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3 months 3 days ago

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The fundamental tenet of Steiner's teaching is that if we take the trouble to recognize the independent existence of the inner worlds of thought, and keep the mind turned in that direction, we shall soon become increasingly conscious of their reality. We are not, as Sartre believed, stranded in the universe of matter like a whale on a beach. That inner world is our natural home. Moreover, once we grasp this truth, we can also recognize that we ourselves possess an "essential ego," a "true self," a fundamental identity that goes far beyond our usual feeble sense of being "me."

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p. 26
3 months 2 weeks ago

I do not mean to be disrespectful, but the attempt of the Lords to stop the progress of reform reminds me very forcibly of the great storm at Sidmouth, and of the conduct of the excellent Mrs Partington on that occasion. In the winter of 1824 there set in a great flood upon that town - the tide rose to an incredible height - the waves rushed in upon the houses, and everything was threatened with destruction. In the midst of this sublime and terrible storm, Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach, was seen at the door of her house with mop and pattens, trundling her mop, squeezing out the sea-water, and vigorously pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was roused; Mrs. Partington's spirit was up. But I need not tell you that the contest was unequal.

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The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs. Partington. Speech at Taunton
7 months 3 days ago

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.

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Culture
7 months 4 days ago

All those to whom I looked up, were of opinion that the pleasure of sympathy with human beings, and the feelings which made the good of others, and especially of mankind on a large scale, the object of existence, were the greatest and surest sources of happiness. Of the truth of this I was convinced, but to know that a feeling would make me happy if I had it, did not give me the feeling.

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(p. 138)
7 months 5 days ago

As the strata of the earth preserve in succession the living creatures of past epochs, so the shelves of libraries preserve in succession the errors of the past and their expositions, which like the former were very lively and made a great commotion in their own age but now stand petrified and stiff in a place where only the literary palaeontologist regards them.

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Vol. 2 "On Books and Writing" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
7 months 4 days ago

He would have left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.

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3 months ago

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

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Education through Recreation (1932), p. 1.
3 months 2 weeks ago

The only originality I claim is that for me this truth goes hand in hand with the intellectual certainty that the human spirit is capable of creating in our time a new mentality, an ethical mentality. Inspired by this certainty, I too proclaim this truth in the hope that my testimony may help to prevent its rejection as an admirable sentiment but a practical impossibility. Many a truth has lain unnoticed for a long time, ignored simply because no one perceived its potential for becoming reality.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

I ... understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has primarily to do with distractions ... Women's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life or saintly life.

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Ch. 2
7 months 3 weeks ago

The superior man loves his soul; the inferior man loves his property.

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5 months ago

It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for 'natural' methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.

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Ch. 7. Family planning
7 months 2 days ago

Ideal legislators do not vote their interests.

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Chapter V, Section 43, p. 284
7 months 4 days ago

Ramsgate is full of Jews and fleas.

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MEKOR IV, 490, 25 August 1879
7 months 4 days ago

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

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Ch. 10: Recrudescence of Puritanism
4 months 1 week ago

If we already lived in a cruelty-free world, the notion of re-introducing suffering, exploitation and creatures eating each other would seem not so much frightful as unimaginable - no more seriously conceivable than reverting to surgery without anaesthesia today.

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Reprogramming Predators, BLTC Research, 2009
6 months 3 days ago

Just as when a man commits suicide ne negates the body, this rational limit of subjectivity, so when he lapses into fantastic and trascendental practice he associates himself with embodied divine and ghostly appearances, namely, he negates in practise the difference between imagination and perception.

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Part III, Section 29
6 months 4 days ago

This day I heard from Laurence who has sent me papers confirming the portentous State of France-where the Elements which compose Human Society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of Monsters to be producd in the place of it-where Mirabeau presides as the Grand Anarch; and the late Grand Monarch makes a figure as ridiculous as pitiable.

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Letter to Richard Burke (c. 10 October 1789), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), p. 30
7 months 5 days ago

He that knows anything, knows this, in the first place, that he need not seek long for instances of his ignorance.

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Book IV, Ch. 3, sec. 22
6 months 3 days ago

Though I myself am an atheist, I openly profess religion in the sense just mentioned, that is, a nature religion. I hate the idealism that wrenches man out of nature; I am not ashamed of my dependency on nature; I openly confess that the workings of nature affect not only my surface, my skin, my body, but also my core, my innermost being, that the air I breathe in bright weather has a salutary effect not only on my lungs but also on my mind, that the light of the sun illumines not only my eyes but also my spirit and my heart. And I do not, like a Christian, believe that such dependency is contrary to my true being or hope to be delivered from it. I know further that I am a finite moral being, that I shall one day cease to be. But I find this very natural and am therefore perfectly reconciled to the thought.

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Lecture V, R. Manheim, trans. (1967), pp. 35-36
5 months ago

You see, if you say something positive like the whole of life - all living things - is descended from a single common ancestor which lived about 4,000 million years ago and that we are all cousins, well that is an exceedingly important and true thing to say and that is what I want to say. Somebody who is religious sees that as threatening and so I am represented as attacking religion, and I am forced into responding to their reaction. But you do not have to see my main purpose as attacking religion. Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading. And that is what is so exciting for me.

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Kam Patel (28 April 1995) . "Going the whole hog". Times Higher Education.
3 months 3 days ago

The mother principle is that governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it.

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5 months 1 week ago

The first task of administrative theory is to develop a set of concepts that will permit the description, in terms relevant to the theory, of administrative situations. These concepts, to be scientifically useful, must be operational; that is, their meanings must correspond to empirically observable facts or situations.

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p. 43.
5 months 4 weeks ago

I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me.

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6 months 4 days ago

Humiliate the reason and distort the soul...

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Part 2, Chapter ?
7 months 1 week ago

When the act of navigation was made, though England and Holland were not actually at war, the most violent animosity subsisted between the two nations. ... It is not impossible, therefore, that some of the regulations of this famous act may have proceeded from national animosity. They are as wise, however, as if they had all been dictated by the most deliberate wisdom. National animosity at that particular time aimed at the very same object which the most deliberate wisdom would have recommended, the diminution of the naval power of Holland, the only naval power which could endanger the security of England.

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Chapter II
5 months 3 weeks ago

The utmost possible regarding an individual is a statement as to some order of probability about the future. Heisenberg's principle has been seized upon as a basis for wild statements to the effect that the doctrine of arbitrary free will and totally uncaused activity are now scientifically substantiated. Its actual force and significance is generalization of the idea that the individual is a temporal career whose future cannot logically be deduced from its past.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

A prudent man, in order to secure his tranquility, will consult his natural disposition in the choice of his plan of life. If, for example, he be persuaded that he should be happier in a state of marriage than in celibacy, he ought to marry; but if he be convinced that matrimony would be an impediment to his happiness, he ought to remain single.

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7 months 4 days ago

It is entirely clear that there is only one way in which great wars can be permanently prevented, and that is the establishment of an international government with a monopoly of serious armed force.

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"The Atomic Bomb and the Prevention of War" in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 10/1/1945
7 months 5 days ago

In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.

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"On the Sufferings of the World"
7 months 4 days ago

The harm that is done by a religion is of two sorts, the one depending on the kind of belief which it is thought ought to be given to it, and the other upon the particular tenets believed. As regards the kind of belief: it is thought virtuous to have faith-that is to say, to have a conviction which cannot be shaken by contrary evidence. Or, if contrary evidence might induce doubt, it is held that contrary evidence must be suppressed.

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preface xxiii
7 months 1 week ago

Cato said the best way to keep good acts in memory was to refresh them with new.

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No. 247
5 months 5 days ago

1. Find a subject you care about.2. Do not ramble, though.3. Keep it simple.4. Have the guts to cut.5. Sound like yourself.6. Say what you mean to say.7. Pity the readers.

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As quoted in Science Fictionisms (1995), compiled by William Rotsler
5 months 2 weeks ago

Democratic and aristocratic states are not in their own nature free. Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments; and even in these it is not always found. It is there only when there is no abuse of power. But constant experience shows us that every man who has power is inclined to abuse it; he goes until he finds limits. Is it not strange, though true, to say that virtue itself has need of limits?.To prevent this abuse, it is necessary that, by the arrangement of things, power shall stop power. A government may be so constituted, as no man shall be compelled to do things to which the law does not oblige him, nor forced to abstain from things which the law permits.

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Book XI, Chapter 4.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophy finds religion, and modifies it; and conversely religion is among the data of experience which philosophy must weave into its own scheme. Religion is an ultimate craving to infuse into the insistent particularity of emotion that non-temporal generality which primarily belongs to conceptual thought alone. In the higher organisms the differences of tempo between the mere emotions and the conceptual experiences produce a life-tedium, unless this supreme fusion has been effected. The two sides of the organism require a reconciliation in which emotional experiences illustrate a conceptual justification, and conceptual experiences find an emotional illustration.

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Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 6.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of our century. It was a dream offering the prospect of a society of perfect unity, in which all human aspirations would be fulfilled and all values reconciled.

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Epilogue, p. 1206
5 months 2 weeks ago

It is clearly absurd to say that if you go on adding atoms together until they have fused into a complex molecule, that molecule will become capable of self-reproduction. It is like saying that a skyscraper is more capable of reproduction than a bungalow. And suppose life did come into being through some accidental interaction of molecules, sun and cosmic rays; why should it not be content to rest passively? Why should it have been possessed of a desire to persist and evolve?

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p. 259
4 months 3 weeks ago

Kant's position is extremely subtle - so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.

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Some More -isms (p. 25)
8 months 6 days ago
Because of the way that myth takes it for granted that miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically inspired people the ancient Greeks, for instance more closely resembles a dream than it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker.
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8 months ago

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

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Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.

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E 11
5 months 2 weeks ago

"A man thinks he is dying for his country," said Anatole France, "but he is dying for a few industrialists." But even that is saying too much. What one dies for is not even so substantial and tangible as an industrialist.

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p. 224
3 months 3 days ago

Man, servant and interpreter of Nature, does and understands only as much as he has observed of the order of Nature, either in reality or in mind; he neither knows nor can do more.

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7 months 2 days ago

Catherine: Why commit Evil? Goetz: Because Good has already been done. Catherine: Who has done it? Goetz: God the Father. I, on the other hand, am improvising.

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Act 3, sc. 4

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