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1 month 1 week ago

There is no more consensus on what justice means than there is on the character of the good. If anything, there is less. Among the virtues, justice is one of the most shaped by convention. For that reason it is among the most changeable.

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'Modus Vivendi' (p.34)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Some would deny any legitimate use of the word God because it has been misused so much. Certainly it is the most burdened of all human words. Precisely for that reason it is the most imperishable and unavoidable. And how much weight has all erroneous talk about God's nature and works (although there never has been nor can be any such talk that is not erroneous) compared with the one truth that all men who have addressed God really meant him? For whoever pronounces the word God and really means Thou, addresses, no matter what his delusion, the true Thou of his life that cannot be restricted by any other and to whom he stands in a relationship that includes all others.

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3 months ago

Love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other. p. 111, first American edition

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1970
4 months 6 days ago

At the age of five years to enter a spinning-cotton or other factory, and from that time forth to sit there daily, first ten, then twelve, and ultimately fourteen hours, performing the same mechanical labour, is to purchase dearly the satisfaction of drawing breath. But this is the fate of millions, and that of millions more is analogous to it.

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Vol II: "On the Vanity and Suffering of Life", as translated by R. B. Haldane, and J. Kemp in The World as Will and Idea (1886), p. 389
2 months 1 week ago

Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.

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Laws of Motion, I
4 months 1 week ago

There is no need for you to develop an armed insurrection. Christ himself has already begun an insurrection with his mouth.

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pp. 67-68
2 months 2 weeks ago

Now the basic impulse behind existentialism is optimistic, very much like the impulse behind all science. Existentialism is romanticism, and romanticism is the feeling that man is not the mere he has always taken himself for. Romanticism began as a tremendous surge of optimism about the stature of man. Its aim - like that of science - was to raise man above the muddled feelings and impulses of his everyday humanity, and to make him a god-like observer of human existence.

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p. 96
2 months 3 weeks ago

What man shall there be among you, that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out? How much then is a man better than a sheep? Wherefore it is lawful to do well on the sabbath days.

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12:11-12 (KJV) Said to the Pharisees.
3 months 3 weeks ago

If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

If we are not stupid or insincere when we say that the good or ill of man lies within his own will, and that all beside is nothing to us, why are we still troubled?

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Book I, ch. 25, § 1.
2 months 6 days ago

Nonviolence is perhaps best described as a practice of resistance that becomes possible, if not mandatory, precisely at the moment when doing violence seems most justified and obvious. In this way, it can be understood as a practice that not only stops a violent act, or a violent process, but requires a form of sustained action, sometimes aggressively pursued. So, one suggestion I will make is that we can think of nonviolence not simply as the absence of violence, or as the act of refraining from committing violence, but as a sustained commitment, even a way of rerouting aggression for the purposes of affirming ideals of equality and freedom.

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p. 27
4 months 4 days ago

Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities - his preeminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.

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"Reflex Action and Theism"
2 months 1 week ago

Many modern philosophers claim that probability is relation between an hypothesis and the evidence for it.

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Chapter 4, Evidence, p. 31.
2 months 1 week ago

One may dream of a culture where everyone bursts into laughter when someone says: this is true, this is real.

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2 weeks 5 days ago

It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing.

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Line 45.
4 months 4 days ago

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

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Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 1952
4 months 3 weeks ago

Although the Law of Reason is common, the majority of people live as though they had an understanding of their own.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

The criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power.

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Chapter Two, pp.. 79
5 months 1 day ago

Yes, everyone sleeps at that hour, and this is reassuring, since the great longing of an unquiet heart is to possess constantly and consciously the loved one...

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4 months 4 days ago

Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.

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Considerations by the Way
4 months 3 days ago

I have no faith in precision: ...simplicity and clarity are values in themselves, but not... [of] precision or exactness...

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All hypotheses respecting the manner in which the elements of inorganic bodies are arranged in space, must be constructed with regard to the general facts of crystallization.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

My theory was that we are all fundamentally 'multiple personalities', beginning with the baby and the child, and slowly developing into more complex selves. If, for some reason, we abruptly cease to develop -- through some trauma that undermines self-confidence -- all those potential personalities are stunted and repressed. And some accident or violent shock may give one of them the opportunity to 'take over'. This suggests, of course, that in some mysterious sense, our 'future' personalities are already there, in embryo, so to speak, and that they also develop as we mature. We move from personality to personality, as we might climb a ladder. The Beethovens and Leonardos got further up the ladder than most of us; yet even they failed to reach the top, as we can see if we study their lives.

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pp. 228- 229
3 months 1 week ago

I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar act of coition; It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination, when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.

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Section 9
1 month 3 weeks ago

All of us need an identity which unites us with our neighbours, our countrymen, those people who are subject to the same rules and the same laws as us, those people with whom we might one day have to fight side by side to protect our inheritance, those people with whom we will suffer when attacked, those people whose destinies are in some way tied up with our own.

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Rivers of Blood BBC2 documentary
4 months 5 days ago

A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.

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Ch. VI: International relations, p. 106
4 months 5 days ago

Since the working-class lives from hand to mouth,it buys as long as it has the means to buy.

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Vol. II, Ch. XX, p. 449.
4 months 1 week ago

it is absurd ... to hope that maybe another Newton may some day arise, to make intelligible to us even the genesis of but a blade of grass

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("Dialectic of Teleological Judgment" §75)
5 months 1 day ago

Let's not beat around the bush; I love life, that's my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.

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The Logic of Induction is the 'Criterion of Truth' inferred from Facts, as the Logic of Deduction is the 'Criterion of Truth' deduced from necessary Principle. In Art, Truth is a means to an end; in Science, it is the only end.

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4 months 5 days ago

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder's lack of rational conviction.

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Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately. Introduction to 1961 edition of Sceptical Essays, 1961
3 months 4 days ago

The strides of humanity are slow, they can only be counted in centuries.

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Act II.
4 months 3 days ago

The case of the conscience of Eichmann, which is admittedly complicated but is by no means unique, is scarcely comparable to the case of the German generals, one of whom, when asked at Nuremberg, "How was it possible that all of you honorable generals could continue to serve a murderer with such unquestioning loyalty?," replied that it was "not the task of a soldier to act as judge over his supreme commander. Let history do that or God in Heaven."

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Ch. VIII
4 months 1 week ago

Secrecy is an instrument of conspiracy; it ought not, therefore, to be the system of a regular government.

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On Publicity from The Works of Jeremy Bentham volume 2, part 2, 1839
3 weeks 4 days ago

Is not every true Reformer, by the nature of him, a Priest first of all? He appeals to Heaven's invisible justice against Earth's visible force; knows that it, the invisible, is strong and alone strong. He is a believer in the divine truth of things; a seer, seeing through the shows of things; a worshipper, in one way or the other, of the divine truth of things; a Priest, that is. If he be not first a Priest, he will never be good for much as a Reformer.

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The small are always dependent on the great; they are "small" precisely because they think they are independent. The great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other "greats" and who can transform it in an original manner.

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p. 35
2 months 4 days 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 days ago

Nonsense. You are a military man and should know better. If there is one science into which man has probed continuously and successfully, it is that of military technology. No potential weapon would remain unrealized for ten thousand years.

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3 weeks 4 days ago

Men, I say, never did believe idle songs, never risked their soul's life on allegories: men in all times, especially in early earnest times, have had an instinct for detecting quacks, for detesting quacks.

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4 months 1 week ago

There is only one man who gets his own way-he who can get it single-handed; therefore freedom, not power, is the greatest good. That man is truly free who desires what he is able to perform, and does what he desires. This is my fundamental maxim. Apply it to childhood, and all the rules of education spring from it. Society has enfeebled man, not merely by robbing him of the right to his own strength, but still more by making his strength insufficient for his needs. This is why his desires increase in proportion to his weakness; and this is why the child is weaker than the man. If a man is strong and a child is weak it is not because the strength of the one is absolutely greater than the strength of the other, but because the one can naturally provide for himself and the other cannot. Thus the man will have more desires and the child more caprices, a word which means, I take it, desires which are not true needs, desires which can only be satisfied with the help of others.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.

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As quoted in Nature Vol. 149 (Jan-Jun) 1942 p. 291, and A Philosophy for Our Time (1954) by Bernard Mannes Baruch, p. 13
2 weeks 1 day ago

To the man who is truly ethical all life is sacred, including that which from the human point of view seems lower in the scale. He makes distinctions only as each case comes before him, and under the pressure of necessity, as, for example, when it falls to him to decide which of two lives he must sacrifice in order to preserve the other. But all through this series of decisions he is conscious of acting on subjective grounds and arbitrarily, and knows that he bears the responsibility for the life which is sacrificed.

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p. 269
3 months 1 day ago

Because we cannot discover God's throne in the sky with a radiotelescope or establish (for certain) that a beloved father or mother is still about in a more or less corporeal form, people assume that such ideas are "not true." I would rather say that they are not "true" enough, for these are conceptions of a kind that have accompanied human life from prehistoric times, and that still break through into consciousness at any provocation.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Power is not opposed to freedom. It is precisely freedom that distinguishes power from violence or coercion.

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4 months 6 days ago

There is no virtue they should be excited to, nor fault they should be kept from, which I do not think they may be convinced of; but it must be by such reasons as their age and understandings are capable of, and those propos'd always in very few and plain words.

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Sec. 81
1 week 5 days ago

Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.

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"Atomic Physics and the Description of Nature"
2 months 1 week ago

An utterance can have Intentionality, just as a belief has Intentionality, but whereas the Intentionality of the belief is intrinsic the Intentionality of the utterance is derived.

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P. 27.

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