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8 months 3 weeks ago

But you must see that if two things are alike, then it is a further question whether the first is copied from the second, or the second from the first, or both from a third.''What would the third be?''Some have thought that all these loves were copies of our love for the Landlord.'

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Pilgrim's Regress 59
8 months 1 day ago

We carry with us the wonders, we seek without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies, wisely learns in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume.

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Section 15
1 year 3 weeks ago

Canned laughter: After some supposedly funny or witty remark you can hear the laughter and applause included in the soundtrack of the show itself - here we have the exact counterpart of the Chorus in classical tragedy; it is here that we have to look for 'living Antiquity.' That is to say, why this laughter? The first possible answer - that it serves to remind us when to laugh - is interesting enough, because it implies the paradox that laughter is a matter of duty and not of some spontaneous feeling; but this answer is not sufficient because we do not usually laugh. The only correct answer would be that the Other - embodied in the television set - is relieving us even of our duty to laugh - is instead laughing for us. So even if, tired from a hard days stupid work, all evening we did nothing but gaze drowsily into the television screen, we can say afterwards that objectively, through the medium of the other, we had a really good time.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

As image and apprehension are in an organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.

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"Priestesses in the Church?" (1948), p. 237
6 months 3 weeks ago

We measure the earth, sun, stars, and ocean depths. We burrow into the depths of the earth for gold. We search for rivers and mountains on the moon. We discover new stars and know their magnitudes. We sound the depths of gorges and build clever machines. Each day brings a new invention. What don't we think of! What can't we do! But there is something else, the most important thing of all, that we are missing. We do not know exactly what it is. We are like a small child who knows he does not feel well but cannot explain why. We are uneasy, because we know a lot of superfluous facts; but we do not know what is really important-ourselves.

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p. 10
8 months 2 weeks ago

We are but dust and shadow.

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Book IV, ode vii, line 16
9 months 3 days ago

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

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The Prince (1513), Ch. 22
6 months 3 weeks ago

If the slave-owner of our times has no slave, John, whom he can send to the cesspool, he has five shillings, of which hundreds of such Johns are in such need that the slave-owner of our times may choose any one out of hundreds of Johns and be a benefactor to him by giving him the preference, and allowing him, rather than another, to climb down into the cesspool.

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Chapter 8: Slavery Exists Among Us
5 months 2 weeks ago

The Public is an old woman. Let her maunder and mumble.

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Journal (1835).
8 months 1 day ago

A little water makes a sea, a small puff of wind a Tempest.

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7 months 1 week ago

I must avert here once again to my view of the opposition that exists between individuality and personality, notwithstanding the fact that the one demands the other. Individuality is, if I may so express it, the container or thing which contains, personality the content or thing contained, or I might say that my personality is in a certain sense my comprehension, that which I comprehend or embrace within myself - which is in a certain way the whole Universe - and that my individuality is my extension; the one my infinite, the other my finite.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Every bureaucracy, therefore, in accord with the peculiar emphasis on its own position, tends to generalize its own experience and to overlook the fact that the realm of administration and of smoothly functioning order represents only a part of the total political reality. Bureaucratic thought does not deny the possibility of the science of politics, but regards it as identical with the science of administration. Thus irrational factors are overlooked, and when these nevertheless force themselves to the fore, they are treated as "routine matters of state."

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7 months 1 week ago

Even the most insensitive hit song enthusiast cannot always escape the feeling that the child with a sweet tooth comes to know in the candy store.

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p. 290
7 months 3 weeks ago

Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.

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(Hays translation) The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts. V, 16
9 months 3 weeks ago

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by Nature be attained. No citizen will have an advantage over any other citizen save as is given by his industry, skill, and intelligence; and each will obtain what he fairly earns. Then, but not till then, will labor get its full reward, and capital its natural return.

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Book VIII, Ch. 3
8 months 3 weeks ago

Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.

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The Civil War in France : "The Third Address", May 1871
8 months 3 weeks ago

Whoso walketh in solitude, And inhabiteth the wood, Choosing light, wave, rock, and bird, Before the money-loving herd, Into that forester shall pass From these companions power and grace.

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Wood-notes, no. II, st. 4
8 months 3 weeks ago

A false science makes atheists, a true science prostrates men before the Deity.

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The critical review, or annals of literature, Volume XXVI, by A Society of Gentlemen (1768) p. 450
5 months 1 week ago

Mercy often means giving death, not life.

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line 329
8 months 3 weeks ago

The live dead-man is dead as a producer and alive insofar as he consumes.

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p. 139
5 months 2 weeks ago

We aspire not to equality but to domination. Countries inhabited by foreign races must become again countries of serfs, farm laborers, and factory workers. The goal is not to suppress inequities, but, rather, to amplify them and to make of them a matter of course.

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as translated by Asselin Charles, in "Colonial Discourse Since Christopher Columbus," Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2 (November 1995), p. 147
7 months 3 weeks ago

And now I ask, whether, with this map of misgovernment before me, I can suppose myself bound by my vote to continue, upon any principles of pretended public faith, the management of these countries in those hands? If I kept such a faith (which in reality is no better than a fides latronum) with what is called the Company, I must break the faith, the covenant, the solemn, original, indispensable oath, in which I am bound, by the eternal frame and constitution of things, to the whole human race.

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Speech in the House of Commons on India (1 December 1783), quoted in The Parliamentary Register: Or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons, Volume XII (1782), p. 247
8 months 3 weeks ago

I was your luxury. For nineteen years I have been put in your man's world and was forbidden to touch anything and you made me think that all was going very well and that I did not have to worry about anything but putting flowers in vases. Why did you lie to me? Why did you keep me ignorant, if it was to admit to me one day that this world is cracking and that you are all powerless and to make me choose between a suicide and a murder?

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Jessica to Hugo, Act 5, sc. 2
9 months 4 weeks ago
There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by knowing how to meet his principle needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an "overjoyed hero," counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty.
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4 months 3 weeks ago

The 'Logic of Induction' consists in stating the Facts and the Inference in such a manner, that the evidence of the Inference is manifest; just as the Logic of Deduction consists in stating the Premises and the Conclusion in such a manner that the Evidence of the Conclusion is manifest.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

A modest man is steady, an humble man timid, and a vain one presumptuous.

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Ch. 7
8 months 3 weeks ago

Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

What modern apologists call 'true' Christianity is something depending upon a very selective process. It ignores much that is to be found in the Gospels: for example, the parable of the sheep and the goats, and the doctrine that the wicked will suffer eternal torment in Hell fire. It picks out certain parts of the Sermon on the Mount, though even these it often rejects in practice. It leaves the doctrine of non-resistance, for example, to be practised only by non-Christians such as Gandhi. The precepts that it particularly favours are held to embody such a lofty morality that they must have had a divine origin. And yet ... these precepts were uttered by Jews before the time of Christ.

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"Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?", in Stockholm newspaper Dagens Nyheter, part II., 11/11/1954
7 months 1 week ago

Society creates the victims that it afterwards vainly attempts to get rid of.

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9 months 3 weeks ago

Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

I agree with Paul that love is more important than faith and hope; but so are honesty, integrity, and moral courage. The world needs less faith and more love and nobility.

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Preface
5 months 6 days ago

Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you - you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.

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Letter to the Secretariat of the Soviet Writers' Union (12 November 1969) as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz, "Expulsion"
5 months 2 weeks ago

For the Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things.

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7 months 1 week ago

At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too.

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S.4
5 months 2 weeks ago

History a distillation of Rumour.

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Pt. I, Bk. VII, ch. 5.
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is wrong to condemn people for doing a thing and then offer no alternative but failure. A person could get mad about that.

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"The Problem of Tobacco"
6 months 3 weeks ago

The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration - the technique of the suspended judgement.

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(p. 81)
6 months 3 weeks ago

After Plotinus, says Schassler, fifteen centuries passed without the slightest scientific interest for the world of beauty and art. ...In reality, nothing of the kind happened. The science of aesthetics ... neither did nor could vanish, because it never existed. ... the Greeks were so little developed that goodness and beauty seemed to coincide. On that obsolete Greek view of life the science of aesthetics was invented by men of the eighteenth century, and especially shaped and mounted in Baumgarten's theory. The Greeks (as anyone may read in Bénard's book on Aristotle and Walter's work on Plato) never had a science of aesthetics.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberties by every other man.

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Pt. II, Ch. 4 : Derivation of a First Principle, § 3
5 months 1 week ago

The State's behavior is violence, and it calls its violence "law"; that of the individual, "crime." The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.

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As quoted in The Great Quotations (1960) by George Seldes, p. 664
5 months 2 weeks ago

It is a greatness not of mere body and gigantic bulk, but a rude greatness of soul. There is a sublime uncomplaining melancholy traceable in these old hearts. A great free glance into the very deeps of thought. They seem to have seen, these brave old Northmen, what Meditation has taught all men in all ages, That this world is after all but a show,-a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing. All deep souls see into that,-the Hindoo Mythologist, the German Philosopher,-the Shakspeare, the earnest Thinker, wherever he may be.

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9 months 3 days ago

Man is by nature unable to want God to be God. Indeed, he himself wants to be God, and does not want God to be God.

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Thesis 17
6 months 3 weeks ago

The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures.

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(p. 99)
6 months 3 weeks ago

An appeal to his alarm is never a good plan to rid oneself of a spirited young man.

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The Pavilion on the Links, ch. III.
8 months 3 weeks ago

The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,-a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

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par. 5

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