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8 months 2 weeks ago

It is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far - not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world - that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one.

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Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League in London, March 1850
8 months 1 week ago

The desire to philosophize from the standpoint of standpointlessness, as a purportedly genuine and superior objectivity, is either childish, or, as is usually the case, disingenuous.

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The Essence of Truth, 1931-32
7 months 1 week ago

The tendency to regard continuity, in the sense in which I shall define it, as an idea of prime importance in philosophy conveniently may be be termed synechism. The present paper is intended chiefly to show what synechism is, and what it leads to.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and, at the same time, all-powerful Being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be.

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"On the Sufferings of the World"
7 months 1 day ago

But if ether is nothing but an hypothesis explanatory of light, air on the other hand, is a thing that is directly felt; and even if it did not enable us to explain the phenomenon of sound, we should nevertheless always be directly aware of it, and above all, of the lack of it in moments of suffocation or air-hunger. And in the same way God Himself, not the idea of God, may become a reality that is immediately felt; and even though the idea of God does not enable us to explain either the existence or essence of the Universe, we have at times the direct feeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation. And the feeling, mark it well, for all that is tragic in it and the whole tragic sense of life is founded upon this - this feeling is a feeling of hunger for God, of the lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first instance... to wish that there may be a God, to be unable to live without Him.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

If you love me, be patient. Look at the trees. Are they in a hurry to ripen their fruit?

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6 months 1 week ago

To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill.

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314
6 months 4 weeks ago

Nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process.

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Ch. 4: "The Eighteenth Century", p. 102
5 months 1 week ago

We have not a direct intuition of the equality of two intervals of time.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The positivist philosophy of Comte and the I doctrine deduced from it that humanity is an organism, and Darwin's doctrine of a law of the struggle for existence that is supposed to govern life, with the differentiation of various breeds of people which follows from it, and the anthropology, biology, and sociology of which people are now so fond-all have the same aim. These have all become favourite sciences because they serve to justify the way in which people free themselves from the human obligation to labour, while consuming the fruits of other people's labour.

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7 months 1 week ago

An autonomous electorate, free because it is free from indoctrination and manipulation, would indeed be on a "level of articulate opinion and ideology" which is not likely to be found. Therefore, the concept has to be rejected as "unrealistic"-has to be if one accepts the factually prevailing level of opinion and ideology as prescribing the valid criteria for sociological analysis. And-if indoctrination and manipulation have reached the stage where the prevailing level of opinion has become a level of falsehood, where the actual state of affairs is no longer recognized as that which it is, then an analysis which is methodologically committed to reject transitive concepts commits itself to a false consciousness. Its very empiricism is ideological.

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p. 117
6 months 3 weeks ago

Militarism, the destroyer of youth, the raper of women, the annihilator of the best in the race, the very mower of life.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The original thinking force of the universe progresses and develops itself in all possible determinations of which it is capable, just as the other original natural forces progress and assume all possible configurations. I am a particular determination of the formative force, like the plant; a particular determination of the peculiar motive force, like the animal; and in addition to this a determination of the thinking force: and the union of these three basic forces into one force, into one harmonious development, is the distinguishing characteristic of my species.

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P. Preuss, trans. (1987), p. 12
7 months 1 week ago

We wish, in a word, equality - equality in fact as a corollary, or rather, as primordial condition of liberty. From each according to his faculties, to each according to his needs; that is what we wish sincerely and energetically.

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As quoted in The Old Order and the New (1890) by J. Morris Davidson
8 months 1 week ago

I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough.

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Act 1, sc. 5
7 months 1 week ago

Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.

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Pt. IV, Expression; § 67: "Conclusion.", p. 270
8 months 1 week ago

We must plow through the whole of language.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 131
6 months 1 week ago

For his purposes (and mine), scientific medicine is defined as the set of practices which submit themselves to the ordeal of being tested. Alternative medicine is defined as that set of practices which cannot be tested, refuse to be tested, or consistently fail tests. If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine. Conversely, if a technique devised by the President of the Royal College of Physicians consistently fails in double-blind trials, it will cease to be a part of 'orthodox' medicine. Whether it will then become 'alternative' will depend upon whether it is adopted by a sufficiently ambitious quack (there are always sufficiently gullible patients).

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Foreword to Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations by John Diamond, Vintage, 2001.
9 months 1 week ago

What a human being believes, however, no matter with what ardor, is not necessarily objective truth.

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What is love's perfection? To love our enemies, and to love them to the end that they may be our brothers.

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First Homily, as translated by John Burnaby (1955), p. 266
5 months 3 weeks ago

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.

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Locked Rooms and Open Doors
6 months 1 week ago

The media have substituted themselves for the older world.

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"Education, Language, and Media". Cycle 7, 1973, p. 232
8 months 1 week ago

Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.

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Letter to Arthur Greeves (29 December 1935) - in They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963) (1979), p. 477
8 months 3 weeks ago

Saying is one thing and doing is another.

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Ch. 31
8 months 2 weeks ago

Whatever bitterness and hate may be found in the movements which we are to examine, it is not bitterness or hate, but love, that is their mainspring. It is difficult not to hate those who torture the objects of our love. Though difficult, it is not impossible; but it requires a breadth of outlook and a comprehensiveness of understanding which are not easy to preserve amid a desperate contest. If ultimate wisdom has not always been preserved by Socialists and Anarchists, they have not differed in this from their opponents; and in the source of their inspiration they have shown themselves superior to those who acquiesce ignorantly or supinely in the injustices and oppressions by which the existing system is preserved.

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Introduction, p. 10.
4 months 3 weeks ago

No wild beasts are such enemies to mankind as are most of the Christians in their deadly hatred of one another.

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Reported in Ammianus, Res gestae, bk. 22, ch. 5, sec. 4
4 months 1 week ago

Death,-a stopping of impressions through the senses, and of the pulling of the cords of motion, and of the ways of thought, and of service to the flesh.

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VI, 28
6 months 3 weeks ago

We're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial root, adventitious growths and rhizomes.

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from A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, p. 15
8 months 2 weeks ago

So far as living instruments of labour are concerned, for instance horses, their reproduction is timed by nature itself. Their average lifetime as instruments of labour is determined by the laws of nature. As soon as this term has expired they must be replaced by new ones. A horse cannot be replaced piecemeal; it must be replaced by another horse.

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Vol. II, Ch. VIII, p. 174.
7 months 1 week ago

Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All.

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-2
8 months 2 weeks ago

But the chief design of this paper is not to disprove it, which many have sufficiently done; but to entreat Americans to consider.

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8 months 1 week ago

The even larger difference between rich and poor makes the latter even worse off, and this violates the principle of mutual advantage.

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Chapter II, Section 13, pg. 79
6 months 3 weeks ago

Historical time knows no lasting present.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Moreover, if the character is formed, and the mind made up, on the few cardinal points of human opinion, agreement of conviction and feeling on these, has been felt in all times to be an essential requisite of anything worthy the name of friendship, in a really earnest mind. All these circumstances united, made the number very small of those whose society, and still more whose intimacy, I now voluntarily sought.

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(p. 229)
9 months 1 week ago

What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for.

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7 months 1 week ago

The recognition by one person of another's personality takes place by means to some extent identical to the means by which he is conscious of his own personality. The idea of the second personality, which is as much as to say that second personality itself, enters within the direct consciousness of the first person, and is immediately perceived as his ego, though less strongly. At the same time, the opposition between the two persons is perceived, so that the externality of the second is perceived.

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6 months 1 week ago

When Fortune flatters, she does it to betray.

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Maxim 277
5 months 3 weeks ago

As human beings, we are endowed with this freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is up to us.

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Ch. 3: Does History Repeat Itself?
4 months 1 week ago

The spiritual men of India, a great and watchful multitude whose spiritual status is unattainable, are many of them catholics in a deeper sense than we of the West have yet given to the word ....

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In his book, Two Letters, 1934
1 week 5 days ago

There's a lot of clues that life could be a testing mechanism, but, if that mechanism was supposed to capture Good, it has failed as scarcity value has compromised what would have to be an even playing field.

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9 months 1 week ago

There is a kind of selective memory that afflicts men when they view the past. They see the good and overlook the evil.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

A people that sells its own children is more condemnable than the buyer; this commerce demonstrates our superiority; he who gives himself a master was born to have one.

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Essai sur les Moeurs et l'Espit des Nations (1753)
9 months 4 days ago

Honesty and trust are promoted, and good neighborliness cultivated.

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8 months 4 days ago

As iron is eaten away by rust, so the envious are consumed by their own passion.

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§ 5
8 months 5 days ago

Unto Thee, O Lord, the Soul of Creation cried: "For whom didst Thou create me, and who so fashioned me? Feuds and fury, violence and the insolence of might have oppressed me; None have I to protect me save Thee; Command for me then the blessings of a settled, peaceful life."

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Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 29, 1.
4 months 4 weeks ago

I commend you and rejoice in the fact that you are persistent in your studies, and that, putting all else aside, you make it each day your endeavour to become a better man.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

And even should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science and libraries of Europe, this country remains to preserve and restore light and liberty to them. In short, the flames kindled on the fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.

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Letter to John Adams, 12 September 1821

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