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3 months 2 weeks ago

Love responsibility. Say: "It is my duty, and mine alone, to save the earth. If it is not saved, then I alone am to blame." Love each man according to his contribution in the struggle. Do not seek friends; seek comrades-in-arms.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

I am a sick man... I am a wicked man. An unattractive man.

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Part 1, Chapter 1
7 months 2 weeks ago

Free in this world as the birds in the air, disengaged from every kind of chains, those who have practiced the Yoga gather in Brahmin the certain fruit of their works. Depend upon it; rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully. This Yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he heard wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him and he goes, he acts as animating original matter. To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a Yogi.

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Letter to H. G. O. Blake, November 20, 1849
7 months 2 weeks ago

The Vedas contain a sensible account of God." "The veneration in which the Vedas are held is itself a remarkable feat. Their code embraced the whole moral life of the Hindus and in such a case there is no other truth than sincerity. Truth is such by reference to the heart of man within, not to any standard without.

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A Tribute to Hinduism, 2008
7 months 2 weeks ago

Persecution of powerless or power-losing groups may not be a very pleasant spectacle, but it does not spring from human meanness alone. What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use. Even exploitation and oppression still make society work and establish some kind of order. Only wealth without power or aloofness without a policy are felt to be parasitical, useless, revolting, because such conditions cut all the threads which tie men together. Wealth which does not exploit lacks even the relationship which exists between exploiter and exploited; aloofness without policy does not imply even the minimum concern of the oppressor for the oppressed.

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Part 1, Ch. 1, § 1
7 months 2 weeks ago

The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy; I mean that if you are happy you will be good.

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Part I: Man and Nature, Ch. 1: Current Perplexities, p. 10
5 months 2 weeks ago

The discarnate TV user lives in a world between fantasy and dream, and is in a typically hypnotic state, which is the ultimate form and level of participation.

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"A Last Look at the Tube." New York Magazine, 17 March 1978, p. 45-48
5 months 3 weeks ago

Probability fractions arise from our knowledge and from our ignorance.

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Chapter 14, Equipossibility, p. 132.
6 months 1 week ago

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The truth can wait, for she lives a long life.

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Willen in der Natur (On the Will in Nature), 1836;
6 months 1 week ago

Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.

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6 months 1 week ago

Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, and he followeth not us: and we forbad him, because he followeth not us. But Jesus said, Forbid him not: for there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name, that can lightly speak evil of me. For he that is not against us is on our part.

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Mark 9:38-40 (KJV)
5 months 6 days ago

Let us remember that the government and the society act and react on each other. Sometimes the government is in advance of the society, and hurries the society forward. So urged, the society gains on the government, comes up with the government, outstrips the government, and begins to insist that the government shall make more speed. If the government is wise, it will yield to that just and natural demand. The great cause of revolutions is this, that, while nations move onward, constitutions stand still. The peculiar happiness of England is that here, through many generations, the constitution has moved onward with the nation.

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Speech in the House of Commons on the Reform Bill (5 July 1831), quoted in Speeches of the Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay, M.P. (1854), p. 25
6 months 1 week ago

The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Every crusader is apt to go mad. He is haunted by the wickedness which he attributes to his enemies; it becomes in some sort a part of him.

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Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudon Chatto & Windus, London, (1951), ch. 9, p. 274
8 months 2 weeks ago
What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him even concerning his own body in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw away the key.
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4 months 1 week ago

Liberal values like tolerance and individual freedom are prized most intensely when they are denied: People who live in brutal dictatorships want the simple freedom to speak, associate, and worship as they choose. But over time life in a liberal society comes to be taken for granted and its sense of shared community seems thin.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

When we come to think about the several benefits in regard to their cause, how have they arisen? Have they arisen out of hate of others and injuring others? Of course we should say no. We should say they have arisen out of love of others and benefiting others. If we should classify one by one all those who love others and benefit others, should we find them to be partial or universal? Of course we should say they are universal. Now, since universal love is the cause of the major benefits in the world, therefore Mozi proclaims universal love is right. And, as has already been said, the interest of the magnanimous lies in procuring benefits for the world and eliminating its calamities. Now that we have found out the consequences of universal love to be the major benefits of the world and the consequences of partiality to be the major calamities in the world; this is the reason why Mozi said partiality is wrong and universality is right.

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Book 4; Universal Love III
6 months 3 weeks ago

All things are in all.

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V 9; as translated by Dorothea Waley Singer
4 months 4 weeks ago

Now civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them which they fail to meet.

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Ch. 8: Civilization on Trial
7 months 2 weeks ago

There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.

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"The Expanding Mental Universe", Saturday Evening Post, 7/1/1959
8 months 2 weeks ago

The whole business of the kingly weaving is comprised in this and this alone: in never allowing the self-restrained characters to be separated from the courageous, but in weaving them together by common beliefs and honors and dishonors and opinions and interchanges of pledges, thus making of them a smooth and, as we say, well-woven fabric, and then entrusting to them in common forever the offices of the state.

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6 months 1 week ago

You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.

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Matthew 5:13-16 (NIV) (See also: Mark 9:50; Luke 14:34, 35)
5 months 2 weeks ago

Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.

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5 months 1 week ago

Many Britons...feel strongly about something which was once called "the alien wedge". And surely it cannot be doubted, even by those who profess allegiance to the "multicultural society", that our society, unlike America, is not of that kind, and therefore that immigration cannot be an object of merely passive contemplation on the part of the present citizenship. There is perhaps no greater sign of the strength of liberalism (a strength which issues, not from popular consensus, but from the political power of the liberal elite) than that it has made it impossible for any but the circumlocutory to argue that the English, the Scots and the Welsh have a prior claim to the benefits of the civilization that their ancestors created, which entitles them to reserve its benefits for themselves.

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The Meaning of Conservatism: Third Edition (2001), p. 62
7 months 3 weeks ago

All the opinions of the world agree in this, that pleasure is our end.

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Ch. 20. Of the Force of Imagination, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
6 months 1 week ago

Peace be with you. Receive my peace unto yourselves. Beware that no one lead you astray saying Lo here or lo there! For the Son of Man is within you. Follow after Him! Those who seek Him will find Him. Go then and preach the gospel of the Kingdom. Do not lay down any rules beyond what I appointed you, and do not give a law like the lawgiver lest you be constrained by it.

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Chapter 4. tion.
4 months 2 weeks ago

The gentleman knows that whatever is imperfect and unrefined does not deserve praise. ... He makes his eyes not want to see what is not right, makes his ears not want to hear what is not right, makes his mouth not want to speak what is not right, and makes his heart not want to deliberate over what is not right. ... For this reason, power and profit cannot sway him, the masses cannot shift him, and nothing in the world can shake him.

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Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 260
7 months 2 weeks ago

I think if I had met him [Lenin] without knowing who he was, I should not have guessed that he was a great man; he struck me as too opinionated and narrowly orthodox. His strength comes, I imagine, from his honesty, courage, and unwavering faith-religious faith in the Marxian gospel, which takes the place of the Christian martyr's hopes of Paradise, except that it is less egotistical... I went to Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.

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Part I, Ch. 3: Lenin, Trotsky and Gorky
6 months 4 days ago

The real sin - perhaps it is a sin against the Holy Ghost for which there is no remission - is the sin of heresy, the sin of thinking for oneself. The saying has been heard before now, here in Spain, that to be a liberal - that is, a heretic - is worse than being an assassin, a thief, or an adulterer. The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose infallibility protects us from reason.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

We scarce ever had a prince, who by fraud, or violence, had not made some infringement on the constitution. We scarce ever had a parliament which knew, when it attempted to set limits to the royal authority, how to set limits to its own. Evils we have had continually calling for reformation, and reformations more grievous than any evils. Our boasted liberty sometimes trodden down, sometimes giddily set up, and ever precariously fluctuating and unsettled; it has only been kept alive by the blasts of continual feuds, wars, and conspiracies.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slaughtered, and the fathers who feel a smug pride when their sons are killed, and even the pacifists who keep saying human nature is essentially good, in spite of all the daily proofs to the contrary. I hate the planet and the human race - I am ashamed to belong to such a species.

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Letter to Colette, December 28, 1916
7 months 2 weeks ago

The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

We are organization watchers in our role as citizens. Increasing attention has been fixed in recent years upon the functioning of society's organizations: its large corporations and its governments. Hence this could also be described as a book for Everyman-for it proposes a way of thinking about organizational issues that concern us all.

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Simon (1975, p. ix); As cited in Stefano Franchi(2006) "Herbert simon, anti-philosopher." Computing and Philosophy. p. 34.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Our principles fix what our life stands for, our aims create the light our life is bathed in, and our rationality, both individual and coordinate, defines and symbolizes the distance we have come from mere animality. It is by these means that our lives come to more than what they instrumentally yield. And by meaning more, our lives yield more.

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The Nature of Rationality (1993), Ch. V : Instrumental Rationality and Its Limits; Rationality's Imagination, p. 181
3 months 3 days ago

Freeeedom! Too much freedom and you have anarchy and a state of war...which is actually not free at all....everybody always wants MORE freedom instead of the balance that's necessary...

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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
5 months 2 weeks ago

Newton, and 'proper scientific method' after him, conducted attention to 'continuous description' of experimental phenomena instead of to causes.

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p. 50
4 months 1 week ago

Innumerable men had passed by, across this Universe, with a dumb vague wonder, such as the very animals may feel; or with a painful, fruitlessly inquiring wonder, such as men only feel;-till the great Thinker came, the original man, the Seer; whose shaped spoken Thought awakes the slumbering capability of all into Thought. It is ever the way with the Thinker, the spiritual Hero. What he says, all men were not far from saying, were longing to say. The Thoughts of all start up, as from painful enchanted sleep, round his Thought; answering to it, Yes, even so! Joyful to men as the dawning of day from night;-is it not, indeed, the awakening for them from no-being into being, from death into life? We still honor such a man; call him Poet, Genius, and so forth: but to these wild men he was a very magician, a worker of miraculous unexpected blessing for them; a Prophet, a God!

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.

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Preface
3 months 2 weeks ago

Depart then satisfied, for he also who releases thee is satisfied.

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XII, 36
7 months 2 weeks ago

It is wrong to think that belief in freedom always leads to victory; we must always be prepared for it to lead to defeat. If we choose freedom, then we must be prepared to perish along with it. Poland fought for freedom as no other country did. The Czech nation was prepared to fight for its freedom in 1938; it was not lack of courage that sealed its fate. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 - the work of young people with nothing to lose but their chains - triumphed and then ended in failure. ... Democracy and freedom do not guarantee the millennium. No, we do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things - and above all on ourselves.

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8 months 2 days ago

All those of you who rejoice in peace, now it is time to judge the truth....Undoubtedly in days gone by there were holy men as Scripture tells,For God stated that he left behind seven thousand men in safety,And there are many priests and kings who are righteous under the law,There you find so many of the prophets, and many of the people too.Tell me which of the righteous of that time claimed an altar for himself?That wicked nation perpetrated a very large number of crimes,They sacrificed to idols and may prophets were put to death,Yet not a single one of the righteous withdrew from unity.The righteous endured the unrighteous while waiting for the winnower:They all mingled in one temple but were not mingled in their hearts;They said such things against them yet they had a single altar.

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Early Christian Latin Poets, 2000, Carolinne White, Routledge, London, ISBN 0415187826 ISBN 9780415187824 p. 55.

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