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2 weeks 6 days ago

Now the real fruits of human nature - the arts, sciences, great enterprises, lofty conceptions, manly virtues - are due especially to the state of war. In a word, we can say that blood is the manure of the plant we call genius.

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Chapter III, p. 29
4 months 3 weeks ago

Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.

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5 months 3 weeks ago
That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.
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4 months 3 weeks ago

The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don't you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good? The good is no longer even being measured.

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Interview with French writer Roger Errera in New York Review of Books
2 months 2 weeks ago

Native societies did not think of themselves as being in the world as occupants but considered that their rituals created the world and keep it operational.

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College and University Journal, Volumes 6-7, American College Public Relations Association, 1967, p. 3
4 months 3 weeks ago

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

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1833
1 month 2 weeks ago

The newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.

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What Modern Liberty Means, p. 47. Essay first published in The Atlantic (November 1919).
4 months 3 weeks ago

Love is a severe critic. Hate can pardon more than love.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 159
2 weeks 5 days ago

Depart then satisfied, for he also who releases thee is satisfied.

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XII, 36
3 months 2 weeks ago

I hate Communism because it is the negation of liberty and because humanity is for me unthinkable without liberty. I am not a Communist, because Communism concentrates and swallows up in itself for the benefit of the State all the forces of society, because it inevitably leads to the concentration of property in the hands of the State, whereas I want the abolition of the State, the final eradication of the principle of authority and the patronage proper to the State, which under the pretext of moralizing and civilizing men has hitherto only enslaved, persecuted, exploited and corrupted them. I want to see society and collective or social property organized from below upwards, by way of free association, not from above downwards, by means of any kind of authority whatsoever.

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As quoted in Michael Bakunin (1937) by E.H. Carr, p. 356
5 months 1 week ago

In theory there is nothing to hinder our following what we are taught; but in life there are many things to draw us aside.

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Book I, ch. 26, 3.
1 week 5 days ago

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

It is a very helpful insight to say we are vehicles for our DNA, we are hosts for DNA parasites which are our genes. Those are insights which help us to understand an aspect of life. But it's emotive to say, that's all there is to it, we might as well give up going to Shakespeare plays and give up listening to music and things, because that's got nothing to do with it. That's an entirely different subject.

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3 weeks 1 day ago

Our laws, language, religion, politics, & manners are so deeply laid in English foundations, that we shall never cease to consider their history as a part of ours, and to study ours in that as it's origin.

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Letter to William Duane
3 months ago

My own view is that philosophy at its best has always, in every period, included some philosophers who brilliantly represent the moral face of the subject and some philosophers who brilliantly represent the theoretical face, as well as some geniuses whose insights span and unite both sides of the subject. To renounce either the moral ambitions of philosophy or its theoretical ambitions is not just to kill the subject of philosophy; it is to commit intellectual and spiritual suicide.

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Science and Philosophy
4 months 3 weeks ago

Why did it occur to anyone to believe in only one God? And conversely why did it ever occur to anyone to believe in many gods? To both these questions we must return the same answer: Because that is how the human mind happens to work. For the human mind is both diverse and simple, simultaneously many and one. We have an immediate perception of our own diversity and of that of the outside world. And at the same time we have immediate perceptions of our own oneness.

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"One and Many," p. 12
1 month 1 day ago

I make known unto thee how He hath provided for the bodily health of us all, by having produced Æsculapius, the Preserver of the universe; and how he hath communicated to us virtue of every kind, by sending down Aphrodite in company with Athene for our guardian; having made it all but a law that no one should use copulation except for the end of generating his like. For this reason truly, according to his revolutions and seasons, do the various vegetable and animal races feel themselves stirred towards the generation of their kind. What need is there to magnify the glory of his rays, and of his light? A night without moon, and without stars, how terrible is it! Let anyone reflect on this, in order that he may estimate how great a blessing is the light we derive from the Sun!

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3 months 1 week ago

No one is guiltless...But no one is beyond the pale of human existence, provided he pays for his guilt.

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2 months 1 week ago

So far from a gradual progress towards perfection forming any necessary part of the Darwinian creed, it appears to us that it is perfectly consistent with indefinite persistence in one state, or with a gradual retrogression.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Our sadness is not sad, but our cheap joys.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 231
3 months 3 weeks ago

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

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Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election (6 September 1780), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II (1855), p. 148
4 months 3 weeks ago

Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States.

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Ch. 13: Freedom in Society.
2 months 3 weeks ago

The big advantage of being a chemistry major was the freedom to be tasteless.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The Africans had that claim on our humanity which could not be resisted, whatever might have been advanced by an hon. gentleman in defence of the property of the planters.

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Speech in the House of Commons (12 May 1789), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXVIII (1816), column 98
3 months 2 weeks ago

Art can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.

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p. 62
4 months 3 weeks ago

Truly, if the preservation of all mankind, as much as in him lies, were every one's persuasion, as indeed it is every one's duty, and the true principle to regulate our religion, politicks and morality by, the world would be much quieter, and better natur'd than it is.

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Sec. 116
4 months 3 weeks ago

Scientific Method... [is] even less existent than some other non-existent subjects.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

A punishment that penalizes without forestalling is indeed called revenge.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.

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Ch. IV: "The Line of Least Resistance", p. 52
3 months 3 weeks ago

The dead govern the living.

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Le Catéchisme positiviste
3 months 4 weeks ago

For no one's authority ought to rank so high as to set a value on his words and terms even though nothing clear and determinate lies behind them.

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Paragraph 1
1 month 4 weeks ago

The modern world inherits the Christian view in which salvation is played out in history. In Christian myth human events follow a design known only to God; the history of humankind is an ongoing story of redemption. This is an idea that informs virtually all of western thought - not least when it is intensely hostile to religion. From Christianity onwards, human salvation would be understood (at least in the west) as involving movement through time. All modern philosophies in which history is seen as a process of human emancipation - whether through revolutionary change or incremental improvement - are garbled versions of this Christian narrative, itself a garbled version of the original message of Jesus.

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The Faith of Puppets: The Revelation of Philip K. Dick (p. 60)
1 month 1 week ago

Then it is that the height of unhappiness is reached, when men are not only attracted, but even pleased, by shameful things, and when there is no longer any room for a cure, now that those things which once were vices have become habits.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

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As quoted in The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1989) edited by Robert Andrews, p. 114
4 months 3 weeks ago

I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

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February 1855
1 month 1 day ago

I am not indeed ignorant that certain over-wise people will call these legends "old wives' fables," and not worth listening to; but I think, for my part, that in such matters it is better to believe the testimony of nations than of those witty individuals, whose little soul is acute indeed, but has a clear insight into no one thing.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.

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2 weeks 5 days ago

And finally remember that nothing harms him who is really a citizen, which does not harm the state; nor yet does anything harm the state which does not harm law [order]; and of these things which are called misfortunes not one harms law. What then does not harm law does not harm either state or citizen.

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X, 33
1 month 1 week ago

He that has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.

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Pt. II, Bk. I, ch. 7.
2 months 2 weeks ago

In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.

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Some More -isms, p. 32
2 weeks 5 days ago

People try to get away from it all-to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: you can get away from it anytime you like. By going within. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful-more free of interruptions-than your own soul.

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(Hays translation) IV, 4
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

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"Is Life Worth Living?"
4 months 3 weeks ago

I have in this treatise followed the mathematical method, if not with all strictness, at least imitatively, not in order, by a display of profundity, to procure a better reception for it, but because I believe such a system to be quite capable of it, and that perfection may in time be obtained by a cleverer hand, if stimulated by this sketch, mathematical investigators of nature should find it not unimportant to treat the metaphysical portion, which anyway cannot be got rid of, as a special fundamental department of general physics, and to bring it into unison with the mathematical doctrine of motion.

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Preface, Tr. Bax, 1883
3 months 2 weeks ago

Second, in the presence of this continuity of feeling, nominalistic maxims appear futile. There is no doubt about one idea affecting another, when we can directly perceive the one generally modified and shaping itself into the other. Nor can there any longer be any difficulty about one idea resembling another, when we can pass along the continuous field of quality from one to the other and back again to the point which we had marked.

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