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3 months 4 weeks ago

Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

An intuitionist conception of justice is, one might say, but half a conception.

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Chapter I, Section 8, pg. 41
3 months 1 week ago

The dominant, almost general, idea of revolution - particularly the Socialist idea - is that revolution is a violent change of social conditions through which one social class, the working class, becomes dominant over another class, the capitalist class. It is the conception of a purely physical change, and as such it involves only political scene shifting and institutional rearrangements. Bourgeois dictatorship is replaced by the "dictatorship of the proletariat" - or by that of its "advance guard," the Communist Party. Lenin takes the seat of the Romanovs, the Imperial Cabinet is rechristened Soviet of People's Commissars, Trotsky is appointed Minister of War, and a labourer becomes the Military Governor General of Moscow. That is, in essence, the Bolshevik conception of revolution, as translated into actual practice.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me.

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18:22 (KJV)
5 months 2 weeks ago

Praise be to God with all due praise, and a prayer for Muhammad His chosen servant and apostle. The purpose of this treatise is to examine, from the standpoint of the study of the Law, whether the study of philosophy and logic is allowed by the Law, or prohibited, or commanded either by way of recommendation or as obligatory.

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3 months ago

One of the great American tragedies is to have participated in a just war. It's been possible for politicians and movie-makers to encourage us we're always good guys. The Second World War absolutely had to be fought. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. But we never talk about the people we kill. This is never spoken of.

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Interviewed by Roger Friedman, "God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut", FoxNews.com
2 months 1 week ago

Societies, not states, are 'the social atoms' with which students of history have to deal.

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Vol. 1
1 month 3 weeks ago

After World War II, liberal rights were not something that were only deserved by white Europeans. ...There was a recognition that the black and brown peoples being held in colonial bondage could not consistently be held in that bondage, because liberalism was a universal doctrine. ...That's the other respect in which we can defend liberalism, a moral one.

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10:30
1 month 1 week ago

For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

And whereas many men, by accident unevitable, become unable to maintain themselves by their labour; they ought not to be left to the Charity of private persons; but to be provided for, (as far-forth as the necessities of Nature require,) by the Lawes of the Common-wealth. For as it is Unchariablenesse in any man, to neglect the impotent; so it is in the Soveraign of a Common-wealth, to expose them to the hazard of such uncertain Charity.

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The Second Part, Chapter 30, p. 181
3 months 1 day ago

Nonviolence is an ideal that cannot always be fully honored in the practice. To the degree that those who practice nonviolent resistance put their body in the way of an external power, they make physical contact, presenting a force against force in the process. Nonviolence does not imply the absence of force or of aggression. It is, as it were, an ethical stylization of embodiment, replete with gestures and modes of non-action, ways of becoming an obstacle, of using the solidity of the body and its proprioceptive object field to block or derail a further exercise of violence.

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p. 22
4 months 3 weeks ago

In any case, if you ever leave me with a handsome man, do not tell me that you trust me because, let me warn you: that is not what will prevent me from deceiving you, if I want to. On the contrary.

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Jessica to her husband Hugo, Act 3, sc. 5
3 months 6 days ago

No sane person should believe that something is 'subjective' merely because it cannot be settled beyond controversy.

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Lecture IV: Reasonableness as a Fact and as a Value
3 months 1 week ago

The narcissistic, the domineering, the possessive woman can succeed in being a "loving" mother as long as the child is small. Only the really loving woman, the woman who is happier in giving than in taking, who is firmly rooted in her own existence, can be a loving mother when the child is in the process of separation.

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Ch. 2

The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.

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K 27
4 months 3 weeks ago

I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances...Strong men believe in cause and effect.

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Worship
4 months 3 weeks ago

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification - the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.

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The Open Universe : An Argument for Indeterminism (1992), p. 44
5 months 2 weeks ago

To entire sincerity there belongs ceaselessness. Not ceasing, it continues long. Continuing long, it evidences itself. Evidencing itself, it reaches far. Reaching far, it becomes large and substantial. Large and substantial, it becomes high and brilliant. Large and substantial; this is how it contains all things. High and brilliant; this is how it overspreads all things. Reaching far and continuing long; this is how it perfects all things. So large and substantial, the individual possessing it is the co-equal of Earth. So high and brilliant, it makes him the co-equal of Heaven. So far-reaching and long-continuing, it makes him infinite. Such being its nature, without any display, it becomes manifested; without any movement, it produces changes; and without any effort, it accomplishes its ends.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

No nation which has sunk into this state of dependence can raise itself out of it by the means which have usually been adopted hitherto. Since resistance was useless to it when it was still in possession of all its powers, what can such resistance avail now that it has been deprived of the greater part of them?

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Introduction p. 9-10
3 months 2 weeks ago

I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind, or cannot understand the darker pages of Hegel, it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

If our intention now is to reveal classical unreason on its own terms, outside of its ties with dreams and error, it must be understood not as a form of reason that is somehow diseased, lost or mad, but quite simply as reason dazzled.

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Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
3 months 3 weeks ago

What will be the influence of communist society on the family? It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage - the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents.

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4 months 1 week ago

Happiness is a good flow of life. 

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As quoted by Stobaeus, ii. 77.
2 months 3 weeks ago

The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity.

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(p. 135)
3 months 4 weeks ago

The earth with yellow pears And overgrown with roses wild Upon the pond is bent, And swans divine, With kisses drunk You drop your heads In the sublimely sobering water. But where, with winter come, am I To find, alas, the floweres, and where The sunshine And the shadow of the world? Cold the walls stand And the wordless, in the wind The weathercocks are rattling.

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"Halves of Life"
2 months 1 week ago

A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provided they come close together.

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Recipe for a Good Film
5 months 6 days ago

Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.

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5 months 2 days ago

The virtue of frugality lies in a middle between avarice and profusion, of which the one consists in an excess, the other in a defect of the proper attention to the objects of self-interest.

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Section II, Chap. I.
5 months 1 day ago

There must be a seed of every good thing in the character of men, otherwise no one can bring it out. Lacking that, analogous motives, honor, etc., are substituted. Parents are in the habit of looking out for the inclinations, for the talents and dexterity, perhaps for the disposition of their children, and not at all for their heart or character.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 13
4 months 4 weeks ago

Tell him to live by yes and no - yes to everything good, no to everything bad.

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As quoted in The Thought and Character of William James (1935) by Ralph Barton Perry, Vol. II, ch. 91
3 months 3 weeks ago

There is, properly speaking, no Misfortune in the world. Happiness and Misfortune stand in continual balance. Every Misfortune is, as it were, the obstruction of a stream, which, after overcoming this obstruction, but bursts through with the greater force.

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9 months 4 days ago

The symptom is not only a cyphered message, it is at the same time a way for the subject to organize his enjoyment - that is why, even after the completed interpretation, the subject is not prepared to renounce his symptom.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

A great deal of capital, which appears to-day in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children.

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Vol. I, Ch. 31, pg. 829.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.

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Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (1976), p. 174
5 months 3 weeks ago

Throughout history there have been peasant rebellions which have followed always the same course. Blindly, the peasants sacked and destroyed, and when members of the "upper classes" fell into their hands, they killed ruthlessly and cruelly, for never in their lives had they been taught gentleness and mercy by those now in their power.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive !

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Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

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Autobiography (1821), reprinted in Basic Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Philip S. Foner, New York: Wiley Book Company (1944} p. 464
3 weeks 2 days ago

It's not about telling people how to be, outside of supporting ideals that teach us what to avoid.

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The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.

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Aristocracy
4 months 2 weeks ago

Now as of old the gods give men all good things, excepting only those that are baneful and injurious and useless. These, now as of old, are not gifts of the gods: men stumble into them themselves because of their own blindness and folly.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man's sex relation to the motorcar.

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(p.46)
2 weeks 4 days ago

But what can be the attraction of getting to know such a tiny section of nature thoroughly, while one leaves everything subtler and more complex shyly and timidly alone? Does the product of such a modest effort deserve to be called by the proud name of a theory of the universe? In my belief the name is justified; for the general laws on which the structure of theoretical physics is based claim to be valid for any natural phenomenon whatsoever. With them, it ought to be possible to arrive at the description, that is to say, the theory, of every natural process, including life, by means of pure deduction, if that process of deduction were not far beyond the capacity of the human intellect. The physicist's renunciation of completeness for his cosmos is therefore not a matter of fundamental principle.

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3 months 1 week ago

These left me in no doubt that something was trying to communicate with us, but that direct communication would be counterproductive. It seemed to be an important part of the scheme to create a sense of mystery.

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p. 352

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