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7 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophy's position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name "theory of knowledge," has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy.

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p. 4
6 months 3 weeks ago

Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

The difference principle, for example, requires that the higher expectations of the more advantaged contribute to the prospects of the least advantaged.

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Chapter II, Section 16, pg. 95

I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: "Well, let them eat cake".

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This passage contains a statement Qu'ils mangent de la brioche that has usually come to be attributed to Marie Antoinette; this was written in 1766, when Marie Antoinette was 10
3 months 3 weeks ago

I find that even Eminent Writers (such as Raymund Lully, Paracelsus, and others) do so abuse the termes they employ, that as they will now and then give divers things one name, so they will oftentimes give one thing, many Names; and some of them (perhaps) such, as do much more properly signifie some Distinct Body of another kind; nay even in Technical Words or Termes of Art, they refrain not from this Confounding Liberty; but will, as I have Observ'd call the same Substance, sometimes the Sulphur, and Sometimes the Mercury, of a Body.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

It is very likely that there are many, many planets carrying life, even intelligent life, throughout the universe, because there are so many stars. By sheer chance, even if those chances are small, a great many life forms and a great many intelligences may exist.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

To throw oneself into strange teachings is quite dangerous.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Science is international but its success is based on institutions, which are owned by nations. If therefore, we wish to promote culture we have to combine and to organize institutions with our own power and means.

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When asked the question, "Why a 'Jewish' University?" when Einstein was assisting Chaim Weizmann in fundraising for The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. | As quoted in [Albert Einstein, Letter "Einstein in Singapore." Manchester Guardian, October 12, 1929]
5 months 1 week ago

From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiator's show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight-whereby the strongest, the swiftest and the cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given.

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(February 1888) "The Struggle for Existence: A Programme". The Nineteenth Century 23: 161-180. (quote from p. 163)
4 months 2 weeks ago

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another, for the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product. ... The proletarian liberates himself by abolishing competition, private property, and all class differences.

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4 months 1 week ago

There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin than the Nazis were.

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6 months 1 week ago

All science must start with some assumptions as to the ultimate analysis of the facts with which it deals. These assumptions are justified partly by their adherence to the types of occurrence of which we are directly conscious, and partly by their success in representing the observed facts with a certain generality, devoid of ad hoc suppositions.

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Ch. 8: "The Quantum Theory", p. 189
6 months 3 weeks ago

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

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8 months 5 days ago

The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

My reason will still not understand why I pray, but I shall still pray, and my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, is every moment of it no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an unquestionable meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.

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Pt. VIII, ch. 19
7 months 4 weeks ago

A pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do never does all he can.

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(p. 32)
3 months 3 weeks ago

All those events in history were such dramas as we see now, only with different actors.

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.X, 27
8 months 5 days ago

If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.

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Grey Eminence, 1940
3 months 2 days ago

Talking and knowing ARE action.....c'mon with shit....

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk; but divert your attention by the objects surrounding you. Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far. The Europeans value themselves on having subdued the horse to the uses of man; but I doubt whether we have not lost more than we have gained, by the use of this animal. No one has occasioned so much, the degeneracy of the human body. An Indian goes on foot nearly as far in a day, for a long journey, as an enfeebled white does on his horse; and he will tire the best horses. There is no habit you will value so much as that of walking far without fatigue.

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8 months 5 days ago

There is a sort of gratification in doing good which makes us rejoice in ourselves.

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Book III, Ch. 2
7 months 3 weeks ago

I entered the Communist Party because its cause was just and I will leave it when it ceases to be just.

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Hugo to Hoederer, Act 5, sc. 3
5 months 3 weeks ago

The universal hypocrisy has so entered into the flesh and blood of all classes of our modern society, it has reached such a pitch that nothing in that way can rouse indignation. Hypocrisy in the Greek means "acting," and acting-playing a part-is always possible. Chapter XII, Conclusion-Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand Variant Translation: Hypocrisy with good reason means the same as acting, and anybody can pretend - act a part.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

I recognize the necessity of animal experiments with my mind but not with my heart.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

A mother gave her children Aesop's fables to read, in the hope of educating and improving their minds; but they very soon brought the book back, and the eldest, wise beyond his years, delivered himself as follows: This is no book for us; it's much too childish and stupid. You can't make us believe that foxes and wolves and ravens are able to talk; we've got beyond stories of that kind! In these young hopefuls you have the enlightened Rationalists of the future.

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"Similes, Parables and Fables" Parerga and Paralipomena
6 months 2 weeks ago

Marx explains the alienation of labor as exemplified in, first, the relation of the worker to the product of his labor and, second, the relation of the worker to his own activity. P. 276

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That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.
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2 weeks 6 days ago

There's no safe way to promote philosophies that include "God". No matter how you approach it they capture destructive dual use, and a lot of us are smarter than that now.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The Value or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power...

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The First Part, Chapter 10, p. 42
Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.
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7 months 3 weeks ago

Courage, not cleverness; not even inspiration, is the grain of mustard that grows up to be a great tree.

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p. 44e
4 months 1 week ago

For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment.

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(p. 30)
8 months 6 days ago

What then remains but that we still should cry Not to be born, or, being born, to die?

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7 months 2 days ago

The First thing that strikes a traveler in the United States is the innumerable multitude of those who seek to emerge from their original condition; and the second is the rarity of lofty ambition to be observed in the midst of the universally ambitious stir of society. No Americans are devoid of a yearning desire to rise, but hardly any appear to entertain hopes of great magnitude or to pursue very lofty aims. All are constantly seeking to acquire property, power, and reputation.

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Book Three, Chapter XIX.
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

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21:13 (KJV)
6 months 1 week ago

Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most. His very "uniqueness," "separateness" and "differentiation" make him an alien, not only in his native place, but even in his own home. Often more so than the foreign born who generally falls in with the established. In the true sense one's native land, with its back ground of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home. A certain atmosphere of "belonging," the consciousness of being "at one" with the people and environment, is more essential to one's feeling of home. This holds good in relation to one's family, the smaller local circle, as well as the larger phase of the life and activities commonly called one's country. The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings than in his native land.

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4 months 1 week ago

I have always done things in my own way, which is at once the way that comes naturally to me, that is honest, sincere, genuine, and unforced; but also perverse, although you must remember that this word means per (through) verse (poetry), out-of-the-way and wayward, which is surely towards the way, and that to be queer-to "follow your own weird"-is wholeheartedly to accept your karma, or fate, or destiny, and thus to be odd in the service of God, "whose service," as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer declares, "is perfect freedom."

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p. xiii
8 months 1 day ago

Tis from the resemblance of the external actions of animals to those we ourselves perform, that we judge their internal likewise to resemble ours; and the same principle of reasoning, carry'd one step farther, will make us conclude that since our internal actions resemble each other, the causes, from which they are deriv'd, must also be resembling.

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Part 3, Section 16
5 months 3 weeks ago

God is the infinite ALL. Man is only a finite manifestation of Him. Or better yet: God is that infinite All of which man knows himself to be a finite part. God alone exists truly. Man manifests Him in time, space and matter. The more God's manifestation in man (life) unites with the manifestations (lives) of other beings, the more man exists. This union with the lives of other beings is accomplished through love. God is not love, but the more there is of love, the more man manifests God, and the more he truly exists... We acknowledge God only when we are conscious of His manifestation in us. All conclusions and guidelines based on this consciousness should fully satisfy both our desire to know God as such as well as our desire to live a life based on this recognition.

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Entry in Tolstoy's Diary
3 months 3 weeks ago

The Palaetiological Sciences point backwards with lines which are broken, but which all converge to the 'same' invisible point: and this point is the Origin of the Moral and Spiritual, as well as of the natural world.

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