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As for one-party rule, it was questioned neither by the Left Opposition nor by the Right [wing of the Communist party]. All were prisoners of their own doctrine and their own past: all had worked with a will to create the apparatus of violence that crushed them. Bukharin's hopeless attempt to form a league with Kamenev was no more than a pitiful epilogue to his career. In November 1929 the deviationists performed a public act of penance, but even this did not save them. Stalin's victory was complete; the collapse of the Bukharinite opposition meant the triumph of autocracy in the party and in the country. In December 1929 Stalin's fiftieth birthday was celebrated as a major historical event, and from this point we may date the "cult of personality". Trotsky's prophecy of 1903 had come true: party rule had become Central Committee rule, and this in turn had becorne the personal tyranny of a dictator.

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(pp. 42-3)
7 months 1 week ago

What potent blood hath modest May!

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May-Day
7 months 3 weeks ago

The greatness of the human being consists in this: that it is capable of the universe.

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q. 1, art. 2, ad 4
7 months 3 days ago

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

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§ 6
7 months 1 week ago

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

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Success
7 months 1 week ago

In the state of nature, wrong-doing is impossible ; or, if anyone does wrong, it is to himself, not to another. For no one by the law of nature is bound to please another, unless he chooses, nor to hold anything to be good or evil, but what he himself, according to his own temperament, pronounces to be so ; and, to speak generally, nothing is forbidden by the law of nature, except what is beyond everyone's power.

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Ch. 2, Of Natural Right

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

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Ch. VII
6 months 5 days ago

Man consists in Truth. If he exposes Truth, he exposes himself. If he betrays Truth, he betrays himself. We speak not here of lies, but of acting against Conviction.

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7 months 2 days ago

If our intention now is to reveal classical unreason on its own terms, outside of its ties with dreams and error, it must be understood not as a form of reason that is somehow diseased, lost or mad, but quite simply as reason dazzled.

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Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
7 months 6 days ago

It may be expedient but it is not just that some should have less in order that others may prosper.

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Chapter I, Section 3, pg. 15
5 months 3 weeks ago

We should desire neither the immortality nor the death of any human being, whoever he may be, with whom we have to do.

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p. 260
7 months 6 days ago

I do not give a damn about the dead. They died for the [Communist] Party and the Party can decide what it wants. I practice a live man's politics, for the living.

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Act 5, sc. 3
4 months 2 days ago

To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.

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Letter to his elder sister Henriette (1841).
5 months 1 week ago

There is only one enduring happiness in life-to live for others.

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Part 1, chapter 2
3 months 3 weeks ago

He who receives a benefit with gratitude, repays the first installment of it.

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De Beneficiis (On Benefits): Book 2, cap. 22, line 1.
7 months 1 week ago

The question of the principle of the form of the intelligible world turns, therefore, upon making apparent in what manner it is possible for several substances to be in mutual commerce, and for this reason to pertain to the same whole, which is called world. We do not here consider the world, let it be understood, as to matter, that is, as to the nature of the substances of which it consists, whether they be material or immaterial, but as to form, that is to say, how among several things taken separately a connection, and among them all, totality can have place.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

We must leave on one side the beliefs which fill up voids and sweeten what is bitter. The belief in immortality. The belief in the utility of sin: etiam peccata. The belief in the providential ordering of events - in short the "consolations" which are ordinarily sought in religion.

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p. 258
4 months 2 weeks ago

Like literature, philosophy is not distinguished from other subjects by a specific approach to a subject-matter independent of it. Chemistry deals with chemicals, biology with life and astronomy with very large, very distant objects. Philosophy can boast no such definite subject-matter.

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Chapter 4, Philosophy As Writing: The Case Of Hegel, p. 69
6 months 1 week ago

Jacques said that his master said that everything good or evil we encounter here below was written on high.

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Prologue
3 months 3 weeks ago

He not only overflowed with learning but stood in the slops.

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On Macaulay; reported in Hesketh Pearson, The Smith of Smiths (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1934), p. 180
3 months 4 days ago

He was a man who looked at what ought to be done, not to the reputation which is got by a man's acts.

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I, 16
6 months 2 weeks ago

You will know that wretched men are the cause of their own suffering, who neither see nor hear the good that is near them, and few are the ones who know how to secure release from their troubles. Such is the fate that harms their minds; like pebbles they are tossed about from one thing to another with cares unceasing. For the dread companion Strife harms them unawares, whom one must not walk behind, but withdraw from and flee.

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As quoted in Divine Harmony: The Life and Teachings of Pythagoras by John Strohmeier and Peter Westbrook
6 months 1 week ago

All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser so terrible as the conscience that dwells in the heart of every man.

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Histories, XVIII, 43 (Bartlett's Familiar Quotations)
7 months 1 week ago

Two men who differ as to the ends of life cannot hope to agree about education.

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Ch. 12: Education and Discipline

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

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"War Shrines"
5 months 2 weeks ago

In one sense, I do believe I am "like a man," as Parthe [the writer's sister] says. But how? In having sympathy. ... Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so. ... They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?

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Letter to Madame Mohl
6 months 1 week ago

The Divine Existence (Daseyn),-his Existence, I say, which, according to the distinction already laid down, is his (Manifestation and Revelation of himself-is absolute- only through itself, and of necessity, LIGHT:-namely, y the inward and spiritual Light. This Light, left to itself, separates and divides itself into an infinite multiplicity of individual rays; and in this way, in these individual rays, becomes estranged from itself and its | original source. But this same Light may also again concentrate itself from out this separation, and conceive and comprehend itself as One, as that which it is in itself,-the Existence and Revelation of God; remaining indeed, even in this conception, that which it is in its form,-Light; but yet in this condition, and even by means of this very condition, announcing it-to self as having no real Being in itself, but as only the, Existence and Self-Manifestation of God.

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p. 78
8 months 1 week ago

Married people pledge love for each other throughout eternity. Well, now, that is easy enough but does not mean very much, for if one is finished with time one is probably finished with eternity. If, instead of saying "throughout eternity," the couple would say, "until Easter, until next May Day," then what they say would make some sense, for then they would be saying something and also something they perhaps could carry out.

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7 months 1 week ago

We live to improve, or we live in vain.

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Address and Declaration at a Select Meeting of the Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty (August 20, 1791) p. 5
5 months 2 weeks ago

Its first ethical precept is the identity of means used and aims sought. The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and wellbeing. Unless this be the essential aim of revolution, violent social changes would have no justification. For external social alterations can be, and have been, accomplished by the normal processes of evolution. Revolution, on the contrary, signifies not mere external change, but internal, basic, fundamental change. That internal change of concepts and ideas, permeating ever-larger social strata, finally culminates in the violent upheaval known as revolution.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

Descend where you will into the lower class, in Town or Country, by what avenue you will, by Factory Inquiries, Agricultural Inquiries, by Revenue Returns, by Mining-Labourer Committees, by opening your own eyes and looking, the same sorrowful result discloses itself: you have to admit that the working body of this rich English Nation has sunk or is fast sinking into a state, to which, all sides of it considered, there was literally never any parallel.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

There are two kinds of animals on earth. One kind minds his own business, the other minds other people's business. The former are vegetarians, like cows, sheep and thinking men. The latter are carnivorous, like hawks, tigers and men of action.

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As quoted by Tai-yi Lin (Lin Yutang's daughter) in her Foreword (26 March 1950) to The Importance of Living, p. x
6 months 1 week ago

The will is the living principle of the rational soul, is indeed itself reason, when purely and simply apprehended. That reason is itself active, means, that the pure will, as such, rules and is effectual. The infinite reason alone lies immediately and entirely in the purely spiritual order. The finite being lives necessarily at the same time in a sensuous order; that is to say, in one which presents to him other objects than those of pure reason; a material object, to be advanced by instruments and powers, standing indeed under the immediate command of the will, but whose efficacy is conditional also on its own natural laws.

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Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p.104
6 months ago

A whole dimension of human activity and passivity has been de-eroticized. The environment from which the individual could obtain pleasure-which he could cathect as gratifying almost as an extended zone of the body-has been rigidly reduced. Consequently, the "universe" of libidinous cathexis is likewise reduced. The effect is a localization and contraction of libido, the reduction of erotic to sexual experience and satisfaction.

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p. 73
4 months 2 days ago

Liberalism is... a protection of human autonomy.

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11:06
1 month 1 week ago

I think hypocrites contradict themselves indirectly. Masturbatory, amoral, self-serving opportunism was never interested in keeping it straight.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

If we want eternal life, then we'll need to rewrite our bug-ridden genetic code and become god-like. "May all that have life be delivered from suffering", said Gautama Buddha. It's a wonderful sentiment. Sadly, only hi-tech solutions can ever eradicate suffering from the living world. Compassion alone is not enough.

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Interview with Nick Bostrom and David Pearce, Dec. 2007
6 months 1 week ago

We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.

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Section 9
5 months 5 days ago

I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.

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Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 413
6 months 4 weeks ago

I am not adverting here to the alleged privacy of experience to its possessor. The point of view in question is not one accessible only to a single individual. Rather it is a type. It is often possible to take up a point of view other than one's own, so the comprehension of such facts is not limited to one's own case. There is a sense in which phenomenological facts are perfectly objective: one person can know or say of another what the quality of the other's experience is. They are subjective, however, in the sense that even this objective ascription of experience is possible only for someone sufficiently similar to the object of ascription to be able to adopt his point of view - to understand the ascription in the first person as well as in the third, so to speak. The more different from oneself the other experiencer is, the less success one can expect with this enterprise.

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pp. 171-172
5 months ago

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

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Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) [Penguin Classics, 2004, ISBN 0-142-43783-2], p. 156
5 months 3 weeks ago

There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain, or with whatever may be the specific thinking organ; while others think with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the life. And the people who think only with the brain develop into definition-mongers; they become the professionals of thought.

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6 months ago

Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.

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p. 14
3 months 1 week ago

Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

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Think Little

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