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4 months 3 weeks ago

You can't lead the people if you don't love the people. You can't save the people, if you don't serve the people.

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Hope on a Tightrope: Words and Wisdom (2008); also on "The Way I See It" Starbucks Coffee Cup #284
5 months 3 days ago

I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.

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Letter to Gilbert Murray, March 21, 1903
2 months 4 weeks ago

No doubt some of your cousins and great-uncles died in childhood, but not a single one of your ancestors did. Ancestors just don't die young!

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Ch. 3. Immortal Coils

My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

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Letter to Robert Fulford, 1964. Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 300
1 month 3 weeks ago

These are the two vices that beset Government Offices; both of them originating in insufficient Intellect,-that sad insufficiency from which, directly or indirectly, all evil whatsoever springs!

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1 month 2 days ago

We cannot hope to be secure when our government has declared, by its readiness "to act alone," its willingness to be everybody's enemy.

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3 months 1 week ago

To require that all of these must be reducible to a single version is to make the mistake of supposing that 'Which are the real objects?' is a question that makes sense independently of our choice of concepts.

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Lecture I: Is There Still Anything to Say about Reality and Truth?
1 month 3 weeks ago

It depends on what we read, after all manner of Professors have done their best for us.

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With Leibnitz the extent to which thoughts advance is the extent of the universe; where comprehension ceases, the universe ceases, and God begins: so that later it was even maintained that to be comprehended was derogatory to God, because He was thus degraded into finitude. In that procedure a beginning is made from the determinate, this and that are stated to be necessary; but since in the next place the unity of these moments is not comprehended, it is transferred to God. God is therefore, as it were, the waste channel into which all contradictions flow: Leibnitz's Théodicée is just a popular summing up such as this.

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Third division, Chapter I. - The Metaphysics of the Understanding Alternate translation: "God is, as it were, the sewer into which all contradictions flow."
4 weeks 1 day 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
3 weeks 1 day ago

I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. The Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine philosophically. In that respect, I am not a Jew.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Let us ask the Gods not for possessions, but for things to do; happiness is in making things rather than consuming them.

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Ch. 2 : On Youth
5 months 4 days ago

The christian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun.

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An Essay on the Origin of Free-Masonry (1803-1805); found in manuscript form after Paine's death and thought to have been written for an intended part III of The Age of Reason. It was partially published in 1810 and published in its entirety in 1818.
6 months 5 days ago
Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.
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3 months 3 weeks ago

Persons who feel themselves to be exiles in this world-and what noble mind, from Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?-are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.

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pp. 39-40
6 months 3 days ago

For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn.

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I heard what you were saying. You - you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.

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Cameo appearance as himself in Woody Allen's 1977 film Annie Hall
5 months 2 days ago

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.

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"Note on Dogma"
2 months 4 weeks ago

The likelihood is that, in 100,000 years time, we shall either have reverted to wild barbarism, or else civilisation will have advanced beyond all recognition - into colonies in outer space, for instance. In either case, evolutionary extrapolations from present conditions are likely to be highly misleading.

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4 weeks 1 day ago

No form of Nature is inferior to Art; for the arts merely imitate natural forms.

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Meditations. xi. 10.
3 months 4 weeks ago

Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it; hence the mind feels more comfortable in the society of a braggart than in that of a martyr; and nothing is more repugnant to it than the spectacle of dying for an idea.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

In philosophy the race is to the one who can run slowest-the one who crosses the finish line last.

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p. 40e
3 months 4 weeks ago

To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.

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"The Meaning of Life".
5 months 3 days ago

What, in unenlightened societies, colour, race, religion, or in the case of a conquered country, nationality, are to some men, sex is to all women; a peremptory exclusion from almost all honourable occupations, but either such as cannot be fulfilled by others, or such as those others do not think worthy of their acceptance.

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Ch. 4
5 months 3 days ago

I now saw, that a science is either deductive or experimental, according as, in the province it deals with, the effects of causes when conjoined, are or are not the sums of the effects which the same causes produce when separate. It followed that politics must be a deductive science. It thus appeared, that both Macaulay and my father were wrong; the one in assimilating the method of philosophising in politics to the purely experimental method of chemistry; while the other, though right in adopting a deductive method, had made a wrong selection of one, having taken as the type of deduction, not the appropriate process, that of the deductive branches of natural philosophy, but the inappropriate one of pure geometry, which, not being a science of causation at all, does not require or admit of any summing-up of effects.

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(pp. 160-161)
4 weeks 1 day ago

Look beneath the surface; let not the several quality of a thing nor its worth escape thee.

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VI, 3
3 months 2 weeks ago

What is beginning to emerge, then, is a theory about psychic sensitivity. It runs as follows. When I relax deeply, it is as if someone opened up the partition between the two compartments of my brain, turning them into a single large room. I experience a sense of mental freedom as if I can suddenly breathe more deeply, and a feeling of contact with things. Everyone has had the experience of being in a state of hurry or excitement, and failing to notice that they have bruised or scratched themselves -- until the excitement evaporates and the pain makes itself known. Hurry and tension raise our sensitivity threshold, and at the same time, erect a glass wall between us and reality. In the "unicameral" state, this wall vanishes, and everything seems more real.

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p. 51
4 months 3 weeks ago

The enmity of one's kindred is far more bitter than the enmity of strangers.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Contrary to earlier prejudices, there is nothing inherently progressive about evolution.

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Chapter 7 "Constructive Evolution" (p. 178)
3 months 3 weeks ago

Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being.

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"Man has no nature"
3 months 2 weeks ago

The Kropotkins, the Perovskayas, the Breshkovskayas, and hosts of others repudiated wealth and station and refused to serve King Mammon. They went among the people, not to lift them up but themselves to be lifted up, to be instructed, and in return to give themselves wholly to the people. That accounts for the heroism, the art, the literature of Russia, the unity between the people, the mujik and the intellectual. That to some extent explains the literature of all European countries, the fact that the Strindbergs, the Hauptmanns, the Wedekinds, the Brieux, the Mirbeaus, the Steinlins and Rodins have never dissociated themselves from the people.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Unrighteous fortune seldom spares the highest worth; no one with safety can long front so frequent perils. Whom calamity oft passes by she finds at last.

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lines 325-328; (Megara).
2 months 4 weeks ago

Though the coming of the day is still the most inspiriting, yet day's departure, also, and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us; and in the pastures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the absence of the load.

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Toils And Pleasures.
3 months 2 weeks ago

The Outsider may be an artist, but the artist is not necessarily an Outsider.

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Chapter one, The Country of the Blind
5 months 3 days ago

In all affairs - love, religion, politics, or business - it's a healthy idea, now and then, to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

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As quoted in The Reader's Digest, Vol. 37 (1940), p. 90; no specific source given.
3 months 1 week ago

Analytic philosophers - both in the 'constructivist' camp and in the camp that studies 'the ordinary use of words' - are disturbingly unanimous in regarding 2-valued logic as having a privileged position: privileged, not just in the sense of corresponding to the way we do speak, but in the sense of having no serious rival for logical reasons. If the foregoing analysis is correct, this is a prejudice of the same kind as the famous prejudice in favor of a privileged status for Euclidean geometry (a prejudice that survives in the tendency to cite 'space has three dimensions' as some kind of 'necessary' truth). One can go over from a 2-valued to a 3-valued logic without totally changing the meaning of 'true' and 'false'; and not just in silly ways, like the ones usually cited (e.g. equating truth with high probability, falsity with low probability, and middlehood with 'in between' probability).

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"Three-valued logic"
5 months 3 days 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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6 months 3 days ago

It is of this sort of divine service I used the expression that, in comparison with the Christianity of the New Testament, it is playing Christianity. The expression is essentially true and characterizes the thing perfectly. For what does it mean to play, when one reflects how the word must be understood in this connection? It means to imitate, to counterfeit, a danger when there is no danger, and to do it in such a way that the more art is applied to it, the more delusive the pretense is that the danger is present.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

So watch yourselves. If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. If he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, 'I repent,' forgive him.

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(Luke 17:3-4) (NIV)
1 month 1 week ago

I have twice gone fishing with rod and line just because other boys asked me to, but this sport was soon made impossible for me by the treatment of the worms that were put on the hook for bait, and the wrenching of the mouths of the fishes that were caught. I gave it up, and even found courage enough to dissuade other boys from going.

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5 months 2 days ago

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue.

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Race
2 months 3 weeks ago

We are not born free, nor do we come into this world with a self-identity and autonomy of our own. We achieve those things, through the conflict and cooperation that weave us into the social fabric.

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Where We Are: The State of Britain Now
4 months 3 weeks ago

The friendship of one wise man is better than the friendship of a host of fools.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

For what is specific in the Catholic religion is immortalization and not justification, in the Protestant sense. Rather is this latter ethical. It is from Kant, in spite of what orthodox Protestants may think of him, that Protestantism derived its penultimate conclusions - namely, that religion rests upon morality, and not morality upon religion, as in Catholicism.

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5 months 2 days ago

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

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1 month 1 week ago

Example is not the main thing. It is the only thing. That is, if the one giving the example is not saying to himself, 'Behold I am giving an example.' That spoils it. Anyone thinking of the example he will give to others has lost his simplicity. Only as a man has simplicity can his example influence others. Sometimes presented in paraphrased form, such as "Example is not the main thing in influencing others, it is the only thing".

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5 months 5 days ago

For instance, if you have by a lie hindered a man who is even now planning a murder, you are legally responsible for all the consequences. But if you have strictly adhered to the truth, public justice can find no fault with you, be the unforeseen consequence what it may. It is possible that whilst you have honestly answered Yes to the murderer's question, whether his intended victim is in the house, the latter may have gone out unobserved, and so not have come in the way of the murderer, and the deed therefore have not been done; whereas, if you lied and said he was not in the house, and he had really gone out (though unknown to you) so that the murderer met him as he went, and executed his purpose on him, then you might with justice be accused as the cause of his death. For, if you had spoken the truth as well as you knew it, perhaps the murderer while seeking for his enemy in the house might have been caught by neighbours coming up and the deed been prevented.

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