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4 months 2 weeks ago

I long to be free - desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war, but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.

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Peaceableness Toward Enemies
5 months 1 day ago

Reason not with him, that will deny the principal truths!

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Things are not so painful and difficult of themselves, but our weakness or cowardice makes them so.

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Ch. 14, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
1 month 2 weeks ago

Amid all these things, beyond all these things every man and nation, every plant and animal, every god and demon, charges upward like an army inflamed by an incomprehensible, unconquerable Spirit. We struggle to make this Spirit visible, to give it a face, to encase it in words, in allegories and thoughts and incantations, that it may not escape us. But it cannot be contained in the twentysix letters of an alphabet which we string out in rows; we know that all these words, these allegories, these thoughts, and these incantations are, once more, but a new mask with which to conceal the Abyss.

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4 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
4 months 1 week ago

Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.

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19:17 (KJV)
4 months 2 weeks ago

No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended.

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5 months 1 week ago

He who is running a race ought to endeavor and strive to the utmost of his ability to come off victor; but it is utterly wrong for him to trip up his competitor, or to push him aside. So in life it is not unfair for one to seek for himself what may accrue to his benefit; but it is not right to take it from another.

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As quoted in De Officiis by Cicero, iii. 10.
5 months 2 weeks ago

John - I'm trying to find the Island in the West. Sensible - You refer, no doubt to some aesthetic experience.

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Pilgrim's Regress 77
5 months 4 weeks ago

The world is but a perpetual see-saw.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy. 

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p. 330
1 month 1 week ago

But to return to the Jewish question. Other groups and nations cultivate their individual traditions. There is no reason why we should sacrifice ours. Standardization robs life of its spice. To deprive every ethnic group of its special traditions is to convert the world into a huge Ford plant. I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.

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6 months 1 week ago

When the Great Dao (Tao, perfect order) prevails, the world is like a Commonwealth State shared by all, not a dictatorship.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

As you hope to prove your own great value to the state, and having proved it, to attain at once to absolute power, so do I indulge a hope that I shall be the supreme power over you, if I am able to prove my own great value to you. Socrates speaking to Alcibiades

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5 months 2 weeks ago

I focus on popular culture because I focus on those areas where black humanity is most powerfully expressed, where black people have been able to articulate their sense of the world in a profound manner. And I see this primarily in popular culture. Why not in highbrow culture? Because the access has been so difficult. Why not in more academic forms? Because academic exclusion has been the rule for so long for large numbers of black people that black culture, for me, becomes a search for where black people have left their imprint and fundamentally made a difference in terms of how certain art forms are understood. This is currently in popular culture. And it has been primarily in music, religion, visual arts and fashion.

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"Cornel West interviewed by bell hooks" in Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life
4 months 1 week ago

There are two kinds of means. One kind is external to that which is accomplished; the other kind is taken up into the consequences and remains immanent in them. There are ends which are merely welcome cessations and there are ends that are fulfillments of what went before. The toil of the laborer is too often an antecedent to the wage he receives, as consumption of gasoline is merely a means to transportation. The means cease to act when the "end" is reached; one would be glad, as a rule, to get the result without having to employ the means. They are but the scaffolding.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Men that look no further than their outsides, think health an appurtenance unto life, and quarrel with their constitutions for being sick; but I that have examined the parts of man, and know upon what tender filaments that fabric hangs, do wonder that we are not always so; and considering the thousand doors that lead to death, do thank my God that we can die but once.

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Section 44 Compare: "I know death hath ten thousand several doors / For men to take their exits.", John Webster, Duchess of Malfi (1623); Act IV, scene ii.
4 months 2 weeks ago

There is no false sensation.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

This adoration, too, was not the same as the worship of God. In my opinion they did not yet recognize him as God, but they acted in keeping with the custom mentioned in Scripture, according to which Kings and important people were worshiped; this did not mean more than falling down before them at their feet and honoring them.

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Sermon on The Gospel for the Festival of the Epiphany, 1522. Luther's Works, American Ed., Hans J. Hillerbrand, Helmut T. Lehmann eds., Philadelphia, Concordia Publishing House/Fortress Press, 1974, ISBN 0800603524 (Sermons II), vol. 52:198
2 months 5 days ago

There stood Mucius, despising the enemy and despising the fire, and watched his hand as it dripped blood over the fire on his enemy's altar, until Porsenna, envying the fame of the hero whose punishment he was advocating, ordered the fire to be removed against the will of the victim.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

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1 month 4 weeks 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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5 months 3 weeks ago

Let us maintain inviolably equality in the sacred right of suffrage: public security can never have a basis more solid.

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Author's Inscription: French Edition
1 month 2 weeks ago

Every being ought to do that which is according to its constitution; and all other things have been constituted for the sake of the superior, but the rational for the sake of one another.

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VII, 55
5 months 2 weeks ago

I was looking at my furniture, not as the utilitarian who has to sit on chairs, to write at desks and tables, and not as the cameraman or scientific recorder, but as the pure aesthete whose concern is only with forms and their relationships within the field of vision or the picture space. But as I looked, this purely aesthetic, Cubist's-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the sacramental vision of reality. I was back where I had been when I was looking at the flowers-back in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance.

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describing his experiment with mescaline, p. 22
4 months 2 days ago

Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair. If one truly responds to man and his future, ie, concernedly and "responsibly." one can respond only by faith or by despair. Rational faith as well as rational despair are based on the most thorough, critical knowledge of all the factors that are relevant for the survival of man.

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p. 483
6 months 2 weeks ago

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don't know why, unless it springs from long efforts to avoid priggery.

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Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1894). Smith was a Quaker, thus the archaic use of "Thee" in this and other letters to her.
2 months 5 days ago

Human or general needs can be satisfied through society; for satisfaction of unique needs you must do some seeking. A friend and a friendly service, or even an individual's service, society cannot procure you. And yet you will every moment be in need of such a service, and on the slightest occasions require somebody who is helpful to you. Therefore do not rely on society, but see to it that you have the wherewithal to - purchase the fulfilment of your wishes.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 243
3 months 4 weeks ago

There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.

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L 16
1 month 2 weeks ago

Where any work can be done conformably to the reason which is common to gods and men, there we have nothing to fear; for where we are able to get profit by means of the activity which is successful and proceeds according to our constitution, there no harm is to be suspected.

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VII, 53
4 months 3 weeks ago

Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy for superstition.

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2 months 1 week ago

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

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Article on Biography.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.

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5 months 1 week ago

Herbert Spencer is little read now. Philosophers do not regard him as a major thinker.

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Social Darwinism has long been in disrepute. Chapter 3, From Evolution To Ethics?, p. 61
4 months 3 weeks ago

But how shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves? Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world, yet is every man his greatest enemy, and as it were, his own executioner.

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Section 4
3 weeks 4 days ago

Talking and knowing ARE action.....c'mon with shit....

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The resolution of complex Facts into precise and measured partial Facts, we call the 'Decomposition of Facts'. This process is requisite for the progress of science, but does not necessarily lead to progress. The Conceptions by which Facts are bound together, are suggested by the sagacity of discoverers. But a supply of appropriate hypotheses cannot be constructed by rule, nor without inventive talent. The truth of tentative hypotheses must be tested by their application to facts. The discoverer must be ready, carefully to try his hypotheses in this manner, and to reject them if they will not bear the test, in spite of indolence and vanity.

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4 months 3 days ago

I hope I shall never live to see Anarchism become thoroughly respectable, for then I shall have to look for a new ideal.

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Letter to Helen Keller (1916), published by "The American Foundation for the Blind"
4 months 3 weeks ago

The French are ... the most brilliant and the most dangerous nation of Europe, and the one that is surest to inspire admiration, hatred, terror, or pity, but never indifference.

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p. 245
3 months 4 weeks ago

Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.

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F 144

Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help.

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2 months ago

Objectivity does not simply involve passivity and detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement.

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p. 403

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