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3 months 2 weeks ago

Incorporeal hypostases, in descending, are distributed into parts, and multiplied about individuals with a diminution of power; but when they ascend by their energies beyond bodies, they become united, and proceed into a simultaneous subsistence, through exuberance of power.

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3 months 2 days ago

In most cases, people, even the most vicious, are much more naive and simple-minded than we assume them to be. And this is true of ourselves too.

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1 week 3 days ago

As for Hitler, he nourished a fundamental aversion to the monarchy and, as we have noted, his polemic against the Habsburgs, for instance, was of an unparalleled vulgarity. For Hitler, the Volk alone was the principle of legitimacy. He was established as its direct representative and guide, without intermediaries, and it was to follow him unconditionally. No higher princple existed or was tolerated by him. Therefore it is perfectly correct to speak of a consolidated populist dictatorship employing the tools of a single party and the myth of the Volk. Not only the ancient German traditions, but also the very concept of Reich and, as we shall see, the concept of race were brought by Hitler to the level of the masses, which implied their degradation and distorition. Still, in this context they became tools of great power.

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p. 35
2 months 4 weeks ago

Can it really be that for us existence means exile, and nothingness, home?

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4 months 1 day ago

Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.

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1 week 6 days ago

Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about it than adults.

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Inside Information p. 4
4 months 3 days 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)
2 months 4 weeks ago

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

Yet with every allowance, one feels it difficult to see how any mortal ever could consider this Koran as a Book written in Heaven, too good for the Earth; as a well-written book, or indeed as a book at all; and not a bewildered rhapsody; written, so far as writing goes, as badly as almost any book ever was!

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4 months 1 week ago

Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.

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2 weeks 3 days ago

No one is able to rule unless he is also able to be ruled.

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De Ira (On Anger): Book 2, cap. 15, line 4
5 months 4 days ago
The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch.
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2 months 4 weeks ago

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.

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4 months 1 week ago

Cleanness of body was ever deemed to proceed from a due reverence to God.

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Book II
1 month 2 weeks ago

We have been Godlike in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbitlike in our unplanned breeding of ourselves.

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Man and Hunger: The Perspectives of History, entered into the Congressional Record by Senator Ernest Gruening
2 months 4 days ago

I was taught in the sixth grade that we had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it. I got a very good grade.

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As quoted by James Lundquist in Kurt Vonnegut
5 months 3 days ago

Freedom's possibility is not the ability to choose the good or the evil. The possibility is to be able. In a logical system, it is convenient to say that possibility passes over into actuality. However, in actuality it is not so convenient, and an intermediate term is required. The intermediate term is anxiety, but it no more explains the qualitative leap than it can justify it ethically. Anxiety is neither a category of necessity nor a category of freedom; it is entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not by necessity, but in itself.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

To preserve permanent good health, the state of mind must be taken into consideration.

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3rd Part
3 months 3 weeks ago

I'd rather be mad than feel pleasure.

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§ 3; quoted also by Eusebius of Caesarea, Praeparatio Evangelica xv. 13
1 month 4 weeks ago

Even a single hair casts its shadow.

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Maxim 228
2 weeks 3 days ago

Because our time is struggling toward the word with which it may express its spirit, many names come to the fore and all make claim to being the right one. Without our assistance, time will not bring the right word to light; we must all work together on it. If, however, so much depends on us, we may reasonably ask what they have made of us and what they propose to make of us; we ask about the education through which they seek to make us creators of that word. Do they conscientiously cultivate our predisposition to become creators or do they treat us only as creatures whose nature simply permits training? Therefore we are concerned above all with what they make of us in the time of our plasticity; the school question is a life question.

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p. 11
2 months 3 weeks ago

The present stage redefines the possibilities of man and nature in accordance with the new means available for their realization.

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p. 65
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is better to conceal ignorance than to expose it.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

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6 months 1 day ago

Caring about others....all you need to know....

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4 months 1 day ago

You take souls for vegetables.... The gardener can decide what will become of his carrots but no one can choose the good of others for them.

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Heinrich, Act 5, sc. 3

All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.

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(p. 178-179)
4 months 2 weeks ago

We should never take pleasure in causing pain to others, even to those who have wronged us, but rather strive to do good to all.

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3 months 3 days ago

If any ask me what a free Government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so, - and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter.

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2 months 5 days ago

Yet there is a certain solitude like no other - that of the man preparing his meal in public on a wall, or on the hood of his car, or along a fence, alone. You see that all the time here. It is the saddest sight in the world. Sadder than destitution, sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honour of sharing or disputing each other's food. He who eats alone is dead (but not he who drinks alone. Why is this?).

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New York (p. 15)
2 months 2 weeks ago

With the conception that the Revolution was only a means of securing political power, it was inevitable that all revolutionary values should be subordinated to the needs of the Socialist State; indeed, exploited to further the security of the newly acquired governmental power.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

For it is not death or pain that is to be feared, but the fear of pain or death.

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(Book II, ch. 1) Book II, ch. 1, 13.
3 weeks 2 days ago

We must now ask how changes of this sort can come about, considering first discoveries, or novelties of fact, and then inventions, or novelties of theory. That distinction between discovery and invention or between fact and theory will, however, immediately prove to be exceedingly artificial.

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p. 52
3 months 3 weeks ago

Enjoyment of the work consists in participation in the creative state of the artist.

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p. 117
2 months 2 days ago

Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.

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Ch. II
2 months 4 weeks ago

The next simplest feature that is common to all that comes before the mind, and consequently, the second category, is the element of Struggle.

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Lecture II : The Universal Categories, § 2 : Struggle, CP 5.45
4 months 1 day ago

In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free.

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Letter to James Baldwin
4 months 2 days ago

The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.

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"What Pragmatism Means," Pragmatism, pp. 60-61 (1931); lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute, Boston, Massachusetts
4 months 1 day ago

I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.

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Diary entry of Friday (2 February), concerning a card game
3 months 2 weeks ago

Cato the elder wondered how that city was preserved wherein a fish was sold for more than an ox.

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Cato the Elder
3 months 3 weeks ago

If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. But the most important and effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us, and we can decide on this only with the utmost difficulty.

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p. 60e
4 weeks ago

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

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Walden Two (1948), p. 95
3 weeks 2 days ago

How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they?

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Burns.
4 months 4 weeks ago

When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one's wit at the expense of one's better nature.

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3 months 1 week ago

Patience cometh by the grace of the Soul.

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4 months 2 days ago

We are always getting ready to live, but never living.

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April 12, 1834
2 months 3 weeks ago

And the Science of them, is the true and onely Moral Philosophy. For Moral Philosophy is nothing else but the Science of what is Good, and Evill, in the conversation, and Society of mankind. Good, and Evill, are names that signify our Appetites, and Aversions; which in different tempers, customes, and doctrines of men, are different.

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The First Part, Chapter 15, p. 79
3 months 1 week ago

There is no word or action but has its echo in Eternity. Thought is an Idea in transit, which when once released, never can be lured back, nor the spoken word recalled. Nor ever can the overt act be erased All that thou thinkest, sayest, or doest bears perpetual record of itself, enduring for Eternity.

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As quoted in Pythagoron: The Religious, Moral, and Ethical Teachings of Pythagoras (1947) by Hobart Huson, p. 99

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