He created nothing, he made nothing. His role was to undo - or rather to attempt to undo, for he did not succeed in his purpose. The cynic, a parasite of civilisation, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail. What would become of the cynic among a savage people where everyone, naturally and quite seriously, fulfils what the cynic farcically considers to be his personal role?

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Chapter XI: The Self-Satisfied Age
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 4 weeks ago
Marriage, a market which has nothing...

Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry George
Henry George
1 month 2 weeks ago
The equal right of all men...

The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air - it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and others no right.

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Book VII, Ch. 1
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 month 2 weeks ago
Remember, that to change thy mind...

Remember, that to change thy mind upon occasion, and to follow him that is able to rectify thee, is equally ingenuous, as to find out at the first, what is right and just, without help. For of thee nothing is required, that is beyond the extent of thine own deliberation and judgment, and of thine own understanding.

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VII, 14
Philosophical Maxims
Plutarch
Plutarch
5 months 1 week ago
Being summoned by the Athenians out...

Being summoned by the Athenians out of Sicily to plead for his life, Alcibiades absconded, saying that that criminal was a fool who studied a defence when he might fly for it.

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51 Alcibiades
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
4 months ago
Once the good man was dead,...

Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was - nobody any longer wanted to be that.

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C 36
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
4 months 3 days ago
The real pioneers in ideas, in...

The real pioneers in ideas, in art and in literature have remained aliens to their time, misunderstood and repudiated.

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Philosophical Maxims
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
1 month 2 weeks ago
Either everything is illusion, nature as...

Either everything is illusion, nature as well as revelation, or experience alone can explain faith.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
5 months 2 weeks ago
The Ideal Man of the eighteenth...

The Ideal Man of the eighteenth century was the Rationalist; of the seventeenth, the Christian Stoic; of the Renaissance, the Free Individual; of the Middle Ages, the Contemplative Saint. And what is our Ideal Man? On what grand and luminous mythological figure does contemporary humanity attempt to model itself? The question is embarrassing. Nobody knows. And, in spite of all the laudable efforts of the Institute for Intellectual Co-operation to fabricate an acceptable Ideal Man for the use of Ministers of Education, nobody, I suspect, will know until such time as a major poet appears upon the scene with the unmistakable revelation. Meanwhile, one must be content to go on piping up for reason and realism and a certain decency.

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p. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 2 weeks ago
Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the...

Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.

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Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
2 months 5 days ago
It is the quality of a...

It is the quality of a great soul to scorn great things and to prefer that which is ordinary rather than that which is too great.

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Philosophical Maxims
Lin Yutang
Lin Yutang
1 month 4 weeks ago
One can learn such a lot...

One can learn such a lot and enjoy such a lot in seventy years, and three generations is a long, long time to see human follies and acquire human wisdom. Anyone who is wise and has lived long enough to witness the changes of fashion and morals and politics through the rise and fall of three generations should be perfectly satisfied to rise from his seat and go away saying, "It was a good show," when the curtain falls.

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p. 23-24
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
4 months 1 week ago
Logical empiricism holds the view, notwithstanding...

Logical empiricism holds the view, notwithstanding some its assertions, that the forms of knowledge and consequently the relations of man to nature and to other men never change. According to rationalism, too, all subjective and objective potentialities are rooted in insights which the individual already possesses, but rationality uses existing objects as well as the active inner striving and ideas of man to construct standards for the future. In this regard, it is not so closely associated with the present order as is empiricism.

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p. 148.
Philosophical Maxims
Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard
4 months 1 week ago
To feel most beautifully alive means...

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

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A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
5 months 3 weeks ago
Without being known too well, it...

Without being known too well, it [India] has existed for millennia in the imagination of the Europeans as a wonderland. Its fame, which it has always had with regard to its treasures, both its natural ones, and in particular, its wisdom, has lured men there.

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Friedrich Hegel .source: Contesting the Master Narrative, Jeffrey Cox and Shelton Stromquist Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013).
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Büchner
Georg Büchner
4 months 2 weeks ago
Peace to the shacks! War on...

Peace to the shacks! War on the palaces!

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
6 months 2 weeks ago
In Oran, as elsewhere, for want...

In Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thought, people have to love one another without knowing it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Xunzi
Xunzi
2 months 2 weeks ago
The learning of the gentleman enters...

The learning of the gentleman enters through his ears, fastens to his heart, spreads through his four limbs, and manifests itself in his actions. ... The learning of the petty person enters through his ears and passes out his mouth. From mouth to ears is only four inches-how could it be enough to improve a whole body much larger than that?

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Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 259
Philosophical Maxims
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei
2 months 2 weeks ago
To apply oneself to great inventions,...

To apply oneself to great inventions, starting from the smallest beginnings, is no task for ordinary minds; to divine that wonderful arts lie hid behind trivial and childish things is a conception for superhuman talents.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 months 2 weeks ago
A king is history's slave. Bk....

A king is history's slave.

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Bk. IX, ch. 1
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
2 months 2 weeks ago
So this is something... we see...

So this is something... we see happening... in the war in Ukraine. A lot of people raise the question, "Why are Ukrainians resisting the Russian invasion as ferociously as they are?" and there's been a little bit of a debate over whether this is due to the fact that Ukrain is democratic, a liberal democracy, and Russia is not, or whether it's simply a fight over sovereignty... I think that that's a false dichotomy because you really don't fight for liberalism as an abstract principle. You fight for it as it is embedded in... your nation... From my... frequent visits to Ukraine... I believe... that's what's really going on, that Ukrainians want their sovereignty, but the reason they want it so desperately is that they want to have a free Ukraine and not Putin's Ukraine, not a... centralized dictatorship, and that's why they're willing to fight so tenaciously.

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25:44:00
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
5 months 3 weeks ago
A Turk thinks, or used to...

A Turk thinks, or used to think (for even Turks are wiser now-a-days), that society would be on a sandbank if women were suffered to walk about the streets with their faces uncovered. Taught by these and many similar examples, I look upon this expression of loosening the foundations of society, unless a person tells in unambiguous terms what he means by it, as a mere bugbear to frighten imbeciles with.

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Stability of Society (17 August 1850), quoted in Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (eds.), The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, XXV - Newspaper Writings December 1847 - July 1873 Part IV, 1986
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
5 months 2 weeks ago
It is arrogance in us to...

It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness and chivalry "masculine" when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them, to describe a man's sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as "feminine".

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 2 weeks ago
Incredible that the prospect of having...

Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.

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Philosophical Maxims
William Whewell
William Whewell
1 month 2 weeks ago
In the 'Induction of Causes' the...

In the 'Induction of Causes' the principal maxim is, that we must be careful to possess, and to apply, with perfect clearness, the Fundamental Idea on which the Induction depends. The Induction of Substance, of Force, of Polarity, go beyond mere laws of phenomena, and may be considered as the Induction cf Causes. The Cause of certain phenomena being inferred, we are led to inquire into the Cause of this Cause, which inquiry must be conducted in the same manner as the previous one; and thus we have the Induction of Ulterior Causes.

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Philosophical Maxims
L.P. Jacks
L.P. Jacks
1 month 2 weeks ago
How can the Universe tell its...

How can the Universe tell its own story save by making use of human speech; how convey its meanings to finite minds save by employing a thinker to declare them? So long as the story remains unspoken, unwritten, can we say it exists at all? Does not the significance of things become a story by the very process which ends in the movement of an intelligently guided pen over a sheet of paper, in the reading of printed types, in the utterance of recognised vocables; and until this process has been accomplished is not the "meaning" a mere promise or unrealized potency? Can we learn the history of the world, and of human life, otherwise than by reading, or hearing it spoken? How, then, can we receive it without the intermediation of a writer, a speaker?

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 2 weeks ago
Keep cool: it will be all...

Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.

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Montaigne; or, The Skeptic
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
4 months 2 weeks ago
To suppose universal laws of nature...

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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Philosophical Maxims
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
1 month 2 weeks ago
The line that connects the bombing...

The line that connects the bombing of civilian populations to the mountain removed by strip mining ... to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight. We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.

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Commencement address at Lindsey Wilson College
Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
4 months 2 weeks ago
Philosophy can bake no bread; but...

Philosophy can bake no bread; but she can procure for us God, Freedom, Immortality. Which, then, is more practical, Philosophy or Economy?

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The first sentence of this was used by William Torrey Harris for the motto of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
4 months 1 week ago
Being is continuous becoming. P. 136

Being is continuous becoming.

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P. 136
Philosophical Maxims
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