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6 months 2 weeks ago

Considering the optimistic turn taken by world trade AT THIS MOMENT...it is some consolation at least that the revolution has begun in Russia, for I regard the convocation of 'notables' to Petersburg as such a beginning. ... On the Continent revolution is imminent and will, moreover, instantly assume a socialist character.

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Letter to Friedrich Engels (8 October 1858), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 40. Letters 1856-59 (2010), pp. 346-347
6 months 3 weeks ago

My purpose is to explain, not the meaning of words, but the nature of things.

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Part III, Def. XX
2 months 2 weeks ago

One of our fan-coloring biographers, who paints small men as very great, inquired of me lately with real affection too, whether he might consider as authentic, the change of my religion much spoken of in some circles. Now this supposed that they knew what had been my religion before, taking for it the word of their priests, whom I certainly never made the confidants of my creed. My answer was "say nothing of my religion. It is known to my God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one."

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Letter to John Adams (11 January 1817), 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. 48-49
6 months 3 weeks ago

War is sweet to them that know it not.

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Though Erasmus quoted this proverb in Latin at the start of his essay Bellum [War], and it is sometimes attributed to him, it originates with the Greek poet Pindar
5 months 2 weeks ago

You have theories enough concerning the Rights of Men. It may not be amiss to add a small degree of attention to their Nature and disposition.

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Letter to Charles-Jean-François Depont (November 1789), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), p. 46
3 months 3 weeks ago

Both natural selection and the historical record offer powerful reasons for doubting the trustworthiness of our naive moral intuitions. So the possibility that human civilisation might be founded upon some monstrous evil should be taken seriously - even if the possibility seems transparently absurd at the time.

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The Antispeciesist Revolution, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 26 Jul. 2013
6 months 3 weeks ago

I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that ties them together.

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Book III, Ch. 12. Of Physiognomy
4 months 1 week ago

From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics, compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness, a system in which the two great commandments were, to hate your neighbour, and to love your neighbour's wife.

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p. 351
4 months 1 week ago

Apparently the rise of consciousness is linked to certain kinds of privation. It is the bitterness of self-consciousness that we knowers know best. Critical of the illusions that sustained mankind in earlier times, this self-consciousness of ours does little to sustain us now. The question is: which is disenchanted, the world itself or the consciousness we have of it?

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A Matter of the Soul (1975), pp. 75-76
6 months 2 weeks ago

Either we must have war against Russia, before she has the atom bomb, or we will have to lie down and let them govern us. ... Anything is better than submission.

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Speech quoted in The Observer (21 November 1948), quoted in Robert Skildesky, Oswald Mosley (1981), p. 542 and Martin Ceadel, Thinking about Peace and War (1987), p. 52
4 months 2 weeks ago

While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.

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p. 52
6 months 2 weeks ago

Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 123
6 months 2 weeks ago

It appears then, that capitalist production comprises conditions independent of good or bad will, conditions which permit the working-class to enjoy that relative prosperity only momentarily, and at that always only as the harbinger of a coming crisis.

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Vol. II, Ch. XX, p. 415.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Why count the days, when even one days is enough for a man to know all happiness?

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2 months 2 weeks ago

To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it--the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.

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A command can express no more than an ought or a shall, because it is a universal, but it does not express an 'is'; and this at once makes plain its deficiency. Against such commands Jesus sets virtue, i.e., a loving disposition, which makes the content of the command superfluous and destroys its form as a command, because that form implies an opposition between a commander and something resisting the command.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.

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Act 5, sc. 3
6 months 2 weeks ago

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

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Ch. 4
7 months 1 week ago

Guide the people by law, subdue them by punishment; they may shun crime, but will be void of shame. Guide them by example, subdue them by courtesy; they will learn shame, and come to be good.

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3 months 3 days ago

I forbid you to be cast down or depressed. It is not enough if you do not shrink from work; ask for it.

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3 months 1 week ago

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

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Goethe.
7 months 2 weeks ago

Someone once asked me, "If you had your choice, Dr. Asimov, would it be women or writing?" My answer was, "Well, I can write for twelve hours at a time without getting tired."

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3 months 1 week ago

He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.

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Bk. III, ch. 11.
6 months 2 weeks ago

The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted. The only self-renunciation which it applauds, is devotion to the happiness, or to some of the means of happiness, of others; either of mankind collectively, or of individuals within the limits imposed by the collective interests of mankind.

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Ch. 2
5 months 2 weeks ago

The third argument, enclosing and defending the other two, consists in the development of those principles of logic according to which the humble argument is the first stage of a scientific inquiry into the origin of the three Universes, but of an inquiry which produces, not merely scientific belief, which is always provisional, but also a living, practical belief, logically justified in crossing the Rubicon with all the freightage of eternity.

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V
6 months 2 weeks ago

Why do I think that we, the intellectuals, are able to help? Simply because we, the intellectuals, have done the most terrible harm for thousands of years. Mass murder in the name of an idea, a doctrine, a theory, a religion - that is all our doing, our invention: the invention of the intellectuals. If only we would stop setting man against man - often with the best intentions - much would be gained. Nobody can say that it is impossible for us to stop doing this.

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3 months 1 week ago

Those who are humane achieve glory. Those who are inhumane suffer disgrace.

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2A:4
6 months ago

Remind yourself that all men assert that wisdom is the greatest good, but that there are few who strenuously seek out that greatest good.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
4 months 2 weeks ago

The old land is still the true love, the others are but pleasant infidelities.

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Pt. I, ch. IV
5 months 1 week ago

The transition from philosophy to the domain of state and society had been an intrinsic part of Hegel's system.

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P. 251
3 weeks 1 day ago

That's because believing in "God" or not doesn't determine goodness....universality does that...understanding each individual is an end in themselves.....

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4 months 2 weeks ago

But one no longer wonders when one realizes that in the higher classes there is an unerring instinct of what tends to maintain and of what tends to destroy the organization by virtue of which they enjoy their privileges. The fashionable lady had certainly not reasoned out that if there were no capitalists and no army to defend them, her husband would have no fortune, and she could not have her entertainments and her ball-dresses. And the artist certainly does not argue that he needs the capitalists and the troops to defend them, so that they may buy his pictures. But instinct, replacing reason in this instance, guides them unerringly. And it is precisely this instinct which leads all men, with few exceptions, to support all the religious, political, and economic institutions which are to their advantage.

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Chapter XII, Conclusion-Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand
5 months 1 day ago

The intellectual's spirit as an amateur can enter and transform the merely professional routine most of us go through into something much more lively and radical; instead of doing what one is supposed to do one can ask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnect with a personal project and original thoughts.

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p. 83
5 months 1 week ago

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.

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The Nice and the Good (1968), ch. 14, p. 127. Murdoch attributed this opinion to her character Kate Gray. It was not her own.
5 months 2 weeks ago

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to the good.

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Speech in opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings (18 February 1788), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Tenth (1899), p. 48
6 months 2 weeks ago

Let me suggest a theme for you: to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you, - returning to this essay again and again, until you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it. Give this good reason to yourself for having gone over the mountains, for mankind is ever going over a mountain. Don't suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you try, but at 'em again, especially when, after a sufficient pause, you suspect that you are touching the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your blows there, and account for the mountain to yourself. Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

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Letter to Harrison Blake, November 16, 1857
7 months 1 week ago

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Yet the hour of emancipation is advancing, in the march of time. It will come.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

"The real saint", Baudelaire pretends to think, "is he who flogs and kills people for their own good." His argument will be heard. A race of real saints is beginning to spread over the earth for the purposes of confirming these curious conclusions about rebellion.

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3 months 3 days ago

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind.

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Line 2 Alternate translation: If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable. (translator unknown).
3 months 3 days ago

Now a life of honour includes various kinds of conduct; it may include the chest in which Regulus was confined, or the wound of Cato which was torn open by Cato's own hand, or the exile of Rutilius, or the cup of poison which removed Socrates from gaol to heaven.

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5 months 1 week ago

The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.

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p. 133.
5 months 1 week ago

Those, no doubt, are in some way fortunate who have brought themselves, or have been brought by others, to obey some ultimate principle before the bar of which all problems can be brought. Single-minded monists, ruthless fanatics, men possessed by an all-embracing coherent vision do not know the doubts and agonies of those who cannot wholly blind themselves to reality.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

From the fundamental nature of the Philistine, it follows that, in regard to others, as he has no intellectual but only physical needs, he will seek those who are capable of satisfying the latter not the former. And so of all the demands he makes of others the very smallest will be that of any outstanding intellectual abilities. On the contrary, when he comes across these they will excite his antipathy and even hatred. For here he has a hateful feeling of inferiority and also a dull secret envy which he most carefully attempts to conceal even from himself; but in this way it grows sometimes into a feeling of secret rage and rancour. Therefore it will never occur to him to assess his own esteem and respect in accordance with such qualities, but they will remain exclusively reserved for rank and wealth, power and influence, as being in his eyes the only real advantages to excel in which is also his desire.

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E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 344-345
2 months 2 weeks ago

As a violin string or a harpsichord key vibrates and gives forth sound, so the cerebral fibres, struck by waves of sound, are stimulated to render or repeat the words that strike them.

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The true is the whole.

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Preface

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