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5 months 4 days ago

The universe itself is God and the universal outpouring of its soul.

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As quoted in De Natura Deorum by Cicero, i. 15.
3 months 1 week ago

For we are social beings, who can exist and behave as autonomous agents only because we are supported in our ventures by that feeling of primal safety that the bond of society brings. We can envisage no project and no satisfaction on which the eyes of others do not shine. We are joined to those others, and even when they are strangers to us, they are also part of us. It is the indispensable need for membership that brings the national idea to our minds; and there is no rational argument that will expel it, once it is there. Without it, we are homeless; and even if our attitude to home is one of sour disaffection, home is no less necessary to our sense of who we are.

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'The First Person Plural', in Ronald Beiner (ed.), Theorizing Nationalism (1999), p. 291
1 month 2 weeks ago

The selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.

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Letter to Larkin Smith
5 months 1 week ago

In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free.

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Letter to James Baldwin
5 months 2 weeks ago

In principle and in practice, in a right track and in a wrong one, the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.

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Ch. 1: Of the Principle of Utility
3 months 2 weeks ago

Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: 'what shall we do and how shall we live.

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Quoted by Max Weber in his lecture "Science as a Vocation"; in Lynda Walsh (2013)
5 months 1 week ago

Form displays the relation itself as the state of original comportment toward beings, the festive state in which the being itself in its essence is celebrated and thus for the first time placed in the open.

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p. 119
1 month 4 weeks ago

We know nothing of tomorrow; our business is to be good and happy today.

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Vol. I, ch. 12, p. 472
3 months 3 days ago

We hardly know any instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking, and so grotesque, as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.

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'Frederic the Great', The Edinburgh Review (April 1842), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review: A New Edition (1852), p. 802
2 months 5 days ago

The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind.

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The life of Friedrich Schiller: Comprehending an examination of his works (1825).
3 months 1 week ago

Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends.

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Ch. 4. The Gene machine
4 months 1 week ago

Plants are Children of the Earth; we are Children of the Æther. Our Lungs are properly our Root; we live, when we breathe; we begin our life with breathing.

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2 months 5 days ago

A man of Intellect, of real and not sham Intellect, is by the nature of him likewise inevitably a man of nobleness, a man of courage, rectitude, pious strength; who, even because he is and has been loyal to the Laws of this Universe, is initiated into discernment of the same; to this hour a Missioned of Heaven; whom if men follow, it will be well with them; whom if men do not follow, it will not be well. Human Intellect, if you consider it well, is the exact summary of Human Worth; and the essence of all worth-ships and worships is reverence for that same.

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7 months 1 week ago

To be honest, Zizek has been saying some disappointing things lately. But, that's the reality of complex philosophy. If it's a good philosophy, if the grounding is good and it's complex, it will hit some sensitive edges.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dicebox in hand, shaking the dice.

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Conclusion
4 months 2 weeks ago

Language forms a kind of wealth, which all can make use of at once without causing any diminution of the store, and which thus admits a complete community of enjoyment; for all, freely participating in the general treasure, unconsciously aid in its preservation.

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Volume II, p. 213
5 months 2 weeks ago

Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included).

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Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, dated 12 December 1868.
5 months 1 week ago

To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.

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4 months 1 week ago

Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

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6 months 4 days ago

If a man has no humaneness what can his propriety be like? If a man has no humaneness what can his happiness be like?

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5 months 1 week ago

There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.

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Act 4, sc. 5
4 months 1 week ago

Understanding being nothing else, but conception caused by Speech.

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The First Part, Chapter 4, p. 17
5 months 2 weeks ago

The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

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Quotation and Originality
5 months 2 weeks ago

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.

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"Walter Savage Landor", from The Dial, xii, 1841
3 months 3 weeks ago

When we are lulled into somnolence by lack of challenge every molehill tends to become a mountain, every minor inconvenience an intolerable imposition. For a self-chosen reality tends to become a prison. The factors that protect and insulate civilized man can easily end by suffocating him unless he possesses a high degree of self-discipline, the 'highly developed vital sense' that Shaw speaks of. And since clever and sensitive people are inclined to lack self-discipline, a high degree of culture usually involves a high degree of pessimism. This is what has happened to Western civilisation over the past two centuries. It explains why so many distinguished artists, writers and musicians have taken such a negative view of the human situation.

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Introduction, p. xiii
1 month 2 weeks ago

We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don't need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don't need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.

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"Compromise, Hell!"
1 month 3 weeks ago

Adeimantus, in what amounts to an accusation of Socrates, asserts that the philosophers appear to be either useless or vicious. Plato, as I have suggested, teaches that ultimately this is an appearance that cannot be reversed, and this insures the philosophers' permanent marginality. They appear as useless because they are. They are neither artisans, nor statesmen, nor rhetoricians. They are idlers who contribute nothing to security or posterity. Their peculiar contemplative pleasures are not accessible to the majority of mankind, and they do not provide for the popular pleasures as do the poets.

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Commerce and Culture, p. 285.
2 months 1 week ago

The idea of universal human dignity ultimately comes out of Christianity... the view that all human beings are equal in the sight of God because they have the capacity for moral choice. As Western thought developed in the 17th-18th centuries, this took on a secular form under thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Immanuel Kant or Georg Hegel, who argued that human equality is... based on human autonomy.

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11:12
5 months 2 weeks ago

How much education may reconcile young people to pain and sufference, the examples of Sparta do sufficiently shew; and they who have once brought themselves not to think bodily pain the greatest of evils, or that which they ought to stand most in fear of, have made no small advance toward virtue.

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Sec. 115
5 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing is more common than good things: the point in question is only to discriminate them; and it is certain that they are all natural and within our reach and even known to all mankind.

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4 months 1 week ago

Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes - desertion after desertion.

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6 months 2 weeks ago
But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new "things."
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3 months 1 week ago

Writers, poets, painters, musicians, philosophers, political thinkers, to name only a few of the categories affected, must woo their readers, viewers, listeners, from distraction. To this we must add, for simple realism demands it, that these same writers, painters, etc., are themselves the children of distraction. As such, they are peculiarly qualified to approach the distracted multitudes. They will have experienced the seductions as well as the destructiveness of the forces we have been considering here. This is the destructive element in which we do not need to be summoned to immerse ourselves, for we were born to it.

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The Distracted Public (1990), p. 167
5 months 2 weeks ago

Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debaucher of sentiment?

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p. 236
4 months 1 day ago

There are only two cases in which war is just: first, in order to resist the aggression of an enemy, and second, in order to help an ally who has been attacked.

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No. 95. (Usbek writing to Rhedi)
4 months 1 week ago

Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God? But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows.

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12:6-7
2 months 4 weeks ago

The WTO-related events in Seattle created the first experience of a rainbow politics-a successful pluralistic politics, without the working of a master mind, but with the currents and beauty that come out of free thinking. In the new politics, people have different ways of talking, but I feel the core will be living democracy and living economies, and that it will include both taking personal responsibility to make change and being part of national and international movements for change.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

"If God did not exist, he would have to be invented." But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.

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Voltaire quoting himself in his Letter to Prince Frederick William of Prussia (28 November 1770), translated by S.G. Tallentyre, Voltaire in His Letters, 1919
5 months 2 weeks ago

Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.

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Quotation and Originality
2 months 5 days ago

Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one!

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4 months 2 weeks ago

I am well aware, that men love to hear of their power, but have an extreme disrelish to be told of their duty.

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p. 441
4 months 3 weeks ago

We indeed, who are beings of finite powers, are forced to make use of instruments. And the use of an instrument sheweth the agent to be limited by rules of another's prescription, and that he cannot obtain his end but in such a way, and by such conditions. Whence it seems a clear consequence, that the supreme unlimited agent useth no tool or instrument at all. The will of an Omnipotent Spirit is no sooner exerted than executed, without the application of means; which, if they are employed by inferior agents, it is not upon account of any real efficacy that is in them, or necessary aptitude to produce any effect, but merely in compliance with the laws of nature, or those conditions prescribed to them by the First Cause, who is Himself above all limitation or prescription whatsoever.

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Philonous to Hylas. The Second Dialogue
4 months 5 days ago

Answers determined by the social division of labor become truth as such.

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p. 50: Describing the pragmatist view
3 months 1 week ago

Only puny secrets need protection. Big secrets are protected by public incredulity. You can actually dissipate a situation by giving it maximal coverage. As to alarming people, that's done by rumours, not by coverage.

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(p. 92)
6 months 4 days ago

There is no body but eats and drinks. But they are few who can distinguish flavors.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Among these widely differing families of men, the first that attracts attention, the superior in intelligence, in power, and in enjoyment, is the white, or European, the MAN pre-eminently so called, below him appear the Negro and the Indian.

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Chapter XVIII.
1 month 3 weeks ago

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.

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Page 138
5 months 2 weeks ago

Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.

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Letter to Lucy Donnely, November 25, 1902

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