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3 months 3 weeks ago

It is normal to hate what we fear, and it happens frequently, though not always, that we fear what we hate. I think it may be taken as the rule among primitive men, that they both fear and hate whatever is unfamiliar. They have their own herd, originally a very small one. And within one herd, all are friends, unless there is some special ground of enmity. Other herds are potential or actual enemies; a single member of one of them who strays by accident will be killed. An alien herd as a whole will be avoided or fought according to circumstances. It is this primitive mechanism which still controls our instinctive reaction to foreign nations. The completely untravelled person will view all foreigners as the savage regards a member of another herd. But the man who has travelled, or who has studied international politics, will have discovered that, if his herd is to prosper, it must, to some degree, become amalgamated with other herds.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler, will more resemble the stubborn dullness of Molotov than the sensual vindictive cruelty of Stalin.

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Part 3, Ch. 10, § 2
3 months 1 week ago

Do not be arrogant because of your knowledge, but confer with the ignorant man as with the learned. For knowledge has no limits, and none has yet achieved perfection in it. Good speech is more hidden than malachite, yet it is found in the possession of women slaves at the millstones.

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Maxim no. 1.
4 months 6 days ago

Will is to grace as the horse is to the rider.

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2 weeks 2 days ago

In morals, truth is but little prized when it is a mere sentiment, and only attains its full value when realized in the world as fact.

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Ch. 5.
3 months 5 days ago

But after these, Pythagoras changed that philosophy, which is conversant about geometry itself, into the form of a liberal doctrine, considering its principles in a more exalted manner; and investigating its theorems immaterially and intellectually; who likewise invented a treatise of such things as cannot be explained in geometry, and discovered the constitution of the mundane figures.

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Chap. IV.
1 month 2 weeks ago

People reserve their best thinking for their professional specialties and, next in line, for serious matters confronting the alert citizen -economics, politics, the disposal of nuclear waste, etc. The day's work done, they want to be entertained.

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p. 16

Tis the first art of kings, the power to suffer hate.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Casting my perils before swains.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Effort supposes resistance.

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Vol. I, par. 320
2 months 3 days ago

Fairness means not to use fraud and trickery in the exchange of commodities and services and the exchange of feelings.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Men sometimes submit to shame, to tyranny, to conquest, but they never long suffer anarchy. There is no people so barbarous that they escape this general law of humanity.

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Second letter on Algeria (1837), Travels in Algeria p. 38
4 months 1 week ago

The texts about the future life fall into, since demonstrative scholars do not agree whether to take them in their apparent meaning or interpret them allegorically. Either is permissible. But it is inexcusable to deny the fact of a future life altogether.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too.

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1833
2 months 3 weeks ago

Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.

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Definitions, as quoted in The Dictionary of Essential Quotations (1983) by Kevin Goldstein-Jackson, p. 154
2 months 2 weeks ago

My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

On its pass through finitude, the being-for-itself of the counter-image expresses itself most potently as ""I-ness", as self-identical individuality. Just as a planet in its orbit no sooner reaches its farthest distance from the center than it returns to its closest proximity, so the point of the farthest distance from God, the I-ness, is also the moment of its return to the Absolute, of the re-absorption into the ideal.

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P. 30
2 months 3 weeks ago

The revolution must end and the republic must begin. In our constitution, right must take the place of duty, welfare that of virtue, and self-defense that of punishment. Everyone must be able to prevail and to live according to one's own nature.

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Act I.
3 months 4 weeks ago

How many valiant men we have seen to survive their own reputation!

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Ch. 16
2 months 1 week ago

The precarious ontological link between Logos and Eros is broken, and scientific rationality emerges as essentially neutral.

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p. 147
2 months 1 week ago

The "kingdom of God" has become the "other world," which stands mechanically beside "this world"-an opposition unknown to the strongest periods of Christianity.

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L. Coser, trans. (1961), p. 97
2 months 2 weeks ago

The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment.

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Pt. I, ch. II.
1 month 3 weeks ago

We often attribute "understanding" and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

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2 months 4 days ago

For this is our central human problem: that we are almost constantly the victims of our emotions, always being swept up and down on a kind of inner-switchback. We possess a certain control over them; we can 'direct our thoughts' -- or feelings -- in such a way as to intensify them. This is certainly our most remarkable human characteristic: imagination. Animals require actual physical stimuli to trigger their experience. A man can retreat into a book -- or a daydream -- and live through certain experiences quite independent of the physical world. He can even, for example, imagine a sexual encounter, and not only experience all the appropriate physical responses, but even the sexual climax. Such a curious ability is far beyond the power of any animal.

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p. 23
4 weeks ago

Though it is often assumed that naturalism must be hostile to religion, the opposite is true. Enemies of religion think of it as an intellectual error, which humanity will eventually grow out of. It is hard to square this view with Darwinian science - why should religion be practically universal, if it has no evolutionary value?

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Sweet Morality (p. 224)
1 month 2 weeks ago

The new science of communication is percept, not concept.

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(p. 259)

A very weighty argument is this - namely, that neither does the light which descends from thence, chiefly upon the world, mix itself with anything, nor admit of dirtiness or pollution, but remains entirely, and in all things that are, free from defilement, admixture, and suffering. Besides, we must pay attention to the other kinds of phenomena, both to the Intelligible, and yet more to the Sensible - whatever are connected with matter, or will manifest themselves in relation to our subject.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

What extracts from the Vedas I have read fall on me like the light of a higher and purer luminary, which describes a loftier course through purer stratum. It rises on me like the full moon after the stars have come out, wading through some far stratum in the sky.

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1850
3 months 1 week ago

Often must you turn your pencil to erase, if you hope to write something worth a second reading.

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Book I, satire i, lines 72-3,
1 month 4 days ago

The WTO-related events in Seattle created the first experience of a rainbow politics-a successful pluralistic politics, without the working of a master mind, but with the currents and beauty that come out of free thinking. In the new politics, people have different ways of talking, but I feel the core will be living democracy and living economies, and that it will include both taking personal responsibility to make change and being part of national and international movements for change.

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2 months 1 week ago

At midday the daily food of all Spaniards was the puchero or cocido, as the dish is really called which the foreigners call pot-pourri or olla podrida. This contains principally yellow chick-peas, with a little bacon, some potatoes or other vegetables and normally also small pieces of beef or sausage, all boiled in one pot at a very slow fire; the liquid of the same makes the substantial broth that is served first.

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p. 14
3 months 3 weeks ago

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of the workman. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.

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Chapter VIII, p. 80.
3 months 4 weeks ago

So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination. ..And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do no bring forth in the agitation.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

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Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
6 days ago

Criticism actually says: You must free your I so completely from all limitations that it becomes a human I. I say: Free yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; because it is not given to everyone to break through all limits, or, more eloquently: that is not a limit for everyone which is one to the others. Consequently, don't exhaust yourself on the limits of others; it's enough if you tear down your own. Who has ever been able to break down even one limit for all people? Aren't countless people today, as at all times, running around with all the "limitations of humanity"? One who overturns one of his limits may have shown others the way and the means; the overturning of their limits remains their affair.

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Landstreicher 2017, p. 97
2 months 2 weeks ago

Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving but selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment.

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2 months 1 week ago

The number 2 thought of by one man cannot be added to the number 2 thought of by another man so as to make up the number 4.

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Oppression and Liberty (1958), p. 82
3 months 3 weeks ago

Christianity taught only what the whole of Asia knew already long before and even better.

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quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture. New Delhi: Pragun Publication.
1 month 3 weeks ago

Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.

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"The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary" (1993), later published in The Judith Butler Reader (2004) edited by Sarah Salih with Judith Butler
3 months 3 weeks ago

We, on the contrary, now send to the Brahmans English clergymen and evangelical linen-weavers, in order out of sympathy to put them right, and to point out to them that they are created out of nothing, and that they ought to be grateful and pleased about it. But it is Just the same as if we fired a bullet at a cliff. " In India, our religions wIll never at any time take root; the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian Wisdom flows back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought.

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Schopenhauer, Arthur The world as will and representation. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. New York, Dover Publications [c1969 - Volume I, & 63 p. 356-357. quoted in Londhe, S. (2008).
2 months 5 days ago

Racism has always been a divisive force separating black men and white men, and sexism has been a force that unites the two groups.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Among human beings, the subjection of women is much more complete at a certain level of civilization than it is among savages. And the subjection is always reinforced by morality.

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Ch. 15: Power and moral codes
1 month 2 weeks ago

The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serves as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware.

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(p. 93)
3 months 3 weeks ago

People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

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1841

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