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8 months 5 days ago

If torture was so strongly embedded in legal practice, it was because it revealed truth and showed the operation of power. It assured the articulation of the written on the oral, the secret on the public, the procedure of investigation on the operation of the confession; it made it possible to reproduce the crime on the visible body of the criminal.

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Chapter One, pp.55
8 months 2 weeks ago

I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.

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1688-1690
8 months 1 week ago

It is because we are predominantly purposeful beings that we are perpetually correcting our immediate sensations. But men are free not to be utilitarianly purposeful. They can sometime be artists, for example. In which case they may like to accept the immediate sensation uncorrected, because it happens to be beautiful.

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"One and Many," p. 11
8 months 1 week ago

Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.

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8 months 1 week ago

Thought depends largely on the stomach. In spite of this, those with the best stomachs are not always the best thinkers.

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Letter to Jean le Rond d'Alembert, 20 August 1770
7 months 6 days ago

Big industry, competition and generally the individualistic organization of production have become a fetter which it must and will shatter.

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8 months 1 day ago

By convention sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.

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(trans. Durant 1939), Ch. XVI, §II, p. 353; citing C. Bakewell, Sourcebook in Ancient Philosophy, New York, 1909, "Fragment O" (Diels), p. 60
8 months 1 week ago

I had always heard it maintained by my father, and was myself convinced, that the object of education should be to form the strongest possible associations of the salutary class; associations of pleasure with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain with all things hurtful to it.

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(p. 136)
8 months 5 days ago

The question here is the same as the question I addressed with regard to madness, disease, delinquency and sexuality. In all of these cases, it was not a question of showing how these objects were for a long time hidden before being finally discovered, nor of showing how all these objects are only wicked illusions or ideological products to be dispelled in the light of reason finally having reached its zenith. It was a matter of showing by what conjunctions a whole set of practices-from the moment they become coordinated with a regime of truth-was able to make what does not exist (madness, disease, delinquency, sexuality, etcetera), nonetheless become something.

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Lecture 1, January 10, 1979, p. 19
8 months 1 week ago

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

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"Rights", 1771
8 months 1 week ago

Since property here exists in the form of stock, its movement and transfer become purely a result of gambling on the stock exchange, where the little fish are swallowed by the sharks and the lambs by the stock exchange wolves.

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Vol. III, Ch. XXVII, The Role of Credit, p. 440.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Tis the first art of kings, the power to suffer hate.

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7 months 1 week ago

I would rather be a devil in alliance with truth, than an angel in alliance with falsehood.

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9 months 1 week 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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4 months 2 weeks ago

The creative imagination of the Hindus has conceived no loftier and holier character than Sita; the literature of the world has not produced a higher ideal of womanly love, womanly truth, and womanly devotion.

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The Wisdom Of China And India by ) Lin Yutang
4 months 1 week ago

Her reverence for the divine, her generosity, her inability not only to do wrong but even to conceive of doing it. And the simple way she lived-not in the least like the rich.

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(Hays translation) I, 3
7 months 3 days ago

I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.

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Speech at the Descartes Conference in Paris (1937) Quoted in The Forbes Scrapbook of Thoughts on the Business of Life (1950), p. 442, as "Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought."
8 months 1 day ago

Man is a universe in little.

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Freeman (1948), p. 150
8 months 1 day ago

Since ancient times, philosophers have maintained that to strive too hard for one's own happiness is self-defeating.

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Chapter 5, Reason And Genes, p. 145
5 months 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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5 months 3 weeks ago

So-called racial characteristics are not really racial at all but are due to the historical experiences of the communities in question.

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Abridgement of Vols. 1-6 by D. C. Somervell
8 months 1 week ago

And the final event to himself has been, that, as he rose like a rocket, he fell like the stick.

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On Edmund Burke's reactions to the American and French revolutions.
4 months 1 week ago

Is it not better to use what is in thy power like a free man than to desire in a slavish and abject way what is not in thy power?

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IX, 40
7 months 2 weeks ago

It lays down, as is generally known, that our speculations upon all subjects whatsoever, pass necessarily through three successive stages: a Theological stage, in which free play is given to spontaneous fictions admitting of no proof; the Metaphysical stage, characterized by the prevalence of personified abstractions or entities; lastly, the Positive stage, based upon an exact view of the real facts of the case.

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p. 36
9 months 1 week ago

Job endured everything - until his friends came to comfort him, then he grew impatient.

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8 months 5 days ago

The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.

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Vol. I, p. 59
4 months 1 week ago

I am an enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but coin.

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Letter to Thomas Cooper, 1814. ME 14:61
8 months 2 weeks ago

It is a mistake to classify the passions as lawful and unlawful, so as to yield to the one and refuse the other. All alike are good if we are their masters; all alike are bad if we abandon ourselves to them. Nature forbids us to extend our relations beyond the limits of our strength; reason forbids us to want what we cannot get, conscience forbids us, not to be tempted, but to yield to temptation. To feel or not to feel a passion is beyond our control, but we can control ourselves. Every sentiment under our own control is lawful; those which control us are criminal. A man is not guilty if he loves his neighbour's wife, provided he keeps this unhappy passion under the control of the law of duty; he is guilty if he loves his own wife so greatly as to sacrifice everything to that love.

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8 months 1 week ago

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, - now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned.

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Behavior
7 months 1 week ago

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

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8 months 1 week ago

But there is only one thing which gathers people into seditious commotion, and that is oppression.

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A Letter Concerning Toleration
8 months 2 weeks ago

Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.

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8 months 6 days ago

But in fact there is no circle at all in the formulation of our question. Beings can be determined in their being without the explicit concept of the meaning of being having to be already available. If this were not so there could not have been as yet any ontological knowledge. And prob­ably no one would deny the factual existence of such knowledge. It is true that "being" is "presupposed" in all previous ontology, but not as an available concept-not as the sort of thing we are seeking.

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Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)
8 months 1 week ago

However hard they try, men cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization. In the process of trying to create an organism they will merely create a totalitarian despotism.

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Chapter 3 (p. 24)
7 months 1 week ago

...the relatively unconscious man driven by his natural impulses because, imprisoned in his familiar world, he clings to the commonplace, the obvious, the probable, the collectively valid, using for his motto: 'Thinking is difficult. Therefore, let the herd pronounce judgement.'

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Frequently misquoted as "Thinking is difficult, that's why most people judge" and close variants. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. (1959), C.G. Jung, R.F.C. Hull (translator) (Princeton Press, 1979, ISBN 9780691018225
8 months 1 week ago

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

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6 months 1 week ago

The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.

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Tyuonyi, Volumes 1-2, 1985, p. 60
7 months 2 weeks ago

General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect.

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Book One, Chapter III.
4 months 1 week ago

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.

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Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey (6 January 1816) ME 14:384

The artist may be well advised to keep his work to himself till it is completed, because no one can readily help him or advise him with it...but the scientist is wiser not to withhold a single finding or a single conjecture from publicity.

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Essay on Experimentation
6 months 3 weeks ago

A Pharisee is someone who is virtuous out of obedience to the Great Beast.

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p. 125
5 months 2 days ago

Paganism we recognized as a veracious expression of the earnest awe-struck feeling of man towards the Universe; veracious, true once, and still not without worth for us. But mark here the difference of Paganism and Christianism; one great difference. Paganism emblemed chiefly the Operations of Nature; the destinies, efforts, combinations, vicissitudes of things and men in this world; Christianism emblemed the Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law of Man. One was for the sensuous nature: a rude helpless utterance of the first Thought of men,-the chief recognized virtue, Courage, Superiority to Fear. The other was not for the sensuous nature, but for the moral. What a progress is here, if in that one respect only-!

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4 months 1 week ago

If a due participation of office is a matter of right, how are vacancies to be obtained? Those by death are few; by resignation, none.

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Letter to Elias Shipman and others of New Haven (12 July 1801). Often misquoted as, "few die and none resign".
6 months 4 days ago

Orwell's essay speaks to us today. It tells us that patriotism is the sine qua non of survival, and that it arises spontaneously in the ordinary human heart. It does not depend upon any grand narrative of triumph of the kind put about by the fascists and the communists, but grows from the habits of association that we British have been fortunate enough to inherit. We do not use grand and tainted honorifics like "la patrie" or "das Vaterland". We refer simply to this spot of earth, which belongs to us because we belong to it, have lived in it, loved it, defended it and established peace and prosperity within its borders.

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'Brexit will give us back pride in our island roots', The Times (18 November 2017), p. 35
4 months 1 week ago

Nothing exists! Neither life nor death. I watch mind and matter hunting each other like two nonexistent erotic phantasms - merging, begetting, disappearing - and I say: "This is what I want!" I know now: I do not hope for anything. I do not fear anything, I have freed myself from both the mind and the heart, I have mounted much higher, I am free. This is what I want. I want nothing more. I have been seeking freedom.

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This passage was used for Kazantzakis' epitaph: "Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα, δε φοβούμαι τίποτα, είμαι λεύτερος." I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.
2 months 1 week ago

Anybody can learn the form, but it doesn't carry truth until the context creates a meaning that actually corresponds with probability or present reality. Even if probability doesn't equate with possibility necessarily, it also isn't inherently impossible. Objective reality is talking, just listen.....preserve life....

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