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6 months 2 weeks ago

To have good sense, is the first principle and fountain of writing well.

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Line 309
3 months 2 weeks ago

It is often said that experiments should be made without preconceived ideas. That is impossible. Not only would it make every experiment fruitless, but even if we wished to do so, it could not be done. Every man has his own conception of the world, and this he cannot so easily lay aside. We must, for example, use language, and our language is necessarily steeped in preconceived ideas.

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Ch. IX: Hypotheses in Physics, Tr. George Bruce Halsted
5 months 3 weeks ago

Let me now try to gather up all these odds and ends of commentary and restate the law of mind, in a unitary way.

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4 months 5 days ago

Philosophy is an everlasting fire, sometimes damped down by setting itself limits, then flaring into new life as it consumes them. Every field of inquiry is limited, but philosophy has an essential relation to the question of limits, to its own limits.

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Introduction, p. xiii
7 months 3 weeks ago

When God chooses to let himself be born in lowliness, when he who holds all possibilities in his hand takes upon himself the form of a lowly servant, when he goes about defenseless and lets people do with him what they will, he surely must know well enough what he is doing and why he wills it; but for all that it is he who has people in his power and not they who have power over him-so history ought not play Mr. Malapert by this wanting to make manifest who he was.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

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Ch. 6: Machines and the Emotions
4 months 2 weeks ago

The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.

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The Life and Writings of Addison', The Edinburgh Review (July 1843), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review: A New Edition (1852), p. 706
6 months 2 weeks ago

When my ability to reason shows me that the suffering of another being is very similar to my own suffering and matters just as much to that other being as my own suffering matters to me, then my reason is showing me something that is undeniably true. ... The perspective on ourselves that we get when we take the point of view of the universe also yields as much objectivity as we need if we are to find a cause that is worthwhile in a way that is independent of our own desires. The most obvious such cause is the reduction of pain and suffering, wherever it is to be found.

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p. 238
7 months 3 weeks ago

Private profit is often hidden under a careful coating of great patriotism.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

In order to remain silent Da-sein must have something to say.

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Stambaugh translation
5 months 3 weeks ago

Every stage of education begins with childhood. That is why the most educated person on earth so much resembles a child.

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"Miscellaneous Observations," Philosophical Writings, M. Stolijar, trans. (Albany: 1997) #48
2 months 3 weeks ago

The equation state = politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other.

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7 months 4 days ago

It is not without good reason said, that he who has not a good memory should never take upon him the trade of lying.

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Ch. 9. Of Liars, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
7 months 1 week ago

The mind itself, its love [of itself] and its knowledge [of itself] are a kind of trinity.

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(Cambridge: 2002), Book 9, Chapter 4, Section 4, p. 27
2 months 3 weeks ago

The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add an useful plant to its culture; especially, a bread grain; next in value to bread is oil.

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Thomas Jefferson, In Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies from the Papers of T. Jefferson (1829), Vol. 1, 144
3 months 1 week ago

If one takes pleasure in calling the gold standard a "barbarous relic," one cannot object to the application of the same term to every historically determined institution. Then the fact that the British speak English - and not Danish, German, or French - is a barbarous relic too, and every Briton who opposes the substitution of Esperanto for English is no less dogmatic and orthodox than those who do not wax rapturous about the plans for a managed currency.

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The Gold Standard - LvMI, excerpt from chapter 17 of Human Action
6 months 3 weeks ago

No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon.

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"The Will to Believe" p. 15
6 months 3 weeks ago

These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

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Section 1, Paragraph 30
4 months 1 week ago

Every living creature commences its existence under a form different from, and simpler than, that which it eventually attains.

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Ch.2, p. 74
5 months 2 weeks ago

Understanding finds nothing but itself when it seeks the essence behind the appearance of things. 'It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain, which is to hide the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we ourselves go behind there, as much in order that we may thereby see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen.'

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P. 111

The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself.

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Preface (J. B. Baillie translation), § 10
4 months 3 weeks ago

The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.

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(p. 55)
3 months 1 week ago

If religion has put forward the proposition that we are all of us sinners, I set another against it: we are all of us perfect! Because, in each moment, we are all we can be, and never need to be more.

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Landstreicher, p. 226
6 months 4 weeks ago

No difference of rank, position, or birth, is so great as the gulf that separates the countless millions who use their head only in the service of their belly, in other words, look upon it as an instrument of the will, and those very few and rare persons who have the courage to say: No! my head is too good for that; it shall be active only in its own service; it shall try to comprehend the wondrous and varied spectacle of this world and then reproduce it in some form, whether as art or as literature, that may answer to my character as an individual.

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On Genius, Parerga and Paralipomena, Chapter III
2 months 3 weeks ago

Let us not limit the resources of nature; they are infinite, especially when reinforced by great art.

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7 months 1 week ago

Several particular maxims... are as powerful, although false, in carrying away belief, as those the most true.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so the division of labour brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital.

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Vol. I, Ch. 14, Section 5, pg. 396.
6 months 3 weeks ago

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.

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Book III, Chapter 4, "Morality and Psychoanalysis"
5 months 3 weeks ago

...what was done in France was a wild attempt to methodize anarchy; to perpetuate and fix disorder. That it was a foul, impious, monstrous thing, wholly out of the course of moral nature. He undertook to prove, that it was generated in treachery, fraud, falsehood, hypocrisy, and unprovoked murder. ... That by the terror of assassination they had driven away a very great number of the members, so as to produce a false appearance of a majority.-That this fictitious majority had fabricated a constitution, which as now it stands, is a tyranny far beyond any example that can be found in the civilized European world of our age.

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p. 376
4 months 3 weeks ago

Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.

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As quoted in "Bildung in Early German Romanticism" by Frederick C. Beiser, in Philosophers on Education : Historical Perspectives (1998) by Amélie Rorty, p. 294
3 months 2 weeks ago

Great organizers, as much as inevitable slaves, tend to stoic moods: it is difficult to be either master or servant if one is sensitive.

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7 months 1 week ago

Let us rejoice and give thanks. Not only are we become Christians, but we are become Christ. My brothers, do you understand the grace of God that is given us? Wonder, rejoice, for we are made Christ! If He is the Head, and we the members, then together He and we are the whole man.... This would be foolish pride on our part, were it not a gift of his bounty. But this is what He promised by the mouth of the Apostle: You are the body of Christ, and severally His members.

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(1 Cor. 12:27). p. 415
3 months 1 week ago

Thus no fortune, no external circumstance, can shut off the wise man from action. For the very thing which engages his attention prevents him from attending to other things. He is ready for either outcome: if it brings goods, he controls them; if evils, he conquers them.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Struggling to be brief I become obscure.

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Line 25
6 months 3 weeks ago

That the human mind has a certain order of possible progress, in which some things must precede others, an order which governments and public instructors can modify to some, but not to an unlimited extent: that all questions of political institutions are relative, not absolute, and that different stages of human progress not only will have, but ought to have, different institutions: That government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is, does not depend on institutions, but institutions on it: That any general theory or philosophy of politics supposes a previous theory of human progress, and that this is the same thing with a philosophy of history.

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(p. 162)
7 months 5 days ago

For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself.

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Book I, i, 3
6 months 3 days ago

For no one's authority ought to rank so high as to set a value on his words and terms even though nothing clear and determinate lies behind them.

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Paragraph 1
4 months 2 weeks ago

Yes, I am in favor of censorship, but it has to be conducted by people like me. And that's the difficulty (laughs). I'm in favor of encouraging every possible form of self-restraint and parental control. And I certainly don't think that pornography should be protected under the American Constitution.

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Interview with Salon.com, 1998
3 months 3 weeks ago

We have to construct the figure of a new David, the multitude as champion of asymmetrical combat, immaterial workers who became a new kind of combatants, cosmopolitan bricoleurs of resistance and cooperation.

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50
7 months 3 weeks ago

I accept nothing on authority. A hypothesis must be backed by reason, or else it is worthless.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one - particularly if he plays golf, which he usually does.

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Introduction to The New Generation, 1930
3 months 2 weeks ago

Work is the grand cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,-honest work, which you intend getting done.

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Address as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, (April 2, 1866), reported in A dictionary of quotations in prose, edited by A. L. Ward (1889).

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