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7 months 3 weeks ago

Privilege is a regulation rendering a few men, and those only, by the accident of their birth, eligible to certain situations. It kills all liberal ambition in the rest of mankind, by opposing to it an apparently insurmountable bar. It diminishes it in the favored class itself, by showing them the principal qualification as indefeasibly theirs. Privilege entitles a favored few to engross to themselves gratifications which the system of the universe left at large to all her sons; it puts into the hands of those few the means of oppression against the rest of their species; it fill them witth vain-glory, and affords them every incitement to insolence and a lofty disregard to the feeling and interests of others.

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Book V, Chapter 11, "Moral Effects of Aristocracy"
8 months 3 weeks ago

The typical Westerner wishes to be the cause of as many changes as possible in his environment; the typical Chinaman wishes to enjoy as much and as delicately as possible.

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The Problem of China (1922), Ch. XII: The Chinese Character
7 months 2 weeks ago

And seeing every man is presumed to do all things in order to his own benefit, no man is a fit Arbitrator in his own cause.

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The First Part, Chapter 15, p. 78
9 months 3 weeks ago

What a human being believes, however, no matter with what ardor, is not necessarily objective truth.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean that but also to mean something else.

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Expression and Meaning, p. 31, Cambridge University Press (1979).
6 months 3 weeks ago

Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.

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Maxim 847
9 months 2 days ago

Not to be a proud and haughty person, you have to follow the old proverb and "know thyself." That is to say, you must regard your special talents, whatever beauty or fame you have, as gifts from God, and not as things you earned for yourself. Whatever is low and mean is not God's doing, however. Here you can only blame yourself. Remember the squalor of your birth and how naked and poor you were when you crawled into the light of day like a little animal.

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p.154
9 months 3 weeks ago

Generals are, as a matter of course, allowed to be far more idiotic than ordinary human beings are permitted to be.

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5 months 1 week ago

Mercy often means giving death, not life.

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line 329
7 months 3 weeks ago

Mankind will never be, in an eminent degree, virtuous and happy till each man shall possess that portion of distinction and no more, to which he is entitled by his personal merits. The dissolution of aristocracy is equally the interest of the oppressor and the oppressed. The one will be delivered from the listlessness of tyranny, and the other from the brutalizing operation of servitude.

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Book V, Chapter 11, "Moral Effects of Aristocracy"
4 months 3 weeks ago

We may say with truth and meaning that governments are more or less republican, as they have more or less of the element of popular election and control in their composition; and believing, as I do, that the mass of the citizens is the safest depository of their own rights, and especially, that the evils flowing from the duperies of the people are less injurious than those from the egoism of their agents, I am a friend to that composition of government which has in it the most of this ingredient. And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

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Letter to John Taylor (28 May 1816) ME 15:23
4 months 3 weeks ago

The 'Diagnosis', or Scheme of the Characters, comes, in the order of philosophy, after the Classification. The characters do not 'make' the classes, they only enable us to 'recognize' them. The Diagnosis is an Artificial Key to a Natural System.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Things have no hold on the soul. They have no access to it, cannot move or direct it. It is moved and directed by itself alone. It takes the things before it and interprets them as it sees fit.

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(Hays translation) V, 19
8 months 3 weeks ago

In England women are still occasionally used instead of horses for hauling canal boats, because the labour required to produce horses and machines is an accurately known quantity, while that required to maintain the women of the surplus population is below all calculation.

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Vol. I, Ch. 15, Section 2, pg. 430.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

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Part of an endorsement statement for The Dying of the Trees (1997) by Charles E. Little
5 months 2 weeks ago

In the same way that the figure of the peasant tends to disappear, so too does the figure of the industrial worker, the service industry worker and all other separate categories.

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125
6 months 2 weeks ago

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

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As quoted in "Dailer's Choice" by Harriet Van Horne, in New York Magazine Vol. 10, No. 13 (28 March 1977), p. 80
8 months 3 weeks ago

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Once you had read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology.

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Humboldt's Gift (1975) [Penguin Classics, 1996, ISBN 0-140-18944-0], p. 5
6 months ago

Like other human freedoms, the freedoms embodied in market institutions are justified inasmuch as they meet human needs. Insofar as they fail to do this they can reasonably be altered. This is true not only of the rights that are involved in market institutions. It is true of all human rights.

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'Modus Vivendi' (p.36)
7 months 3 weeks ago

Each new ontological theory, propounded in lieu of previous ones shown to be untenable, has been followed by a new criticism leading to a new scepticism. All possible conceptions have been one by one tried and found wanting; and so the entire field of speculation has been gradually exhausted without positive result: the only result reached being the negative one above stated, that the reality existing behind all appearances is, and must ever be, unknown.

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Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. IV, The Relativity of All Knowledge
8 months 1 week ago

After the battle in Pharsalia, when Pompey was fled, one Nonius said they had seven eagles left still, and advised to try what they would do. "Your advice," said Cicero, "were good if we were to fight jackdaws."

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Cicero
8 months 3 weeks ago

One must care about a world one will not see.

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Attributed to Russell in The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations (1997), p. 450, and in Robertson's Dictionary of Quotations (1998), p. 362, but no specific source is given.
8 months 3 weeks ago

I, for my part, do not conceive an act as having causes, and I consider myself satisfied when I have found in it not its 'factors' but the general themes which it organizes: for our decisions gather into new syntheses and on new occasions the leitmotif that governs our life

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p. 461
7 months 2 weeks ago

When we desire to lead men to God, we must not simply overthrow their idols. In each of these images we must seek to discover what divine quality he who carved it sought.

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p. 117
7 months 6 days ago

Where cruelty and injustice are concerned, hopelessness is submission, which I believe is immoral.

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quoted in "Internal Exile" by Pankaj Mishra in The New Yorker, 2021
8 months 1 week ago

Again, Amyclas the Heracleotean, one of Plato's familiars, and Menæchmus, the disciple, indeed, of Eudoxus, but conversant with Plato, and his brother Dinostratus, rendered the whole of geometry as yet more perfect. But Theudius, the Magnian, appears to have excelled, as well in mathematical disciplines, as in the rest of philosophy. For he constructed elements egregiously, and rendered many particulars more universal. Besides, Cyzicinus the Athenian, flourished at the same period, and became illustrious in other mathematical disciplines, but especially in geometry. These, therefore, resorted by turns to the Academy, and employed themselves in proposing common questions.

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Ch. IV.
5 months 1 day ago

Within a nominally Christian world, chivalry upheld without any substantial alterations an Aryan ethics in the following things: (1) upholding the ideal of the hero rather than the saint, and of the conqueror rather than of the martyr; (2) regarding faithfulness and honor, rather than caritas and humbleness, as the highest virtues; (3) regarding cowardice and dishonor, rather than sin, as the worst possible evil; (4) ignoring or hardly putting into practice the evangelical precepts of not opposing evil and not retaliating against offenses, but rather, methodically punishing unfairness and evil; (5) excluding from its ranks those who followed the Christian precept 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' to the letter; and (6) refusing to love one's enemy and instead fighting him and being magnanimous only after defeating him.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

In a sense, people are our proper occupation. Our job is to do them good and put up with them. But when they obstruct our proper tasks, they become irrelevant to us--like sun, wind, and animals. Our actions may be impeded by them, but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

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(Hays translation) V.20
9 months 2 days ago

Riches are a good handmaid, but the worst mistress.

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De Augmentis Scientiarum, Book II, "Antitheta"
1 month 3 weeks ago

Too lazy to do that...hopefully nobody notices....👀
 

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Conquered people tend to be witty.

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Mr. Sammler's Planet, (1976), p. 98
9 months 1 week ago

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

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As quoted in InfoWorld, Vol. 23, No. 16, 16 April 2001, p. 49. This had been attributed previously to many other sources from 1908 on, according to this analysis by Quote Investigator.
9 months 2 days ago

Animals only follow their natural instincts; but man, unless he has experienced the influence of learning and philosophy, is at the mercy of impulses that are worse than those of a wild beast. There is no beast more savage and dangerous than a human being who is swept along by the passions of ambition, greed, anger, envy, extravagance, and sensuality.

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Translated by Beert C. Verstraete as On Education for Children, in The Erasmus Reader (University of Toronto Press: 1990), p. 73
5 months 2 weeks ago

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
7 months 2 weeks ago

Tears do not burn except in solitude.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing deserves to be undone, doubtless because nothing deserved to be done.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

To affirm equality is to affirm a cohabitation defined in part by an interdependency that takes the edge off the individual boundaries of the body, or that works that edge for its social and political potential.

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p. 148
7 months 1 week ago

Progress usually comes from the barbarian, and there is nothing more stagnant than the philosophy of the philosophers and the theology of the theologians.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Any American ally will welcome Biden as president, will be happy that he was elected, but will be a little... distrustful because the Republicans could make a come-back in 2022. They could win the presidency again in 2024. ...There's is still a good third of the American public that remain very strong Trump voters. They're very angry and... are not going to go away... Therefore the ability of the United States to resume its role as the chief defender of the liberal order... is going to be contested, both domestically and... by American friends. If this leads to more self-reliance on their part, that may not be the worst thing in the world, but it is going to mean a very different kind of world order than the one I grew up arguing with Owen Harries about.

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30:41:00
9 months 3 weeks ago

Alas, time comes and time goes, it subtracts little by little; then it deprives a person of a good, the loss of which he indeed feels, and his pain is great. Alas, and he does not discover that long ago it has already taken away from him the most important thing of all-the capacity to make a resolution-and it has made him so familiar with this condition that there is no consternation over it, the last thing that could help gain new power for renewed resolution!

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8 months 3 weeks ago

If slavery, barbarism and desolation are to be called peace, men can have no worse misfortune. No doubt there are usually more and sharper quarrels between parents and children, than between masters and slaves ; yet it advances not the art of household management to change a father's right into a right of property, and count children but as slaves. Slavery, then, and not peace, is furthered by handing the whole authority to one man.

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Ch. 6, On Monarchy
6 months 3 weeks ago

Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.

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Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"
9 months 1 week ago

Sobriety, as opposed to inebriety and gluttony, is of admirable use in teaching men that nature is satisfied with a little, and enabling them to content themselves with simple and frugal fare.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Note that Unitarianism rejects concepts such as Hell, the Trinity, Original Sin, the infallability of the Bible, as well as claims that any one religion has a monopoly on theological truth and the Holy Spirit. At the same time, it accepts the notion that reason, rational thought, science, and philosophy can coexist with faith in God.

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Thomas Jefferson, letter to Benjamin Waterhouse (26 June 1822), 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. 12, pp. 241-243.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Final causes or intentions are the torment of modern philosophy, which neglects nothing to get rid of them. From this, among other things, comes its great axiom: nature creates only individuals. Indeed, since all classification supposes order, this philosophy has denied classes to deny order. In order to establish this marvellous reasoning, it fixes its suspicious eyes on the differences between beings to dispense itself from turning them to their similarities. It does not want to recognize that nuances between classes and individuals constitute another order, and that diversity in resemblance supposes intention more visibly than mere resemblance.

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9 months 1 day ago

Every rich man is avaricious, in my opinion.

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Ch. 14
8 months 3 weeks ago

It was mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances.

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p. 7
7 months 2 weeks ago

The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Each individual is an end in themselves in a system none of us created.....

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