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5 months 2 days ago

Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them. (KJV) 9:55-56 Rebuking James and John for asking if he would command fire to come down from heaven, to consume a village of Samaritans for not receiving them, because they seemed to be headed for Jerusalem.

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Jesus on usury from the Sermon on the Mount, Luke 6:34-35
5 months 1 week ago

Not official revolutionary commissars in any sort of sashes, but rather revolutionary propagandists are to be dispatched into all the provinces and communes and particularly among the peasants who cannot be revolutionised by principles, nor by the decrees of any dictatorship, but only by the act of revolution itself, that is to say, by the consequences that will inevitably ensure in every commune from complete cessation of the legal and official existence of the state.

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5 months ago

When we desire to lead men to God, we must not simply overthrow their idols. In each of these images we must seek to discover what divine quality he who carved it sought.

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p. 117
3 months ago

It has ever been held the highest wisdom for a man not merely to submit to Necessity,-Necessity will make him submit,-but to know and believe well that the stern thing which Necessity had ordered was the wisest, the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his frantic pretension of scanning this great God's-World in his small fraction of a brain; to know that it had verily, though deep beyond his soundings, a Just Law, that the soul of it was Good;-that his part in it was to conform to the Law of the Whole, and in devout silence follow that; not questioning it, obeying it as unquestionable.

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4 months 1 week ago

Speech is a mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.

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Maxim 1073
3 months 4 days ago

The right wing version really sees community represented either by... religion, or by nation, that these are units that... get dissolved under a liberal world order, through globalization, through the movement of people, goods, ideas and trade between nations, national identity becomes diluted and that sense of national community that held people together in democratic societies appears to be lost. ...Secularism ...is perceived as a loss by people that have religious faith. They believe that there is a form of militant secularism that is not allowing them to practice their religion, and for that reason a lot of religious conservatives in places like the United States, have turned against that liberal order.

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16:18
6 months 1 week ago

IV. Every tax ought to be contrived as both to take out and to keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the state.

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Chapter II, Part II, p. 893.
4 months 3 weeks ago

I have said that, in a sense, the parasites were a 'shadow' of man's cowardice and passivity. Their strength could increase in an atmosphere of defeat and panic, for it fed on human fear. In that case, the best way to combat them was to change the atmosphere to one of strength and purpose.

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p. 188
2 months 6 days ago

How many, once lauded in song, are given over to the forgotten; and how many who sung their praises are clean gone long ago!

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VII, 6
5 months 1 week ago

It is so by nature that the plant will develop with regularity, that the animal will move purposefully, and that human beings will think. Why should I take exception to recognizing also the last as the expression of an original force of nature, as I do the first and the second?

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P. Preuss, trans. (1987), p. 11
4 months 1 week ago

We should provide in peace what we need in war.

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Maxim 709
6 months 1 week ago

Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe.

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Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
6 months 1 week ago

I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject.

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5 months 2 days ago

The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.

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pp. 145-146
3 months 5 days ago

It is a commonplace of the classical literature on Empire, from Polybius to Montesquieu and Gibbon, that Empire is from its inception decadent and corrupt.

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201
6 months 2 weeks ago

Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.

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Ch. 10. Of Managing the Will
3 months ago

Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of Labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like helldogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor dayworker, as of every man: but he bends himself with free valour against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labour in him, is it not as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright blessed flame!

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2 months 5 days ago

Lenin's thesis is that the party Central Committee should have the privilege of naming all the local committees of the party. It should have the right to appoint the effective organs of all local bodies from Geneva to Liege, from Tomsk to Irkutsk. It should also have the right to impose on all of them its own ready-made rules of party conduct. It should have the right to rule without appeal on such questions as the dissolution and reconstitution of local organizations. This way, the Central Committee could determine, to suit itself, the composition of the highest party organs. The Central Committee would be the only thinking element in the party. All other groupings would be its executive limbs.

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6 months ago

The ethical commonplaces of any period include ideas that may have been radical discoveries in a previous age. This is true of modern conceptions of liberty, equality, and democracy, and we are in the midst of ethical debates which will probably result two hundred years hence in a disseminated moral sensibility that people of our time would find very unfamiliar.

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"Ethics without Biology" (1978), p. 143.
5 months 1 day ago

We cannot grasp any idea, any organ of meditation, we cannot possess it in full force, until we have felt and sensed it, as much so as if it were an odor or a color.

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6 months 1 week ago

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

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Letter to François-Joachim de Pierre, cardinal de Bernis, 23 April 1764
6 months 1 week ago

The animals are much more content with mere existence than we are; the plants are wholly so; and man is so according to how dull and insensitive he is. The animal's life consequently contains less suffering but also less pleasure than the human's, the direct reason being that on the one hand it is free from care and anxiety and the torments that attend them, but on the other is without hope and therefore has no share in that anticipation of a happy future which, together with the enchanting products of the imagination which accompany it, is the source of most of our greatest joys and pleasures. The animal lacks both anxiety and hope because its consciousness is restricted to what is clearly evident and thus to the present moment: the animal is the present incarnate.

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Vol. 2 "On the Suffering of the World" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
6 months 1 week ago

Change is one thing, progress is another.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

What is obscene about pornography is not an excess of sex, but the fact that it contains no sex at all.

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5 months 5 days ago

To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known.

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7 months 6 days ago

Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Catastrophic fatality abruptly switches over into salvation.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Let us now enquire whether anger be in accordance with nature, and whether it be useful and worth entertaining in some measure.

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6 months ago

Animal Liberation is Human Liberation too.

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Preface
5 months 5 days ago

If every pure character in the Old Testament announces the Messiah, if every unworthy person is his torturer and every woman his Mother, does not the Book of Books lose all life with this obsessive theme? On the doctrine of prefiguration.

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Persons or Figures
5 months 5 days ago

To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!

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6 months 1 week ago

The experiences of this period had two very marked effects on my opinions and character. In the first place, they led me to adopt a theory of life, very unlike that on which I had before acted, and having much in common with what at that time I certainly had never heard of, the anti-self-consciousness theory of Carlyle.

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(pp. 141-142)
6 months 1 week ago

I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.

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Letter to Sheldon Vanauken (14 December 1950), quoted in Sleuthing C. S. Lewis (2001) by Kathryn Ann Lindskoog, p. 393
6 months 1 week ago

The original scriptures of most religions are poetical and unsystematic. Theology, which generally takes the form of a reasoned commentary on the parables and aphorisms of the scriptures, tends to make its appearance at a later stage of religious history. The Bhagavad-Gita occupies an intermediate position between scripture and theology; for it combines the poetical qualities of the first with the clear-cut methodicalness of the second... one of the clearest and most comprehensive summaries of the Perennial Philosophy ever to have been made. Hence its enduring value, not only for Indians, but for all mankind.

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5 months 2 days ago

If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.

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19:21 (KJV)
5 months 5 days ago

One disgust, then another - to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

I am a lover of liberty. I will not and I cannot serve a party.

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Spongia adversus aspergines Hutteni (1523), § 176, As quoted in Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1900) by Ephraim Emerton, p. 377
5 months ago

Although the formulations of science now offer the most advanced knowledge of nature, men continue to use obsolete forms of thought long discarded by scientific theory. In so far as these obsolete forms are superfluous for science, the fact that they persist violated the principle of the economy of thought, that characteristic trait of the bourgeois temper.

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p. 133.
2 months 3 weeks ago

That you may know that they whom anger possesses are not sane, look at their appearance; for as there are distinct symptoms which mark madmen, such as a bold and menacing air, a gloomy brow, a stern face

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Fools learn wisdom through misfortune.

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6 months 1 week ago

A man's body and the needs of his body are now everywhere treated with a tender indulgence. Is the thinking mind then, to be the only thing that is never to obtain the slightest measure of consideration or protection, to say nothing of respect?

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"On Noise"
3 months ago

Is not every true Reformer, by the nature of him, a Priest first of all? He appeals to Heaven's invisible justice against Earth's visible force; knows that it, the invisible, is strong and alone strong. He is a believer in the divine truth of things; a seer, seeing through the shows of things; a worshipper, in one way or the other, of the divine truth of things; a Priest, that is. If he be not first a Priest, he will never be good for much as a Reformer.

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5 months 1 week ago

And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.

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7 months 1 week ago

I make no secret about being Jewish ... I just think it's more important to be human and to have a human heritage; and I think it is wrong for anyone to feel that there is anything special about any one heritage of whatever kind. It is delightful to have the human heritage exist in a thousand varieties, for it makes for greater interest, but as soon as one variety is thought to be more important than another, the groundwork is laid for destroying them all.

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