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5 months 3 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

The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.

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Ch. 11 - Clifford's Lectures and Essays, 1879
5 months 1 week ago

But suppose we were to teach creationism. What would be the content of the teaching? Merely that a creator formed the universe and all species of life ready-made? Nothing more? No details?

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2 months 4 weeks ago

When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.

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As quoted in The Dialectical Imagination : A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research (1973) by M Jay, p. 279.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Consciousness presupposes itself, and asking about its origin is an idle and just as sophistical a question as that old one, "What came first, the fruit-tree or the stone? Wasn't there a stone out of which came the first fruit-tree? Wasn't there a fruit-tree from which came the first stone?

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4 months 1 week ago

We will not go to Heaven,Goetz, and even if we both entered it, we would not have eyes to see each other, nor hands to touch each other. Up there, God gets all the attention.... We can only love on this earth and against God.

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Acts 8 & 9
2 months 1 week ago

Confidence is the only bond of friendship.

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Maxim 34
5 months 1 week ago

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

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4 months 1 week ago

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.

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Page 159
4 months 3 weeks ago

God might grant us riches, honours, life, and even health, to our own hurt; for every thing that is pleasing to us is not always good for us. If he sends us death, or an increase of sickness, instead of a cure, Vvrga tua et baculus, tuus ipsa me consolata sunt. "Thy rod and thy staff have comforted me," he does it by the rule of his providence, which better and more certainly discerns what is proper for us than we can do; and we ought to take it in good part, as coming from a wise and most friendly hand.

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Ch. 12
4 weeks 1 day ago

The interventionists do not approach the study of economic matters with scientific disinterestedness. Most of them are driven by an envious resentment against those whose incomes are larger than their own. This bias makes it impossible for them to see things as they really are. For them the main thing is not to improve the conditions of the masses, but to harm the entrepreneurs and capitalists even if this policy victimizes the immense majority of the people.

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4 months 1 week ago

Why you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.

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Ch. 5: Elasticity, section 1 Miss Hardcastle speaking to Mark Studdock
4 months 2 weeks ago

We suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside the modern evils, we are oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead.

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Preface to the First Edition, Capital Volume 1, Peinguin Classics edition 1976.
4 months 4 weeks ago

O sons of Peace, sons of the One Catholic [Church], walk in your way, and sing as you walk. Travelers do this in order to keep up their spirits.

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p.427
2 months 2 weeks ago

The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness. A statement of the author's "connection principle."

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"Consciousness, Explanatory Inversion, and Cognitive Science," The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13, 4 (December 1990): 585-696.
2 months 1 week ago

All media are extensions of some human faculty -- psychic or physical.

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4 months 4 days ago

No one deserves to live who has not at least one good-man-and-true for a friend.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Social positivism only accepts duties, for all and towards all. Its constant social viewpoint cannot include any notion of rights, for such notion always rests on individuality. We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. These obligations then increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service. ... Any human right is therefore as absurd as immoral. Since there are no divine rights anymore, this concept must therefore disappear completely as related only to the preliminary regime and totally inconsistent with the final state where there are only duties based on functions.

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Le Catéchisme positiviste
5 months 3 days ago

The superior man loves his soul; the inferior man loves his property.

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3 months 6 days ago

The doctrine of Right and Wrong, is perpetually disputed, both by Pen and the Sword: Whereas the doctrine of Lines, and Figures, is not so; because men care not, in that subject what be truth, as a thing that crosses no mans ambition, profit, or lust. For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any mans right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, That the three Angles of a Triangle, should be equall to two Angles of a Square; that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of Geometry, suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.

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The First Part, Chapter 11, p. 80-81
4 months 1 week ago

No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.

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Chapter II, Section 17, pg. 102
2 months 4 weeks ago

Today's mic-hogging, fast-talking, contentious young (and old) lefties continue to hawk little books and pamphlets on revolution, always with choice words or documents from Marx, Mao, even Malcolm. But I've never seen a broadside with "A Black Feminist Statement or even the writings of Angela Davis or June Jordan or Barbara Omolade or Flo Kennedy or Audre Lorde or bell hooks or Michelle Wallace, at least not from the groups who call themselves leftist. These women's collective wisdom has provided the richest insights into American radicalism's most fundamental questions: How can we build a multiracial movement? Who are the working class and what do they desire? How do we resolve the Negro Question and the Woman Question? What is freedom?

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Robin Kelley Freedom Dreams
1 week 3 days ago

Very little is needed to make a happy life.

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VII, 67
2 months 3 weeks ago

What is beginning to emerge, then, is a theory about psychic sensitivity. It runs as follows. When I relax deeply, it is as if someone opened up the partition between the two compartments of my brain, turning them into a single large room. I experience a sense of mental freedom as if I can suddenly breathe more deeply, and a feeling of contact with things. Everyone has had the experience of being in a state of hurry or excitement, and failing to notice that they have bruised or scratched themselves -- until the excitement evaporates and the pain makes itself known. Hurry and tension raise our sensitivity threshold, and at the same time, erect a glass wall between us and reality. In the "unicameral" state, this wall vanishes, and everything seems more real.

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p. 51
4 months 1 week ago

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanise them.

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As quoted in Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today's political times
2 months 2 days ago

Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed have to wait forever.

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p. 42
4 months 1 week ago

"Fare well!" "A whole world of pain is contained in these words." How can it be contained in them? - It is bound up in them. The words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow.

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p. 52e
4 weeks 1 day ago

He who does not prevent a crime, when he can, encourages it.

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line 291; (Agamemnon)
1 week 3 days ago

Observe always that everything is the result of a change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and to make new ones like them.

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IV, 36
1 month 3 days ago

...Lucretius talked epicureanism stoically (like Heine's Englishman taking his pleasures sadly), and concluded on his stren gospel of pleasure by committing suicide. His noble epic "on the Nature of Things", follows Epicurus in damning pleasure with faint praise. Almost contemporary with Caesar and Pompey, he lived in the midst of turmoil and alarms; his nervous pen is forever inditing prayers to tranquility and peace. One pictures him as a timid soul whose youth had been darkened with religious fears; for he never tires of telling his readers that there's no hell, except here, and there are no gods except gentlemanly ones who live in a garden of Epicurus in the clouds, and never intrude in the affairs of men.

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4 months 1 week ago

What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

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§ 116
4 months 2 weeks ago

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

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1833
1 month 1 week ago

On the more conservative side... Liberalism has been associated with... the right to own private property... one of the most fundamental individual rights that is protected in true liberal societies, and that right is... what made possible the modern economic world. As any economist would tell you, without secure property rights and contract enforcement, you don't get investment and therefore economic growth.

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13:44
5 months 3 days ago

The Superior Man is all-embracing and not partial. The inferior man is partial and not all-embracing.

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May we not imagine that possibly this earthly life of ours is to the other life what sleeping is to waking? May not all our life be a dream and death an awakening? But an awakening to what? And supposing that everything is but the dream of God and that God one day will awaken? Will He remember His dream?

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I hope we shall... crush in it's birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

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Letter to George Logan, 1816
4 weeks 1 day ago

Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of.

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Dover 2005, p. 182
3 months 2 weeks ago

In England ... everything becomes professional ... even the rogues of that island are pedants.

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"Selected Aphorisms from the Lyceum (1797)"

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is the intermixing of different genres.

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Propylaea (1798) Introduction
1 month 3 weeks ago

In the long run, there is nothing to stop intelligent agents from identifying the molecular signature of experience below hedonic zero and eliminating it altogether - even in insects. Nociception is vital; pain is optional. I tentatively predict that the world's last unpleasant experience in our forward light-cone will be a precisely datable event - perhaps some micro-pain in an obscure marine invertebrate a few centuries hence.

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The Radical Plan to Phase out Earth's Predatory Species, io9, 30 Jul. 2014
4 months 2 weeks ago

The evident justice and utility of the foregoing maxims have recommended them more or less to the attention of all nations.

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Chapter II, Part II, p. 894.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Know that death comes to everyone, and that wealth will sometimes be acquired, sometimes lost. Whatever griefs mortals suffer by divine chance, whatever destiny you have, endure it and do not complain. But it is right to improve it as much as you can, and remember this: Fate does not give very many of these griefs to good people.

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As quoted in Divine Harmony: The Life and Teachings of Pythagoras by John Strohmeier and Peter Westbrook.
5 months 1 week ago

He is a dreamer of ancient times, or rather, of the myths of what ancient times used to be. Such men are harmless in themselves, but their queer lack of realism makes them fools for others.

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2 months 1 week ago

Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful.

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The less identity, the more violence. "Violence in the media." Canadian Forum. Volume 56, 1976, p. 9
2 months 3 weeks ago

Perhaps it is not true to speak of God as a judge at all, or of his judgements. There does not seem to be really any evidence that His worlds are places of trial but rather schools, place of training, or that He is a judge but rather a Teacher, a Trainer, not in the imperfect sense in which men are teachers, but in the sense of His contriving and adapting His whole universe for one purpose of training every intelligent being to be perfect. ... I think God would not be the Almighty, the All-Wise, the All-Good, if he were the judge, in the sense that the evangelical and Roman Catholic Christians impute judgement to him. ... Our business is, I think, to understand, not to judge. What He does, as far as we know, to rule by law down to the most infinitesimally small portion of His universe, not to judge.

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As quoted in Florence Nightingale's Theology: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale (2002) by Lynn McDonald, pps. 177-179

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