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George Santayana
George Santayana
2 months 1 week ago
Liberalism has merely cleared a field...

Liberalism has merely cleared a field in which every soul and every corporate interest may fight with every other for domination. Whoever is victorious in this struggle will make an end of liberalism; and the new order, which will deem itself saved, will have to defend itself in the following age against a new crop of rebels.

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"The Irony of Liberalism"
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
2 months 1 week ago
Although the formulations of science now...

Although the formulations of science now offer the most advanced knowledge of nature, men continue to use obsolete forms of thought long discarded by scientific theory. In so far as these obsolete forms are superfluous for science, the fact that they persist violated the principle of the economy of thought, that characteristic trait of the bourgeois temper.

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p. 133.
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
3 months 3 weeks ago
Dear rulers ... I maintain that...

Dear rulers ... I maintain that the civil authorities are under obligation to compel the people to send their children to school. ... If the government can compel such citizens as are fit for military service to bear spear and rifle, to mount ramparts, and perform other martial duties in time of war, how much more has it a right to compel the people to send their children to school, because in this case we are warring with the devil, whose object it is secretly to exhaust our cities and principalities of their strong men.

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letter to the German rulers (1524), as quoted in The History of Compulsory Education in New England, John William Perrin, 1896
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 1 week ago
When you make the two into...

When you make the two into one, you will become children of Adam, and when you say, 'Mountain, move from here!' it will move.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
3 weeks 4 days ago
Hayek's blind spot with regard to...

Hayek's blind spot with regard to politics was clear in the early 1980s when the first Thatcher government, in an attempt to reduce inflation and bring the public finances closer to a balanced budget, was raising interest rates and cutting public spending. As he had done during the 1930s, Hayek attacked these policies as not being severe enough. It would be better, he told me in a conversation we had around this time, if Thatcher imposed a more drastic contraction on the economy so that the wage-setting power of the trade unions could be broken. He appeared unfazed by unemployment, which was already higher (more than three million people) than at any time since the 1930s, and would rise much further if his recommendations were accepted.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 2 weeks ago
The labour-power is a commodity, not...

The labour-power is a commodity, not capital, in the hands of the labourer, and it constitutes for him a revenue so long as he can continuously repeat its sale; it functions as capital after its sale, in the hands of the capitalist, during the process of production itself.

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Vol. II, Ch. XIX, p. 384.
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
3 months 2 weeks ago
Man's urge for change and his...

Man's urge for change and his need for stability have always balanced and checked each other, and our current vocabulary, which distinguishes between two factions, the progressives and the conservatives, indicates a state of affairs in which this balance has been thrown out of order. No civilization - the man-made artifact to house successive generations - would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.

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"Civil Disobedience"
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 1 week ago
And having said this, Jesus smote...

And having said this, Jesus smote his face with both his hands, and then smote the ground with his head. And having raised his head, he said: "Cursed be every one who shall insert into my sayings that I am the son of God." At these words the disciples fell down as dead, whereupon Jesus lifted them up, saying: 'Let us fear God now, if we would not be affrighted in that day.'

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Ch. 53
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
1 month 3 weeks ago
Not only does reality resist those...

Not only does reality resist those who still criticize it, but it also abandons those who defend it. Maybe it is a way for reality to get its revenge from those who claim to believe in it for the sole purpose of eventually transforming it: sending back its supporters to their own desires.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1 month 4 weeks ago
What most clearly characterizes true freedom...

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

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L 49
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
1 month 2 weeks ago
Every day should be passed as...

Every day should be passed as if it were to be our last.

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Maxim 633
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 week 2 days ago
The suffering man ought really 'to...

The suffering man ought really 'to consume his own smoke'; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire, - which, in the metaphorical sense too, all smoke is capable of becoming!

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 1 week ago
The Master said, "Hard is...

The Master said, "Hard is it to deal with him, who will stuff himself with food the whole day, without applying his mind to anything good! Are there not gamesters and chess players? To be one of these would still be better than doing nothing at all.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 2 weeks ago
Tout existant naît sans raison, se...

Tout existant naît sans raison, se prolonge par faiblesse et meurt par rencontre. Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
3 months 2 weeks ago
Life is a business that does...

Life is a business that does not cover the costs.

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Vol II "On the Vanity and Suffering of Life"
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
3 months 2 weeks ago
Again, defenders of utility often find...

Again, defenders of utility often find themselves called upon to reply to such objections as this-that there is not time, previous to action, for calculating and weighing the effects of any line of conduct on the general happiness. This is exactly as if any one were to say that it is impossible to guide our conduct by Christianity, because there is not time, on every occasion on which anything has to be done, to read through the Old and New Testaments. The answer to the objection is, that there has been ample time, namely, the whole past duration of the human species. During all that time mankind have been learning by experience the tendencies of actions.

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Ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
2 months 1 week ago
But if it bee well considered,...

But if it bee well considered, The praise of Ancient Authors, proceeds not from the reverence of the Dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the Living.

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Review and Conclusion, p. 395
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
2 months 3 weeks ago
So many of my thoughts and...

So many of my thoughts and feelings are shared by the English that England has turned into a second native land of the mind for me.

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Journeys to England and Ireland, 1835.
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 months 1 day ago
Steiner goes further than this --...

Steiner goes further than this -- and this is his own central contribution to modern thought. He states that once we have made a habit of remembering Mozart and the stars, we shall find ourselves developing powers of 'spiritual vision.' We shall never again feel ourselves to be helpless victims of the external world.

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p. 169
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 3 weeks ago
There is nothing...
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Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 2 weeks ago
If you use a trick in...

If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking other than yourself?

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p. 24e
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 2 weeks ago
In fact, contempt for happiness is...

In fact, contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.

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p. 198
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 1 week ago
Thou sayest that I am a...

Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

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18:37, (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 2 weeks ago
Consider MacArthur and his Republican supporters....

Consider MacArthur and his Republican supporters. So limited is his intelligence and his imagination that he is never puzzled for one moment. All we have to do is to go back to the days of the Opium War. After we have killed a sufficient number of millions of Chinese, the survivors among them will perceive our moral superiority and hail MacArthur as a saviour. But let us not be one-sided. Stalin, I should say, is equally simple- minded and equally out of date. He, too, believes that if his armies could occupy Britain and reduce us all to the economic level of Soviet peasants and the political level of convicts, we should hail him as a great deliverer and bless the day when we were freed from the shackles of democracy. One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

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Part I: Man and Nature, Ch. 1: Current Perplexities, pp. 4-5
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
4 months 1 day ago
It is necessary to show that...

It is necessary to show that there is nothing so little known [as the above rules], nothing more difficult to practice, or nothing more useful and universal.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
4 months 3 weeks ago
The man who is guided by...
The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch.
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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
2 months 1 week ago
The prophet is appointed to oppose...

The prophet is appointed to oppose the king, and even more: history.

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BBC radio broadcast (1962), as quoted in The Great Thoughts (1984) by George Seldes
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
2 months 1 week ago
A man discovers what he is...

A man discovers what he is actually worth in this world when he faces society as a man, without money, name, or powerful connections, stripped of all but his native potentialities. He soon finds that nothing has less weight than his human qualities. They are prized so low that the market does not even list them. Strict science, which acknowledges man only as a biological concept, reflects man's lot in the actual world; in himself, man is nothing more than a member of a species. In the eyes of the world, the quality of humanity confers no title to existence, nay, not even a right of sojourn. Such title must be certified by special social circumstances stipulated in documents to be presented on demand.

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p. 137.
Philosophical Maxims
Leszek Kołakowski
Leszek Kołakowski
1 week 4 days ago
As for one-party rule, it was...

As for one-party rule, it was questioned neither by the Left Opposition nor by the Right [wing of the Communist party]. All were prisoners of their own doctrine and their own past: all had worked with a will to create the apparatus of violence that crushed them. Bukharin's hopeless attempt to form a league with Kamenev was no more than a pitiful epilogue to his career. In November 1929 the deviationists performed a public act of penance, but even this did not save them. Stalin's victory was complete; the collapse of the Bukharinite opposition meant the triumph of autocracy in the party and in the country. In December 1929 Stalin's fiftieth birthday was celebrated as a major historical event, and from this point we may date the "cult of personality". Trotsky's prophecy of 1903 had come true: party rule had become Central Committee rule, and this in turn had becorne the personal tyranny of a dictator.

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(pp. 42-3)
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
2 months 2 weeks ago
Suppose a surface to be part...

Suppose a surface to be part red and part blue; so that every point on it is either red or blue, and of course, no part can be both red and blue. What then, is the color of the surface in the immediate neighborhood of the point. ...it follows that the boundary is half red and half blue. In like manner, we find it necessary to hold that consciousness essentially occupies time... Thus, the present is half past and half time to come. ...Take another case: the velocity of a particle at any instant of time is its mean velocity during an infinitesimal instant in which that time is consumed. Just so, my immediate feeling is my feeling through an infinitesimal duration containing the present instant.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 months 4 days ago
Just as a vagrant accused of...

Just as a vagrant accused of stealing a carrot from a field stands before a comfortably seated judge who keeps up an elegant flow of queries, comments and witticisms while the accused is unable to stammer a word, so truth stands before an intelligence which is concerned with the elegant manipulation of opinions.

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p. 68
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
3 days ago
The old Romans….

The old Romans had a custom which survived even into my lifetime. They would add to the opening words of a letter: "If you are well, it is well; I also am well." Persons like ourselves would do well to say. "If you are studying philosophy, it is well." For this is just what "being well" means. Without philosophy the mind is sickly.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 1 week ago
Go into the village over against...

Go into the village over against you, and straightway ye shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her: loose them, and bring them unto me. And if any man say ought unto you, ye shall say, The Lord hath need of them; and straightway he will send them. All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass.

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21:2-5 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 2 weeks ago
All gods are homemade, and it...

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours Vijaya in Island.

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1962
Philosophical Maxims
Leszek Kołakowski
Leszek Kołakowski
1 week 4 days ago
If the gist of the controversy...

If the gist of the controversy were to be expressed in a single sentence, one might say that the mechanists represented the opposition of the natural sciences to philosophic interference, while the dialecticians stood for the supremacy of philosophy over the sciences and thus reflected the characteristic tendency of Soviet ideological development. The mechanists' outlook might be called negative, while the dialecticians ascribed immense importance to philosophy and regarded themselves as specialists. The mechanists, however, had a much better idea of what science was about. The dialecticians were ignoramuses in this sphere and confined themselves to general formulas about the philosophical need to "generalize" and unify the sciences; on the other hand, they knew more than the mechanists about the history of philosophy. (Eventually the party condemned both camps, and created a dialectical synthesis of both forms of ignorance.)

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(pg. 64)
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 2 weeks ago
Opinions differ as to the reasons...

Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 week 2 days ago
Alas! such is the miseducation of...

Alas! such is the miseducation of these days, it is only among those that are called the uneducated classes - those educated by experience - that you can look for a Man. Even among these, such a sight is growing daily rarer. My father, in several respects, has not, that I can think of, left his fellow. Perhaps among Scottish peasants what Samuel Johnson was among English authors. I have a sacred pride in my peasant father, and would not exchange him, even now, for any king known to me. Gold and the guinea stamp - the Man and the clothes of the man. Let me thank God for that greatest of blessings, and strive to live worthily of it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
1 month 4 weeks ago
There's no need to fear or...

There's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

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from Postscript on the Societies of Control
Philosophical Maxims
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini
3 weeks 6 days ago
If I'm a cruel satirist at...

If I'm a cruel satirist at least I'm not a hyprocrite: I never judge what other people do. Neither a politician nor a priest, I never censor what others do. Neither a philospher nor a psychiatrist, I never bother trying to analyze or resolve my fears and neuroses.

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"Hypocrisy"
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
2 months 3 weeks ago
The most dangerous madmen are those...

The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and ... people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
3 months 2 weeks ago
Being happy involves both a certain...

Being happy involves both a certain achievement in action and a rational assurance about the outcome.

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Chapter IX, Section 83, p. 549
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
3 months 2 weeks ago
All men would…

All men would then be necessarily equal, if they were without needs. It is the poverty connected with our species which subordinates one man to another. It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.

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"Equality", 1764
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
3 months 2 weeks ago
The next thing is by gentle...

The next thing is by gentle degrees to accustom children to those things they are too much afraid of. But here great caution is to be used, that you do not make too much haste, nor attempt this cure too early, for fear lest you increase the mischief instead of remedying it.

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Sec. 115
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 2 weeks ago
Applaud us when we run, console...

Applaud us when we run, console us when we fall, cheer us when we recover.

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Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election (6 September 1780), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II (1855), p. 129
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
1 month 1 week ago
It is now time for us...

It is now time for us to pay a decent, a rational, a manly reverence to our ancestors, not by superstitiously adhering to what they, in other circumstances, did, but by doing what they, in our circumstances, would have done.

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Speech in the House of Commons on the Reform Bill (2 March 1831), quoted in Speeches of the Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay, M.P. (1854), p. 8
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 2 weeks ago
At the approach of danger there...

At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it; the other even more reasonable says that it is too painful and harassing to think of the danger, since it is not a man's power to provide for everything and escape from the general march of events; and that it is therefore better to turn aside from the painful subject till it has come, and to think of what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second.

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Bk. X, ch. 17
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 5 days ago
Little can be hoped for from...

Little can be hoped for from a ruler... who has not at some time or other been preoccupied, even if only confusedly, with the first beginning and ultimate end of all things, and above all of man, with the "why" of his origin and the "wherefore" of his destiny.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
3 months 3 weeks ago
The world neither ever saw, nor...

The world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery.

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Chapter X, Part I.
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 2 weeks ago
What is the case, the fact,...

What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.

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(2) Original German: Was der Fall ist, die Tatsache, ist das Bestehen von Sachverhalten.
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 months 4 days ago
Whenever one tries to suppress doubt,...

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.

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Lectures in philosophy [Leçons de philosophie] (1959) as translated by Hugh Price p. 103
Philosophical Maxims
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