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5 months 3 weeks ago

The need of black conservatives to gain the respect of their white peers deeply shapes certain elements of their conservatism. In this regard, they simply want what most people want, to be judged by the quality of their skills, not by the color of their skin. But the black conservatives overlook the fact that affirmative action policies were political responses to the pervasive refusal of most white Americans to judge black Americans on that basis.

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(p52)
4 months 4 weeks ago

The objects of a financier are, then, to secure an ample revenue; to impose it with judgment and equality; to employ it economically; and, when necessity obliges him to make use of credit, to secure its foundations in that instance, and for ever, by the clearness and candour of his proceedings, the exactness of his calculations, and the solidity of his funds.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

When an astronomer tells me that some stellar phenomenon, which his telescope reveals to him at this moment, happened... fifty years ago... I... ask... how he has measured the velocity of light.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.

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The Idolatry of Politics, U.S. Jefferson Lecture speech
5 months 4 weeks ago

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

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3 months 1 week ago

The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitious - fabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance.

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"The interpreters of Genesis and the interpreters of Nature"
5 months 3 weeks ago

He [God] lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another. When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it.

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Book II, Chapter 4, "The Perfect Penitent"
1 month 3 weeks ago

You say you are a Calvinist. I am not. I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know.

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Letter to Ezra Stiles Ely (25 June 1819), published in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1983) by Dickinson W. Adams
2 months 1 week ago

Must we then speak of this subject also: and shall we write concerning things that are not to be told, and shall we publish things not to be divulged, and secrets not to be spoken aloud? Who indeed is Attis or Gallos; who the Mother of the Gods; what is the reason of this rule of Chastity; moreover for what cause has such an institution been established among us from remote antiquity; handed down to us indeed from the most ancient of the Phrygians, but accepted in the first place by the Greeks - and those not the vulgar herd, but the Athenians - taught by the event that they had not done well in ridiculing him that was performing the rites of the Great Mother. For they are said to have insulted and driven off the Gallos, as one who was making innovations in religion: because they did not understand the character of the goddess, or how that she was the very "Deo", "Rhea," and " "Demeter" so much honoured amongst them themselves.

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6 months 6 days ago

States as great engines move slowly.

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Book II
6 months 4 weeks ago

For as only one thing is necessary, and as the theme of the talk is the willing of only one thing: hence the consciousness before God of one's eternal responsibility to be an individual is that one thing necessary.

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6 months 5 days ago

Not because Socrates said so, but because it is in truth my own disposition - and perchance to some excess - I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as a Frenchman, making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond.

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Ch. 9
4 months 1 week ago

Newton's law is nothing but the statistics of gravitation, it has no power whatever. Let us get rid of the idea of power from law altogether. Call law tabulation of facts, expression of facts, or what you will; anything rather than suppose that it either explains or compels.

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Suggestions for Thought : Selections and Commentaries (1994), edited by Michael D. Calabria and Janet A. MacRae, p. 41
6 months 1 day ago

Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to an opera, to court? He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow.

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Demea to Philo, Part X
6 months 3 weeks ago

There is a kind of selective memory that afflicts men when they view the past. They see the good and overlook the evil.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Those who have a well-ordered character lead also a well-ordered life.

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4 months 1 day ago

God created everything by number, weight and measure.

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As quoted in Symmetry in Plants (1998) by Roger V. Jean and Denis Barabé, p. xxxvii
5 months 2 weeks ago

Virtue is the same for a man and for a woman.

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§ 5
2 months 1 week ago

We have, as a result of two thousand years of Christianity, sex on the brain. Which isn't always the best place for it.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Everything predicted by the enemies of banks, in the beginning, is now coming to pass. We are to be ruined now by the deluge of bank paper. It is cruel that such revolutions in private fortunes should be at the mercy of avaricious adventurers, who, instead of employing their capital, if any they have, in manufactures, commerce, and other useful pursuits, make it an instrument to burden all the interchanges of property with their swindling profits, profits which are the price of no useful industry of theirs.

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Letter to Thomas Cooper, 1814. ME 14:61
6 months 3 weeks ago

I consider one of the most important duties of any scientist the teaching of science to students and to the general public.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

All that happens is as usual and familiar as the rose in spring and the crop in summer.

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IV, 44
3 months 4 weeks ago

Nonviolence has now to be understood less as a moral position adopted by individuals in relation to a field of possible action than as a social and political practice undertaken in concert, culminating in a form of resistance to systemic forms of destruction coupled with a commitment to world building that honors global interdependency of the kind that embodies ideals of economic, social, and political freedom and equality.

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p. 20
6 months 1 day ago

Avarice and injustice are always shortsighted, and they did not foresee how much this regulation must obstruct improvement, and thereby hurt in the long-run the real interest of the landlord.

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Chapter II, p. 426-427.
2 months 1 week ago

Of the splendid constellation of great names... we admire the living and revere dead far too warmly and too deeply to suffer us sit in judgment on their respective claims to in this or that particular discovery; to balance mathematical skill of one against the experimental dexterity of another, or the philosophical acumen a third. So long as "one star differs from another in glory," - so long as there shall exist varieties, or even incompatibilities of excellence, - so long will the admiration of mankind be found sufficient for all who merit it.

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On the Theory of Light (1828) p.494
4 months 2 weeks ago

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.

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The Legend of the Baal-Shem (1955),1995 edition, p. 36
5 months 4 weeks ago

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those they have slain.

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3 months 1 week ago

The wise man should restrain his senses like the crane and accomplish his purpose with due knowledge of his place, time and ability.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner "state" in which the thinking comes to pass.

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Lecture XX, "Conclusions"
5 months 1 week ago

Having departed from your house, turn not back; for the furies will be your attendants.

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Symbol 15
5 months 4 days ago

In the pursuit of truth we must beware of being misled by terms which we do not rightly understand. That is the chief point. Almost all philosophers utter the caution; few observe it.

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Paragraph 1
4 months 3 weeks ago

If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive !

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5 months 3 days ago

Art is the perfection of nature.

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Section 16
1 month 2 weeks ago

Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.

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Ch. 15
5 months 3 weeks ago

The ceremonial (hot or cold) as opposed to the haphazard (lukewarm) characterizes piety.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 127
5 months 3 weeks ago

There is no knowledge that is not power.

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Old Age
6 months 4 weeks ago

If self-knowledge does not lead to knowing oneself before God - well, then there is something to what purely human self-observation says, namely, this self-knowledge leads to a certain emptiness that produces dizziness. Only by being before God can one totally come to oneself in the transparency of soberness.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Instead of noble men, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, round a little there and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

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Editorial, Andhra Granthalayam, vol. 1, no. 2 (1939) p. 6
5 months 4 weeks ago

The labour-power is a commodity, not capital, in the hands of the labourer, and it constitutes for him a revenue so long as he can continuously repeat its sale; it functions as capital after its sale, in the hands of the capitalist, during the process of production itself.

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Vol. II, Ch. XIX, p. 384.
6 months 1 day ago

By the removal of the unnecessary mouths, and by extracting from the farmer the full value of the farm, a greater surplus, or what is the same thing, the price of a greater surplus, was obtained for the proprietor...

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Chapter IV, p. 450 (On Highland Clearances).
5 months 2 weeks ago

But, when the elements have been mingled in the fashion of a man and come to the light of day, or in the fashion of the race of wild beasts or plants or birds, then men say that these come into being; and when they are separated, they call that woeful death. They call it not aright; but I too follow the custom, and call it so myself.

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fr. 9 As quoted by John Burnet, Early Greek philosophy (1908) p. 240
2 months 3 weeks ago

Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.

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As quoted in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (1957) by Stillman Drake, p. 92
6 months 1 week ago

Life is one long struggle in the dark.

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Book II, line 54 (tr. Rouse)
5 months 3 weeks ago

The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.

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p. 125
6 months 5 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

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