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7 months 3 weeks ago

There is no one who ever acts honestly in the administration of states, nor any helper who will save any one who maintains the cause of the just.

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5 months 1 week ago

I have wanted them to have this simple definition to read again and again so they know: Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.

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Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2014), p.XII
7 months 1 week ago

And yet it is hard to believe that anything in nature could stand revealed as solid matter.The lightning of heaven goes through the walls of houses,like shouts and speech; iron glows white in fire; red-hot rocks are shattered by savage steam; hard gold is softened and melted down by heat; chilly brass, defeated by heat, turns liquid; heat seeps through silver, so does piercing cold;by custom raising the cup, we feel them bothas water is poured in, drop by drop, above.

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Book I, lines 487-496 (Frank O. Copley)
5 months 1 week ago

Most men have nothing in their heads but their physical needs; put them on a desert island with nothing to occupy their minds and they would go insane. They lack real motive. The curse of civilization is boredom.

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Chapter Eight, The Outsider as a Visionary
1 month 3 days ago

I will say that limitless skepticism creates existential alienation that directly contradicts any mission of resolution. It's unnecessary, as some philosophical ideas and concepts can be known, with certainty, for all intents and purposes and should be allowed to stand unquestioned.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

We, on the contrary, now send to the Brahmans English clergymen and evangelical linen-weavers, in order out of sympathy to put them right, and to point out to them that they are created out of nothing, and that they ought to be grateful and pleased about it. But it is Just the same as if we fired a bullet at a cliff. " In India, our religions wIll never at any time take root; the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian Wisdom flows back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought.

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Schopenhauer, Arthur The world as will and representation. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. New York, Dover Publications [c1969 - Volume I, & 63 p. 356-357. quoted in Londhe, S. (2008).
6 months 3 weeks ago

The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.

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7 months 1 week ago

These philosophers of the world place contrarieties in the same subject; for the one attributed greatness to nature and the other weakness to this same nature, which could not subsist; whilst faith teaches us to place them in different subjects: all that is infirm belonging to nature, all that is powerful belonging to grace. Such is the marvelous and novel union which God alone could teach, and which he alone could make, and which is only a type and an effect of the ineffable union of two natures in the single person of a Man-God.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Our concern is solely with the basic structure of society and its major institutions and therefore with the standard cases of social justice.

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Chapter II, Section 10, pg. 58
5 months 1 week ago

Power is more 'spacious' than violence. And violence becomes power if it 'gives itself more time.' Looked at from this perspective, power rests on an excess of space and time.

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6 months 1 day ago

To ruminate upon evils, to make critical notes upon injuries, and be too acute in their apprehensions, is to add unto our own tortures, to feather the arrows of our enemies, to lash ourselves with the scorpions of our foes, and to resolve to sleep no more.

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Part III, Section XII
4 months 4 days ago

More controversially, technology can accelerate the transition from harming to helping free-living sentient beings: mankind's fitfully expanding "circle of compassion". The civilising process needn't be species-specific but instead extend to free-living dwellers in tomorrow's wildlife parks. Every cubic metre of the biosphere will soon be computationally accessible to surveillance, micro-management and control. Fertility regulation via immunocontraception can replace Darwinian ecosystems governed by starvation and predation. Any species of obligate carnivore we choose to preserve can be genetically and behaviourally tweaked into harmlessness. Asphyxiation, disembowelling, and agonies of being eaten alive can pass into the dustbin of history.

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High-tech Jainism, The World Transformed, Jul. 2014
5 months 2 weeks ago

The most immediate result of this unbalanced specialisation has been that to-day, when there are more "scientists" than ever, there are much less "cultured" men than, for example, about 1750. And the worst is that with these turnspits of science not even the real progress of science itself is assured. For science needs from time to time, as a necessary regulator of its own advance, a labour of reconstitution, and, as I have said, this demands an effort towards unification, which grows more and more difficult, involving, as it does, ever-vaster regions of the world of knowledge. Newton was able to found his system of physics without knowing much philosophy, but Einstein needed to saturate himself with Kant and Mach before he could reach his own keen synthesis. Kant and Mach - the names are mere symbols of the enormous mass of philosophic and psychological thought which has influenced Einstein.

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Chapter XII: The Barbarism Of "Specialisation"
11 months 1 day 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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6 months 2 weeks ago

The friendship of one wise man is better than the friendship of a host of fools.

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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
6 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. We should replace it by a more modest and more realistic principle - the principle that the fight against avoidable misery should be a recognized aim of public policy, while the increase of happiness should be left, in the main, to private initiative.

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As quoted in 1,001 Pearls of Wisdom (2006) by David Ross
6 months 3 weeks ago

It seems that sin is geographical. From this conclusion, it is only a small step to the further conclusion that the notion of "sin" is illusory, and that the cruelty habitually practised in punishing it is unnecessary.

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A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42 (1996), p. 283
6 months 2 weeks ago

From whence are these "rights of individuals" derived, and why should we care? Unless we presume the existence of some greater power that determines what is good, isn't it arbitrary to posit that human survival is more important than private property rights, an equally artificially construed concept? Isn't it arbitrary to assume that some sort of equality is preferable to a system where, say, the poor are assumed to have bad karma? If these 'rights of individuals' are derived only from shared humanity, then do 'individuals' (a thoroughly meaningless term, by the way), begin to lose them when they act inhumanely? And isn't it totally arbitrary to grant rights to humans rather than other creatures anyway?

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Lecture in New Haven, On Constructed Rights
6 months 3 weeks ago

They [Christians] believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else. And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not an impersonal thing nor a static thing-not even just one person-but a dynamic pulsating activity, a life, a kind of drama, almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance ... (The) pattern of this three-personal life is ... the great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality.

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Book IV, Chapter 4, "Good Infection"
3 months 2 weeks ago

Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business; and it gives in the long run a net result of zero.

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Ch. 6, Laissez-Faire.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Familiarity breeds contempt.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

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Vol. I, Part 1.
7 months 4 days ago

Lucid intervals and happy pauses.

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History of King Henry VII, III
4 months 2 days ago

Hayek's blind spot with regard to politics was clear in the early 1980s when the first Thatcher government, in an attempt to reduce inflation and bring the public finances closer to a balanced budget, was raising interest rates and cutting public spending. As he had done during the 1930s, Hayek attacked these policies as not being severe enough. It would be better, he told me in a conversation we had around this time, if Thatcher imposed a more drastic contraction on the economy so that the wage-setting power of the trade unions could be broken. He appeared unfazed by unemployment, which was already higher (more than three million people) than at any time since the 1930s, and would rise much further if his recommendations were accepted.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Even when there is no law, there is conscience.

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Maxim 237
6 months 3 weeks ago

Stop Traveller! Near this place lieth John Locke. If you ask what kind of a man he was, he answers that he lived content with his own small fortune. Bred a scholar he made his learning subservient only to the cause of truth. This thou will learn from his writings, which will show thee everything else concerning him, with greater truth, than the suspect praises of an epitaph. His virtues, indeed, if he had any, were too little for him to propose as matter of praise to himself, or as an example to thee. Let his vices be buried together. As to an example of manners, if you seek that, you have it in the Gospels; of vices, to wish you have one nowhere; if mortality, certainly, (and may it profit thee), thou hast one here and everywhere.

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Epitaph, as translated from the Latin.
4 months 3 weeks ago

By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures.

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(p. 25)
6 months 2 weeks ago

At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. In the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable. For centuries, these reaches would belong to the non-human. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, they would wait, soliciting with strange incantations a new incarnation of disease, another grimace of terror, renewed rites of purification and exclusion.

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Part One: 1. Stultifera Navis
2 months 3 weeks ago

The major and almost only theme of all my work is the struggle of man with "God": the unyielding, inextinguishable struggle of the naked worm called "man" against the terrifying power and darkness of the forces within him and around him.

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As quoted in Nikos Kazantzakis (1968) by Helen Kazantzakis, p. 507
2 months 3 weeks ago

The Roman came into the Promised Land that had become less and less as promised. The rich got along quite well with the foreign occupation; it provided protection from desperate peasants and patriotic resistance fighters. It provided protection from prophets who could be labeled "agitators" now, without any qualms.

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p. 121
5 months 3 weeks ago

Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it - that is what you must do.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

There can be only one permanent revolution - a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.

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"Three Methods Of Reform" in Pamphlets : Translated from the Russian (1900) as translated by Aylmer Maude, p. 29
5 months 1 week ago

The Outsider's case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretense, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for truth.

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Chapter one, The Country of the Blind
6 months 3 weeks ago

A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.

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Ch. 25
5 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing could be more natural than the developement of the passions, nor more striking than the views of the human heart. What delicate struggles! and uncommonly pretty turns of thought!

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Mary: A Fiction
5 months 1 week ago

When power is separated from any communicative context, it becomes naked violence.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.

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3 months 5 days ago

In these days the angel of topology and the devil of abstract algebra fight for the soul of each individual mathematical domain.

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Weyl, Hermann. Invariants. Duke Math. J. 5 (1939), no. 3, 489--502. doi:10.1215/S0012-7094-39-00540-5. http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.dmj/1077491405.
2 months 3 weeks ago

The selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.

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Letter to Larkin Smith
5 months 3 weeks ago

Poets and priests were one in the beginning, and they only separated in later times. But the real poet is always a priest, just as the real priest always remains a poet.

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Fragment No. 71
3 months 2 weeks ago

Scientists believe there is a hierarchy of facts and that among them may be made a judicious choice. They are right, since otherwise there would be no science...

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3 months 6 days ago

There are two threats to reason, the opinion that one knows the truth about the most important things and the opinion that there is no truth about them. Both of these opinions are fatal to philosophy; the first asserts that the quest for truth is unnecessary, while the second asserts that it is impossible. The Socratic knowledge of ignorance, which I take to be the beginning point of all philosophy, defines the sensible middle ground between two extremes.

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"Western Civ," p. 18.
5 months 1 week ago

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

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Ch. 2
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is generally characteristic of arms races, including human ones, that although all would be better off if none of them escalated, so long as one of them escalates none can afford not to.

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Chapter 7 "Constructive Evolution" (p. 184)
6 months 3 weeks ago

The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them for eternity.

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Letter XV

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