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7 months 2 weeks ago

Where is the prince sufficiently educated to know that for seventeen hundred years the Christian sect has done nothing but harm?

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Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano's, 1927), transl. Richard Aldington, letter 160 from Voltaire to Frederick II of Prussia, 6 April 1767
6 months 1 week ago

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

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6 months 3 days ago

Even the most insensitive hit song enthusiast cannot always escape the feeling that the child with a sweet tooth comes to know in the candy store.

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p. 290
6 months 4 days ago

Warmth, warmth, more warmth! for we are dying of cold and not of darkness. It is not the night that kills, but the frost.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

What all other men are is of the greatest importance to me. However independent I may imagine myself to be, however far removed I may appear from mundane considerations by my social status, I am enslaved to the misery of the meanest member of society. The outcast is my daily menace. Whether I am Pope, Czar, Emperor, or even Prime Minister, I am always the creature of their circumstance, the conscious product of their ignorance, want and clamoring. They are in slavery, and I, the superior one, am enslaved in consequence.

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Solidarity in Liberty: The Workers' Path to Freedom
5 months 1 week ago

There are circumstances in which even the least energetic of mankind learn to behave with vigour and decision; and the most cautious forget their prudence and embrace foolhardy resolutions.

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The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the Bandbox.
3 months 2 weeks ago

There can be no safer deposit on earth than the Treasury of the United States.

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Letter to Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette (1825) ME 19:281
4 months 1 week ago

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

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"New methods and new aims in teaching", in New Scientist, 22(392) (21 May 1964), pp.483-4
7 months 2 weeks ago

There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality. It is a dim recognition of this fact which makes much of our political propaganda sound so thin. We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life. That is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology. The tempter always works on some real weakness in our own system of values - offers food to some need which we have starved.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The occult war is a battle that is waged imperceptibly by the forces of global subversion, with means and in circumstances ignored by current historiography. The notion of occult war belongs to a three-dimensional view of history: this view does not regard as essential the two superficial dimensions of time and space (which include causes, facts, and visible leaders) but rather emphasizes the dimension of depth, or the "subterranean" dimension in which forces and influences often act in a decisive manner, and which, more often not than not, cannot be reduced to what is merely human, whether at an individual or a collective level"

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The universe is what it is, not what I choose that it should be.

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The Value of Free Thought: How to Become a Truth-seeker and Break the Chains of Mental Slavery (1944), p. 24
6 months 3 weeks ago

The best doctor is the one you run for and can't find.

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As quoted in Selected Thoughts from the French: XV Century - XX Century, with English Translations (1913) by James Raymond Solly, p. 67
7 months 2 weeks ago

An atheist, like a Christian, holds that we can know whether or not there is a God. The Christian holds that we can know there is a God; the atheist, that we can know there is not. The Agnostic suspends judgment, saying that there are not sufficient grounds either for affirmation or for denial. At the same time, an Agnostic may hold that the existence of God, though not impossible, is very improbable; he may even hold it so improbable that it is not worth considering in practice. In that case, he is not far removed from atheism. His attitude may be that which a careful philosopher would have towards the gods of ancient Greece. If I were asked to prove that Zeus and Poseidon and Hera and the rest of the Olympians do not exist, I should be at a loss to find conclusive arguments. An Agnostic may think the Christian God as improbable as the Olympians; in that case, he is, for practical purposes, at one with the atheists.

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What is an Agnostic?, 1953
6 months 2 weeks ago

The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

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September 26, 1859
8 months 1 day ago

All things must needs be borne on through the calm void moving at equal rate with unequal weights.

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Book II, lines 238-239 (tr. Bailey)
8 months 1 day ago

But if one should guide his life by true principles, man's greatest riches is to live on a little with contented mind; for a little is never lacking.

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Book V, lines 1117-1119 (tr. Rouse)
6 months 1 week ago

Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

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3 months 4 weeks ago

Never for a moment do we lay aside our mistrust of the ideals established by society, and of the convictions which are kept by it in circulation. We always know that society is full of folly and will deceive us in the matter of humanity. ... humanity meaning consideration for the existence and the happiness of individual human beings.

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Chapter 26
7 months 3 weeks ago

Every man is, no doubt, by nature, first and principally recommended to his own care; and as he is fitter to take care of himself than of any other person, it is fit and right that it should be so.

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Section II, Chap. II.
7 months 2 weeks ago

If A were not allowed his better position, B would be even worse off than he is.

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Chapter II, Section 17, pg. 103
5 months 1 week ago

While the intellectual space does contain universal ideas, definitions, those definitions are detailed a posteriori. Truth corresponds with reality at a minimum. 

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6 months 1 week ago

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

If you only notice human proceedings, you may observe that all who attain great power and riches, make use of either force or fraud; and what they have acquired either by deceit or violence, in order to conceal the disgraceful methods of attainment, they endeavor to sanctify with the false title of honest gains. Those who either from imprudence or want of sagacity avoid doing so, are always overwhelmed with servitude and poverty; for faithful servants are always servants, and honest men are always poor; nor do any ever escape from servitude but the bold and faithless, or from poverty, but the rapacious and fraudulent. God and nature have thrown all human fortunes into the midst of mankind; and they are thus attainable rather by rapine than by industry, by wicked actions rather than by good. Hence it is that men feed upon each other, and those who cannot defend themselves must be worried.

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Book III, Chapter 13
4 months 1 week ago

If all the parts of the universe are interchained in a certain measure, any one phenomenon will not be the effect of a single cause, but the resultant of causes infinitely numerous; it is, one often says, the consequence of the state of the universe the moment before.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

That man and woman have an equality of duties and rights is accepted by woman even less than by man. Behind his destiny woman must annihilate herself, must be only his complement. A woman dedicates herself to the vocation of her husband; she fills up and performs the subordinate parts in it. But if she has any destiny, any vocation of her own, she must renounce it, in nine cases out of ten.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

A wise man's kingdom is his own breast: or, if he ever looks farther, it will only be to the judgment of a select few, who are free from prejudices, and capable of examining his work. Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood than the approbation of the multitude; and Phocion, you know, always suspected himself of some blunder when he was attended with the applauses of the populace.

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Playfully ironic letter to Adam Smith regarding the positive reception of "The Theory of Moral Sentiments"
7 months 2 weeks ago

In these frequent talks about the books I read, he used, as opportunity offered, to give me explanations and ideas respecting civilization, government, morality, mental cultivation, which he required me afterwards to restate to him in my own words. He also made me read, and give him a verbal account of, many books which would not have interested me sufficiently to induce me to read them of myself: among others, Millar's Historical View of the English Government, a book of great merit for its time, and which he highly valued; Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History, McCrie's Life of John Knox, and even Sewel's and Rutty's Histories of the Quakers. He was fond of putting into my hands books which exhibited men of energy and resource in unusual circumstances, struggling against difficulties and overcoming them: of such works I remember Beaver's African Memoranda, and Collins's account of the first settlement of New South Wales.

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(p. 8)
6 months 1 week ago

The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

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(p. 48)
6 months 2 weeks ago

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts!

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Ch. 8, Humanity
7 months 2 weeks ago

In the course of instruction which I have partially retraced, the point most superficially apparent is the great effort to give, during the years of childhood an amount of knowledge in what are considered the higher branches of education, which is seldom acquired (if acquired at all) until the age of manhood.

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(p. 30)
7 months 2 weeks ago

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

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Part 3, Chapter 10
6 months 1 week ago

One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.

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6 months 4 days ago

But it has been necessary, for the benefit of the social order, to convert religion into a kind of police system, and hence hell. Oriental or Greek Christianity is predominantly eschatological, Protestantism predominantly ethical, and Catholicism is a compromise between the two, although with the eschatological element predominating.

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4 months 1 week ago

Sure enough, America is a great, and in many respects a blessed and hopeful phenomenon. Sure enough, these hardy millions of Anglo-Saxon men prove themselves worthy of their genealogy; and, with the axe and plough and hammer, if not yet with any much finer kind of implements, are triumphantly clearing out wide spaces, seedfields for the sustenance and refuge of mankind, arenas for the future history of the world; doing, in their day and generation, a creditable and cheering feat under the sun. But as to a Model Republic, or a model anything, the wise among themselves know too well that there is nothing to be said.

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6 months 1 week ago

We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.

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It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing originated; the only question is: "Is it true in and for itself?" Many think that by pronouncing a doctrine to be Neo-Platonic, they have ipso facto banished it from Christianity. Whether a Christian doctrine stands exactly thus or thus in the Bible, the point to which the exegetical scholars of modern times devote all their attention is not the only question. The Letter kills, the Spirit makes alive: this they say themselves, yet pervert the sentiment by taking the Understanding for the Spirit.

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Pt. III, sec. 3, ch. 2 Lectures on the History of History Vol 1 p. 344 John Sibree translation (1857), 1914
8 months 6 days ago

The double meaning has been given to suit people's diverse intelligence. The apparent contradictions are meant to stimulate the learned to deeper study.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.

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Lectures XI, XII, and XIII, "Saintliness"
8 months 6 days ago

Hence, as Narcissus, by catching at the shadow, plunged himself in the stream and disappeared, so he who is captivated by beautiful bodies, and does not depart from their embrace, is precipitated, not with his body, but with his soul, into a darkness profound and repugnant to intellect (the higher soul), through which, remaining blind both here and in Hades, he associates with shadows.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head.

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7 months 1 week ago

Ambition is the death of thought.

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p. 77e
3 months 4 weeks ago

The great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up. That is possible for him who never argues and strives with men and facts, but in all experience retires upon himself, and looks for the ultimate cause of things in himself.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

What is new in our time is the increased power of the authorities to enforce their prejudices.

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Quoted on Who Said That?, BBC TV, 8/8/1958
4 months 1 week ago

[on Epicurus] His starting point is a conviction that apathy is impossible, and that pleasure - though not necessarily sensual pleasure - is the only conceivable, and quite legitimate, end of life and action. "Nature leads every organism to prefer its own good to every other good" - even the stoic finds a subtle pleasure in renunciation. "We must not avoid pleasures, but we must select them". Epicurus, then, is no epicurean, he exalts the joys of intellect rather than those of sense; he warns against pleasures that excite and disturb the soul which they should rather quite and appease. In the end he proposes to seek not pleasure in its usual sense, but ataraxia - tranquility, equaninimity, repose of mind; all of which trembles on the verge of Zeno's "Apathy"

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8 months 6 days ago

On the whole, a man who denies the existence of the effects arranged according to the causes in the question of arts, or whose wisdom cannot understand it, then he has no knowledge of the art of its Maker.

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