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3 months 1 week ago

In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.

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Ch. XII: "The Political Principles of Liberalism", §6, p. 267
4 months 1 week ago

All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.

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(p. 199)
5 months 1 week ago

When you love someone, you hope - the more closely to be attached - that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.

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A 727, B 755
6 months 2 weeks ago

So monstrous is the making and keeping them slaves at all, abstracted from the barbarous usage they suffer, and the many evils attending the practice; as selling husbands away from wives, children from parents, and from each other, in violation of sacred and natural ties; and opening the way for adulteries, incests, and many shocking consequences, for all of which the guilty Masters must answer to the final Judge.

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5 months 1 week ago

Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise?

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21:16 (KJV)
5 months 3 weeks ago

Half our days we pass in the shadow of the earth; and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Recognition of the subjectivity of the qualities of sense is found in Galilei (and also in Descartes and Hobbes) in a form closely related to the principle underlying the constructive mathematical method of our modern physics which repudiates" qualities".

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Introduction
7 months 5 days ago

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

We cannot abdicate our conscience to an organization, nor to a government. 'Am I my brother's keeper?' Most certainly I am! I cannot escape my responsibility by saying the State will do all that is necessary. It is a tragedy that nowadays so many think and feel otherwise.

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p. 309
6 months 3 weeks ago

There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.

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Ch. 1. Of the Inconstancy of Our Actions, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
7 months 1 week ago

He kept the middle way, that's all: he was the type of man for whom one has an affection of the mild but steady order - which is the kind that wears best.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

That persons have opposing interests and seek to advance their own conception of the good is not at all the same thing as their being moved by envy and jealousy.

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Chapter IX, Section 81, p. 540
2 months 1 week ago

Then what should we work for? Only this: proper understanding; unselfish action; truthful speech. A resolve to accept whatever happens as necessary and familiar, flowing like water from that same source and spring.

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(Hays translation) IV, 33
3 months 4 weeks ago

Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour. No known civilization has, ever reached the goal of civilization yet. There has never been a communion of saints on earth. In the least uncivilized society at its least uncivilized moment, the vast majority of its members have remained very near indeed to the primitive human level. And no society has ever been secure of holding such ground as it has managed to gain in its spiritual advance. Ch. 8: Civilization on Trial Variants: Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.

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As quoted in Reader's Digest (October 1958)
2 months 5 days ago

If A is success in life, then A = x + y + z. Work is x, play is y and z is keeping your mouth shut.

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Said to Samuel J Woolf, Berlin, Summer 1929. Cited with additional notes in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice and Freeman Dyson, Princeton UP (2010) p 230
6 months 3 weeks ago

This return of Republics back to their principles also results from the simple virtue of one man, without depending on any law that excites him to any execution: none the less, they are of such influence and example that good men desire to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life contrary to those examples.

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Book 3, Ch. 1
4 months 3 weeks ago

What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?

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D 62
6 months 2 weeks ago

There cannot any one moral Rule be propos'd, whereof a Man may not justly demand a Reason.

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Book I, Ch. 3, sec. 4
6 months 2 weeks ago

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

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Civilization
4 months 4 days ago

I finished the Iliad to-day... I never admired the old fellow so much, or was so strongly moved by him. What a privilege genius like his enjoys! I could not tear myself away. I read the last five books at a stretch during my walk to-day, and was at last forced to turn into a bypath, lest the parties of walkers should see me blubbering for imaginary beings, the creations of a ballad-maker who has been dead two thousand seven hundred years. What is the power and glory of Caesar and Alexander to that? Think what it would be to be assured that the inhabitants of Monomotapa would weep over one's writings.

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Anno Domini 4551! Letter to his niece Margaret (August 1851), quoted in George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Volume II (1876), pp. 186-187
6 months 2 weeks ago

Nature is the best posture-master.

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p. 167
5 months 2 weeks ago

The end of the philosophical dialogue lies in itself; it can never serve a purpose outside of itself. Just as a sculptor does not cease to be a work of art even if it lies at the bottom of the sea, so indeed every work of philosophy endures, even if uncomprehended in its own time. One would be grateful if it were merely a matter of incomprehension. Instead, the work is usually refitted and appropriated by various entities-some playing the part of the opponent; others, that of the proponent.

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P.3-4
4 months 1 week ago

To forget the wrongs you receive, is to remedy them.

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Maxim 383
5 months 6 days ago

The concept of God was for a long time the place where the idea was kept alive that there are other norms besides those to which nature and society give expression in their operation.

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"Thoughts on Religion," Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1995), p. 129.
6 months 2 weeks ago

I don't like the spirit of socialism - I think freedom is the basis of everything.

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Letter to Constance Malleson (Colette), September 29, 1916
5 months 1 week ago

What thinkest thou, Simon? of whom do the kings of the earth take custom or tribute? of their own children, or of strangers?

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17:25 (KJV)
2 months 1 week ago

You're better off not giving the small things more time than they deserve.

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(Hays translation) IV, 32
2 months 2 weeks 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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7 months 2 weeks ago

The refined and active, on the other hand, prefer honour, which I suppose may be said to be the end of the political life. Yet honour is plainly too superficial to be the object of our search, because it appears to depend rather on those who give than on those who receive it, whereas we feel instinctively that the good must be something proper to a man, which cannot easily be taken from him.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

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Part 3, Chapter 10
7 months 2 weeks ago

For the purposes of poetry a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

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6 months 1 week ago

A great prison structure was planned, whose different levels would correspond exactly to the levels of the centralized administration. The scaffold, where the body of the tortured criminal had been exposed to the ritually manifested force of the sovereign, the punitive theatre in which the representation of punishment was permanently available to the social body, was replaced by a great enclosed, complex and hierarchized structure that was integrated into the very body of the state apparatus.

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Chapter Three, The Gentle Way in Punishment
5 months 2 weeks ago

Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.

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Speech on the Petition of the Unitarians (11 May 1792), volume vii, p. 50
3 months 5 days ago

The news of this barbaric orgy of military sadism was kept from the world for half a year. A belated commission of inquiry was appointed by the Government. A committee appointed by the Indian National Congress made a more through investigation and reported 1,200 killed, and 3,600 wounded. Gen. Dyer was censured by the House of Commons, exonerated by the House of Lords, and was retired on a pension. Thinking this was insufficient the militarists of the Empire raised a fund of $150,000 for him and presented him with a jeweled sword of honor. (source: The Case for India - By Will Durant Simon and Schuster, New York. 1930 p. This book was banned by the British Government. Durant held the view that no part of the world suffered so much poverty andoppression as India did and that this was largely due to British imperialism).

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2 months 3 weeks ago

We witness a strange inversion: on the one hand, the endeavor to turn the social contract into a less calculating and more feeling connection among its members; on the other hand, the endeavor to turn the erotic relationship into a contractual one.

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p. 15.
6 months 6 days ago

The pleasure is only for a little moment, and it [passes] like a dream, and a man at the end thereof finds death through knowing it.

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Maxim no. 18. Translated by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, Teaching Of Amenem Apt Son Of Kanekht (London: Martin Hopkinson and Company Ltd, 1924) p. 58
3 months 4 weeks ago

The system of technological production that we have today has been justified in terms of creating more goods to feed more people and to meet more needs. But it actually destroys more of the resources that we need in order to meet those multiple needs. If we shift to an ecological perception, a diversity perception, we realize that some of the instruments of which we are very proud are actually extremely primitive for dealing with nature. To me that is the great lesson of ecological awareness at the turn of the millennium.

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1998
5 months 1 day ago

Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just. This reintegration with the good is what punishment is. Every man who is innocent, or who has finally expiated guilt, needs to be recognized as honourable to the same extent as anyone else.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

It is the part of cowardice, not of courage, to go and crouch in a hole under a massive tomb, to avoid the blows of fortune.

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Ch. 3. A Usage of the Island of Cea, tr. George B. Ives, 1925
5 months 1 week ago

I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.

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Letter to Victoria, Lady Welby (1908) SS 80-81
7 months 2 weeks ago

A man who for a long time has gone around hiding a secret becomes mentally deranged. At this point one would imagine that his secret would have to come out, but despite his derangement his soul still sticks to its hideout, and those around him become even more convinced that the false story he told to deceive them is the truth. He is healed of his insanity, knows everything that has gone on, and thereby perceives that nothing has been betrayed. Was this gratifying to him or not; he might wish to have disposed of his secret in his madness; it seems as if there were a fate which forced him to remain in his secret and would not let him go away from it. Or was it for the best, was there a guardian spirit who helped him keep his secret.

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4 months 1 week ago

The judge is condemned when the guilty is absolved.

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Maxim 407 Adopted by the original Edinburgh Review magazine as its motto.
7 months 1 week ago

Since those who rule in the city do so because they own a lot, I suppose they're unwilling to enact laws to prevent young people who've had no discipline from spending and wasting their wealth, so that by making loans to them, secured by the young people's property, and then calling those loans in, they themselves become even richer and more honored.

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5 months 1 week ago

Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life.... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.

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Introduction, sect. 6
6 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.

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Ch. 31. Of Divine Ordinances, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
4 months 2 weeks ago

It is not sufficient to observe our mysteries in the seclusion of our lodge-we must act-act! We are drowsing, but we must act. (Pierre raised his notebook and began to read.) For the dissemination of pure truth and to secure the triumph of virtue," he read, "we must cleanse men from prejudice, diffuse principles in harmony with the spirit of the times, undertake the education of the young, unite ourselves in indissoluble bonds with the wisest men, boldly yet prudently overcome superstitions, infidelity, and folly, and form of those devoted to us a body linked together by unity of purpose and possessed of authority and power.

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