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1 week 4 days ago

Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: 'what shall we do and how shall we live.

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Quoted by Max Weber in his lecture "Science as a Vocation"; in Lynda Walsh (2013)
2 months 2 weeks ago

Throughout your treatment you forget that you said that 'free-will' can do nothing without grace, and you prove that 'free-will' can do all things without grace! Your inferences and analogies "For if man has lost his freedom, and is forced to serve sin, and cannot will good, what conclusion can more justly be drawn concerning him, than that he sins and wills evil necessarily?

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p. 149
1 week 4 days ago

And see, a kind, refined lady will devour the carcasses of these animals with full assurance that she is doing right, at the same time asserting two contradictory propositions: First, that she is, as her doctor assures her, so delicate that she cannot be sustained by vegetable food alone, and that for her feeble organism flesh is indispensable; and, secondly, that she is so sensitive that she is unable, not only herself to inflict suffering on animals, but even to bear the sight of suffering. Whereas the poor lady is weak precisely because she has been taught to live upon food unnatural to man; and she cannot avoid causing suffering to animals - for she eats them.

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Ch. IX
1 month 4 days ago

Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.

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26:26-29 (KJV)
2 months 1 week ago

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

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Vol. I, Ch. 32, p. 837.
3 weeks 6 days ago

The struggle between the opponents and defenders of capitalism is a struggle between innovators who do not know what innovation to make and conservatives who do not know what to conserve.

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p. 233
1 month 4 days ago

Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God? But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows.

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12:6-7
5 days ago

To train and educate the rising generation will at all times be the first object of society, to which every other will be subordinate.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

When one told Plistarchus that a notorious railer spoke well of him, "I 'll lay my life," said he, "somebody hath told him I am dead, for he can speak well of no man living."

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Of Plistarchus
3 weeks 4 days ago

Happiness is the proof that time can accommodate eternity.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The blood of Jesus Christ can cover a multitude of sins, it seems to me.

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2 months 1 week ago

"They would say," he answered, "that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience."

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Ch. 7 : The Pendragon, section 2
3 months 1 day ago

War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free.

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1 month 2 days ago

Rohde became more and more firmly bound to the bourgeois world, its institutions and accepted opinions. ... The contrast between the two natures makes Rohde and Nietzsche exemplary representatives of two distinctive worlds. In their youth they both live in the realm of boundless possibilities and feel an affinity through the exuberance of their noble aspirations. Subsequently they go in opposite directions. Nietzsche remains young, leaving concrete reality as his task assumes existential import. Rohde grows old, bourgeois, stable, and skeptical. Hence courage is a fundamental trait in Nietzsche, plaintive self-irony in Rohde. ... Rohde retained the interests but not the attitudes of his youth; he looked to the world of the Greeks for the object of his contemplation rather than the norm of obligation.

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pp. 61-62
1 month 1 week ago

If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned - a saint or a corpse.

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3 months 1 week ago

A person can perhaps succeed in hiding his sins from the world, he can perhaps be foolishly happy that he succeeds, or yet, a little more honest, admit that it is a deplorable weakness and cowardliness that he does not have the courage to become open-but a person cannot hide his sins from himself.

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3 months 1 week ago

Generals are, as a matter of course, allowed to be far more idiotic than ordinary human beings are permitted to be.

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1 month 1 week ago

Accordingly, time logically supposes a continuous range of intensity of feeling. It follows then, from the definition of continuity, that when any particular kind of feeling is present, an infinitesimal continuum of all feelings differing infinitesimally from that, is present.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

But though empires, like all the other works of men, have all hitherto proved mortal, yet every empire aims at immortality.

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Chapter II, Part II, p. 896.
1 month 4 days ago

Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment, than for you. And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell: for if the mighty works, which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But I say unto you, That it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee.

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11:21-24 (KJV)
2 months 1 week ago

I cannot believe - and I say this with all the emphasis of which I am capable - that there can ever be any good excuse for refusing to face the evidence in favour of something unwelcome. It is not by delusion, however exalted, that mankind can prosper, but only by unswerving courage in the pursuit of truth.

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"The Pursuit of Truth" in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, 1993
1 month 3 weeks ago

A blow from your friend is better than a kiss from your enemy.

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As quoted in Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists‎ (2007) by James Geary, p. 118
2 months 2 weeks ago

There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried.

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Aphorism 19
1 week 2 days ago

Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.

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Maxim 358
2 months 1 week ago

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

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Quotation and Originality
1 month 3 days ago

If we ignore the prior work of attention and notice only the emptiness of the moment of choice we are likely to identify freedom with the outward movement since there is nothing else to identify it with. But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.

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The Sovereignty of Good (1970) p. 36.
2 months 1 week ago

In some places the metropolis makes do with paying a clique of feudal overlords; in others, it has fabricated a fake bourgeoisie of colonized subjects in a system of divide and rule; elsewhere, it has killed two birds with one stone: the colony is both settlement and exploitation.

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p. xlvi
2 months 2 weeks ago

Above all, every relation must be considered as suspicious, which depends in any degree upon religion, as the prodigies of Livy: And no less so, everything that is to be found in the writers of natural magic or alchemy, or such authors, who seem, all of them, to have an unconquerable appetite for falsehood and fable.

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Aphorism 29
1 month 1 week ago

Neither the few nor the many have a right to act merely by their will, in any matter connected with duty, trust, engagement, or obligation.

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p. 440
2 weeks 5 days ago

Now, moral philosophers generally prefer to talk about virtues, or about (specific) duties, rights, and so on, rather than about moral images of the world. There are obvious reasons for this; nevertheless, I think that it is a mistake, and that Kant is profoundly right. What we require in moral philosophy is, first and foremost, a moral image of the world, or rather--since, here again, I am more of a pluralist than Kant--a number of complementary moral images of the world.

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Lecture III: Equality and Our Moral Image of the World

The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion.

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'On the Athenian Orators', Knight's Quarterly Magazine (August 1824), quoted in The Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay, Vol. I (1860), p. 135
1 month 2 weeks ago

The infant runs toward it with its eyes closed, the adult is stationary, the old man approaches it with his back turned.

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"Death"
1 month 1 week ago

The acts of France were acts of hostility to this country; her whole system, every speech, every decree, every act, bespoke an intention preclusive of accommodation. No man, he would venture to say, had a more lively sense of the importance of the question before the House, or of the evils of war, than himself. A war with France, under such circumstances as now governed her conduct, must be terrible, but peace much more so. A nation that had abandoned all its valuable distinctions, arts, sciences, religion, law order, every thing but the sword, was most formidable and dreadful to all nations composed of citizens who only used soldiers as a defence; as such, France should be resisted with spirit and temper, without fear or scruple.

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Speech in the House of Commons upon the outbreak of war with France (12 February 1793)

When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

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D 66
1 month 4 days ago

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.

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Ch. I
2 months 1 week ago

Most men would feel insulted, if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.

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p. 485
1 week 2 days ago

Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology.

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(p. 85)
2 months 2 weeks ago

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.

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1 month 1 week ago

Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth . . .

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1 month 1 week ago

The study of Ethics would, no doubt, be far more simple, and its results far more "systematic," if, for instance, pain were an evil of exactly the same magnitude as pleasure is a good; but we have no reason whatever to assume that the Universe is such that ethical truths must display this kind of symmetry ... .

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Principia Ethica (1903), ch. VI.
3 weeks 2 days ago

The family uses people, not for what they are, nor for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for - its own uses. It thinks of them not as what God has made them, but as the something which it has arranged that they shall be.

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3 months 1 week ago

All mankind, right down to those you most despise, are your neighbors.

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3 months 1 week ago

There is no version of primeval history, preceding the discoveries of modern science, that is as rational and as inspiring as that of the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis.

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2 months 6 days ago

A utopia of judicial reticence: take away life, but prevent the patient from feeling it; deprive the prisoner of all rights, but do not inflict pain; impose penalties free of all pain. Recourse to psycho-pharmacology and to various physiological 'disconnectors', even if it is temporary, is a logical consequence of this 'non-corporal' penalty.

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Chapter One, The Spectacle of the Scaffold
3 weeks 4 days ago

The huge laugh is a most extreme expression of freedom.

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2 months 1 week ago

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word "experience" have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word. It is to be feared, however, that if the word is avoided the confusions of thought with which it has been associated may persist.

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On the Nature of Acquaintance: Neutral Monism, 1914
1 week 1 day ago

There is no spirit-driven life force, no throbbing, heaving, pullulating, protoplasmic, mystic jelly. Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information.

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