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3 months 3 weeks ago

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue.

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Race
2 months 1 week ago

If all men, by the act of being born, are destined to suffer violence, that is a truth to which the empire of circumstances closes their minds.

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in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 163
2 months 2 weeks ago

What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.

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Ch. V: Democracy
1 month 3 weeks ago

In historical events great men - so-called - are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.

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Bk. IX, ch. 1
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become.

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E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 347
3 months 2 weeks ago

I don't really know what they mean by "intellectuals," all the people who describe, denounce, or scold them. I do know, on the other hand, what I have committed myself to, as an intellectual, which is to say, after all, a cerebro-spinal individual: to having a brain as supple as possible and a spinal column that's as straight as necessary.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Making money is not without its value, but nothing is baser than to make it by wrong-doing.

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4 weeks ago

Our principles fix what our life stands for, our aims create the light our life is bathed in, and our rationality, both individual and coordinate, defines and symbolizes the distance we have come from mere animality. It is by these means that our lives come to more than what they instrumentally yield. And by meaning more, our lives yield more.

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The Nature of Rationality (1993), Ch. V : Instrumental Rationality and Its Limits; Rationality's Imagination, p. 181
3 months 6 days ago

All the good are friends of one another.

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As quoted in Stromata, v. 14. by Clement of Alexandria
2 months 3 weeks ago

Gentlemen, the melancholy event of yesterday reads to us an awful lesson against being too much troubled about any of the objects of ordinary ambition. The worthy gentleman, who has been snatched from us at the moment of the election, and in the middle of contest, whilst his desires were as warm, and his hopes as eager as ours, has feelingly told us, what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.

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Speech at Bristol on declining the poll, referring to a Mr. Richard Coombe (9 September 1780), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II (1855), p. 171
3 months 2 weeks ago

The sight of both eyes becomes one.

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fr. 88
4 months 1 week ago

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

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As quoted in InfoWorld, Vol. 23, No. 16, 16 April 2001, p. 49. This had been attributed previously to many other sources from 1908 on, according to this analysis by Quote Investigator.
3 months 3 weeks ago

In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual.... Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man's biological nature.

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Chapter 3 (p. 21)
3 months 2 weeks ago

A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.

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"Practicing criticism, or, is it really important to think?", interview by Didier Eribon, May 30-31, 1981, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. L. Kriztman (1988), p. 155
2 months 3 weeks ago

Every state, like every theology, assumes man to be fundamentally bad and wicked.

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As quoted in Michael Bakunin (1937), E.H. Carr, p. 453
4 months 3 weeks ago

I was brought up in the Christian religion, and although I can scarcely sanction all the improper attempts to gain the emancipation of woman, all paganlike reminiscences also seem foolish to me. My brief and simple opinion is that woman is certainly as good as man-period. Any more discursive elaboration of the difference between the sexes or deliberation on which sex is superior is an idle intellectual occupation for loafers and bachelors.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing is so common as to imitate one's enemies, and to use their weapons.

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"Oracles", 1770
4 months 3 weeks ago

Probably, the most-often-repeated lesson in history is that foreigners who are called in to help one side in a civil war take over for themselves. It is a lesson that seems never to be learned despite endless repetition.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.

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1 week 3 days ago

We must admit, however, that neither wild beasts nor any other creature except man is subject to anger: for, whilst anger is the foe of reason, it nevertheless does not arise in any place where reason cannot dwell. Wild beasts have impulses, fury, cruelty, combativeness: they have not anger any more than they have luxury: yet they indulge in some pleasures with less self-control than human beings.

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1 month 4 days ago

Suffering exists only because it was good for our genes. Conditionally-activated negative emotions were fitness-enhancing in the ancestral environment. In the current era, apologists for mental pain are serving as the innocent mouthpieces of the nasty bits of code which spawned them.

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The Good Drug Guide: The Responsible Parent's Guide to Healthy Mood-Boosters for All the Family, BLTC Research, 2012
3 months 3 weeks ago

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

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p. 33
2 months 2 weeks ago

The society which projects and undertakes the technological transformation of nature alters the base of domination by gradually replacing personal dependence (of the slave on the master, the serf on the lord of the manor, the lord on the donor of the fief, etc.) with dependence on the "objective order of things" (on economic laws, the market etc.).

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p. 144
4 months 1 week ago

For it still seemed to me that it is not we who sin, but some other nature sinned in us. And it gratified my pride to be beyond blame, and when I did anything wrong not to have to confess that I had done wrong. I loved to excuse my soul and to accuse something else inside me (I knew not what) but which was not I. But, assuredly, it was I, and it was my impiety that had divided me against myself. That sin then was all the more incurable because I did not deem myself a sinner.

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A. Outler, trans. (Dover: 2002), Book 5, Chapter 10, p. 77
1 month 1 week ago

Instead of water belonging to millions of local communities, water too is to be controlled by five or six global water giants. These are recipes that use economic systems to appropriate for the few the base of survival of the majority.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Whoever desires to live among men has to obey their laws-this is what the secular morality of Western civilization comes down to. ... Rationality in the form of such obedience swallows up everything, even the freedom to think.

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p. 29.

It is said that truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both in him.

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J 157
3 months 3 weeks ago

Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

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Orual
3 months 4 weeks ago

The natural price, therefore, is, as it were, the central price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating.

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Chapter VII, p. 69.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.

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Culture
3 months 3 weeks ago

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

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June 20, 1831
1 month 3 days ago

If we don't address the genetic causes of suffering (physical and mental) we will find ourselves in 500 years enjoying material abundance via nanotech, living in a perfect democracy, colonizing space, and still sitting around wondering "Why are we miserable so much of the time? Why can't we all just get along? Why are we not all happy?"

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David Pearce in SF, Qualia Computing, 7 Oct. 2018
2 weeks 2 days ago

Truly it is a sad thing for a people, as for a man, to fall into Scepticism, into dilettantism, insincerity; not to know Sincerity when they see it. For this world, and for all worlds, what curse is so fatal?

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Fortune is not satisfied with inflicting one calamity.

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Maxim 274
3 months 3 weeks ago

I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations: generations who, as one terrible moment now reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations, to be all ineffaceably real, an essential part, his part, in the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia had never been anything but a fantasy.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return.

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p 63
2 months 1 week ago

Yet its essence was the certitude that his life was not totally at the mercy of chance. Somehow, it was more important than that. This sense of power inside his head - which he could intensify by pulling a face and wrinkling up the muscles of his forehead - aroused a glow of optimism, an expectation of exciting events. He knew that for him, fate held something special in store.

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p. 26
2 weeks 2 days ago

They have their belief, these poor Thibet people, that Providence sends down always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of Pope! At bottom still better, belief that there is a Greatest Man; that he is discoverable; that, once discovered, we ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds! This is the truth of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is the only error here.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing is indefensible - from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

"And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class."

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As quoted in The Communist Manifesto (21 February 1848), p19-20.
3 months 2 weeks ago

The particularity (Jeweiligkeit) of the places and their manifoldness are grounded in space, and the particularity of the time points is grounded in time. That basic characteristic of the thing, that essential determination of the thingness of the thing to be this one (je dieses), is grounded in the essence of space and time. Our question "What is a thing?" includes, therefore, the questions "What is space?" and "What is time?" It is customary The particularity (Jeweiligkeit) os the places.

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p. 16
3 months 3 weeks ago

I went to Salt Lake City and the Mormons tried to convert me, but when I found they forbade tea and tobacco I thought it was no religion for me.

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Letter to C. P. Sanger, 23 December, 1929
4 months 3 days ago

We are beggars: this is true.

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"The Last Written Words of Luther," Table Talk No. 5468, (16 February 1546), in Dr. Martin Luthers Werke (1909) as translated by James A. Kellerman, Band 85 (TR 5) 317-318
3 months 3 weeks ago

How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?

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2 months 3 days ago

Organizations are systems of coordinated action among individuals and groups whose preferences, information, interests, or knowledge differ. Organization theories describe the delicate conversion of conflict into cooperation, the mobilization of resources, and the coordination of effort that facilitate the joint survival of an organization and its members.

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Simon (1993. p. 2); Cited in Mario Catalani, ‎Giuseppe F. Clerico (1996) Decision making structures. p. 1.
3 months ago

A man may be in as just possession of Truth as of a City, and yet be forced to surrender.

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Section 6
2 months 3 weeks ago

Whereas logic and objectivity are usually the predominant features of a man's outer attitude, or are at least regarded as ideals, in the case of a woman it is feeling. But in the soul it is the other way round: inwardly it is the man who feels, and the woman who reflects. Hence a man's greater liability to total despair, while a woman can always find comfort and hope; accordingly a man is more likely to put an end to himself than a woman. However much a victim of social circumstances a woman may be, as a prostitute for instance, a man is no less a victim of impulses from the unconscious, taking the form of alcoholism and other vices.

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Psychological Types (1921). CW 6. P.805
3 months 3 weeks ago

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

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Interview (1960), Quoted in Susan Sontag's introduction to Barthes: Selected Writings, "Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes,"

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