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8 months 4 weeks ago

Nearly allied to justice are the virtues of beneficence, compassion, gratitude, piety, and friendship.

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6 months 4 days ago

The genes are the master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.

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Ch. 4. The Gene machine
5 months 3 weeks ago

I believe that the progress of experimental science, the free intercourse of nation with nation, the unrestricted influx of commodities from countries where they are cheap, and the unrestricted efflux of labour towards countries where it is dear, will soon produce, nay, I believe that they are beginning to produce, a great and most blessed social revolution.

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Speech in Edinburgh (2 November 1852), quoted in Speeches of the Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay, M.P. (1854), p. 517
4 months 4 weeks ago

But I liken common languid Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling down into ever worse distress towards final ruin;-all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own.

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8 months 1 week ago

Tis certainly a kind of indignity to philosophy, whose sovereign authority ought every where to be acknowledg'd, to oblige her on every occasion to make apologies for her conclusions, and justify herself to every particular art and science, which may be offended at her.

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Part 4, Section 5
8 months 1 week ago

Savage - There is only one way fit for a man - Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.

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Pilgrim's Regress 100
7 months 4 days ago

If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.

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8 months 1 week ago

I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.

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1688-1690
7 months 1 week ago

In countries where associations are free, secret societies are unknown. In America there are factions, but no conspiracies.

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Chapter XII.
8 months 2 weeks ago

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The existence of the mind-independent environment beyond one's world-simulation is a theoretical inference, not an empirical observation.

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Postscript to review of Michael Lockwood's Mind, Brain and the Quantum, BLTC Research, Dec. 2016
7 months 4 weeks ago

An evil and foolish and intemperate and irreligious life should not be called a bad life, but rather, dying long drawn out.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

One of those leaders of what they call the social revolution has said that religion is the opiate of the people. Opium...opium...opium, yes. Let us give them opium so that they can sleep and dream.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Everything over which I have might that cannot be torn from me remains my property; well, then let might decide about property, and I will expect everything from my might! Alien might, might that I leave to another, makes me an owned slave: then let my own might make me an owner. Let me then withdraw the might that I have conceded to others out of ignorance regarding the strength of my own might! Let me say to myself, what my might reaches to is my property; and let me claim as property everything that I feel myself strong enough to attain, and let me extend my actual property as far as I entitle, that is, empower, myself to take.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 227, 228
8 months 1 week ago

Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don't know why, unless it springs from long efforts to avoid priggery.

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Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1894). Smith was a Quaker, thus the archaic use of "Thee" in this and other letters to her.
6 months 2 weeks ago

If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever.... Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.

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F 82
6 months 1 week ago

There is no single speech nor article in which it is not said that the purpose of all these orgies is the peace of Europe. At a dinner given by the representatives of French literature, all breathe of peace. M. Zola, who, a short time previously, had written that war was inevitable, and even serviceable; M. de Vogue, who more than once has stated the same in print, say, neither of them, a word as to war, but speak only of peace. The sessions of Parliament open with speeches upon the past festivities; the speakers mention that such festivities are an assurance of peace to Europe. It is as if a man should come into a peaceful company, and commence energetically to assure everyone present that he has not the least intention to knock out anyone's teeth, blacken their eyes, or break their arms, but has only the most peaceful ideas for passing the evening.

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Ch. 1
7 months 4 days ago

There are questions which, once approached, either isolate you or kill you outright.

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7 months ago

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

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A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970); 2001, p. 170.
7 months 1 day ago

Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.

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3:15 (KJV) Said to John the Baptist.
8 months 2 weeks ago

Every rich man is avaricious, in my opinion.

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Ch. 14
9 months 5 days ago

...there are more things to admire in men than to despise.

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8 months 1 week ago

The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance...This notion of alternative possibility, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance.

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The Dilemma of Determinism (1884) p.153
5 months 3 weeks ago

The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts the problem to be insoluble, or in the atheism which denies the existence of any orderly progress and governance of things: the men of genius propound solutions which grow into systems of Theology or of Philosophy, or veiled in musical language which suggests more than it asserts, take the shape of the Poetry of an epoch.

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Ch.2, p. 72
6 months 6 days ago

The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.

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Letter to Harold Adam Innis (14 March 1951), published in Essential McLuhan (1995), edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, p. 73
8 months 3 weeks ago

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.

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XI, 14
4 months 1 week ago

Those who are most to be considered, those for whose help the struggle must be made, if labor is to be enfranchised, and social justice won, are those least able to help or struggle for themselves, those who have no advantage of property or skill or intelligence, - the men and women who are at the very bottom of the social scale. In securing the equal rights of these we shall secure the equal rights of all. Hence it is, as Mazzini said, that it is around the standard of duty rather than around the standard of self-interest that men must rally to win the rights of man. And herein may we see the deep philosophy of Him who bade men love their neighbors as themselves. In that spirit, and in no other, is the power to solve social problems and carry civilization onward.

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Ch. 21 : Conclusion
4 months 1 week ago

Now to get back to our given Church: it lives almost entirely for modesty and moneyed piety. It zealously inveighs against the harm done to Joseph and the sheep, but it has made its arrangements with the upper classes and serves as their spiritual defender. It bristles at see-through blouses, but not at slums in which half-naked children starve, and not, above all, at the conditions that keep three quarters of mankind in misery. It condemns desperate girls who abort a foetus, but it consecrates war, which aborts millions. It has nationalized its God, nationalized him into ecclesiastic organization, and has inherited the Roman empire under the mask of the Crucified. It preserves misery and injustice, having first tolerated and then approved the class power that causes them; it prevents any seriousness about deliverance by postponing it to St. Never-Ever's Day or shifting it to the beyond.

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p. 144
4 months 5 days ago

But that which is useful is the better.

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III, 6
8 months 1 week ago

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.

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Demonology
8 months 1 week ago

But perhaps I lack the gift. I see I've described her as being like a sword. That's true as far as it goes. But utterly inadequate by itself, and misleading. I ought to have said 'But also like a garden. Like a nest of gardens, wall within wall, hedge within hedge, more secret, more full of fragrant and fertile life, the further you explore.' And then, of her, and every created thing I praise, I should say 'in some way, in its unique way, like Him who made it.' Thus up from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith. to the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful.

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5 months 4 days ago

It is not easy for any of us to stop measuring the world against the standard of Europe, but the concept of the multitude requires it of us. It is a challenge. Embrace it.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

I must also call your attention to the fact that it is crucial for my viewpoint that human behavior is to a large extent charged with a considerable amount of energy, but that in contrast to Freud I do not consider this energy to be sexual, but the vital energy within any organism which, according to biological laws, gives man the desire to live, and that means to adapt himself to the social necessities of his society. To go back to what I consider to be the misunderstanding, it has never been my position that society only deforms or manifests that which is already there. If we make the distinction between human necessities in general and human desires in particular then indeed, society creates particular desires which, however, follow the general laws of the necessities rooted in human nature.

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8 months 1 week ago

Beings who are so uniquely constituted must necessarily express themselves in other ways than ordinary men. It is impossible that with souls so differently modified, they should not carry over into the expression of their feelings and ideas the stamp of those modifications.

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First Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
6 months 1 week ago

Three days later the little princess was buried, and Prince Andrei went up the steps to where the coffin stood, to give her the farewell kiss. And there in the coffin was the same face, though with closed eyes. "Ah, what have you done to me?" it still seemed to say, and Prince Andrei felt that something gave way in his soul and that he was guilty of a sin he could neither remedy nor forget.

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Bk. IV, Ch. 9
8 months 1 week ago

The rush to California, for instance, and the attitude, not merely of merchants, but of philosophers and prophets, so called, in relation to it, reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. That so many are ready to live by luck, and so get the means of commanding the labor of others less lucky, without contributing any value to society!

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p. 487
8 months 4 days ago

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

It is necessary to insist upon this extraordinary but undeniable fact: experimental science has progressed thanks in great part to the work of men astoundingly mediocre, and even less than mediocre. That is to say, modern science, the root and symbol of our actual civilization, finds a place for the intellectually commonplace man and allows him to work therein with success.

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Chapter XII: The Barbarism Of "Specialisation"
7 months 2 weeks ago

Be substantially great in thyself, and more than thou appearest unto others.

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Part I, Section XIX
7 months 1 day ago

Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.

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p. 65
5 months 3 weeks ago

There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits.

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p. 246
8 months 1 week ago

For those who want 'to change life", 'to reinvent love,' God is nothing but a hindrance.

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p. 500
3 months 4 weeks ago

As an eminent pioneer in the realm of high frequency currents... I congratulate you on the great successes of your life's work.

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[http://www.teslasociety.com/einsteinletter.jpg Einstein's letter] to Nikola Tesla for Tesla's 75th birthday (1931)
4 months 1 week ago

We necessarily perceive bodies as 'without' us: the Idea of 'Externality' is one of the conditions of perception.

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7 months 4 days ago

Democratic socialists are either proletarians who are not yet sufficiently clear about the conditions of the liberation of their class, or they are representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, a class which, prior to the achievement of democracy and the socialist measures to which it gives rise, has many interests in common with the proletariat. It follows that, in moments of action, the communists will have to come to an understanding with these democratic socialists, and in general to follow as far as possible a common policy with them - provided that these socialists do not enter into the service of the ruling bourgeoisie and attack the communists. It is clear that this form of co-operation in action does not exclude the discussion of differences.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

I say, it is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise; to be guided in the right path by those who know it better than they. This is the first "right of man;" compared with which all other rights are as nothing.

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4 months 5 days ago

Whatever this is that I am, it is flesh and a little spirit and an intelligence. This that I am, whatever it be, is mere flesh and a little breathe and the ruling Reason, This Being of mine, whatever it really is, consists of a little flesh, a little breath, and the part which governs.

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A little flesh, a little breath, and a Reason to rule all - that is myself. (Staniforth translation) II, 2
8 months 1 week ago

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies-the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distraction.

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Chapter 4 (pp. 35-36)

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