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6 months 1 week ago

So it happens at times that a person believes that he has a world-view, but that there is yet one particular phenomenon that is of such a nature that it baffles the understanding, and that he explains differently and attempts to ignore in order not to harbor the thought that this phenomenon might overthrow the whole view, or that his reflection does not possess enough courage and resolution to penetrate the phenomenon with his world-view.

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4 months 4 days ago

For a long while I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madmen, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate.

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3 months 4 days ago

We don't need fossils - the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution.

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The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009) (p. 164)
1 month 5 days ago

Let it not be in any man's power to say truly of thee that thou art not simple or that thou art not good; but let him be a liar whoever shall think anything of this kind about thee; and this is altogether in thy power.

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X, 32
1 month 1 week ago

Agreeably to the request of the House of Representatives, communicated in their resolution of the 16th instant, I proceed to state under the reserve therein expressed, information received touching an illegal combination of private individuals against the peace and safety of the Union, and a military expedition planned by them against the territories of a power in amity with the United States, with the measures I have pursued for suppressing the same....

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3 months 6 days ago

At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.

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3 months 6 days ago

Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.

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"The Care and Feeding of Communication Innovation", Dinner Address to Conference on 8 mm Sound Film and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, 8 November 1961
5 months 2 weeks ago

If you only notice human proceedings, you may observe that all who attain great power and riches, make use of either force or fraud; and what they have acquired either by deceit or violence, in order to conceal the disgraceful methods of attainment, they endeavor to sanctify with the false title of honest gains. Those who either from imprudence or want of sagacity avoid doing so, are always overwhelmed with servitude and poverty; for faithful servants are always servants, and honest men are always poor; nor do any ever escape from servitude but the bold and faithless, or from poverty, but the rapacious and fraudulent. God and nature have thrown all human fortunes into the midst of mankind; and they are thus attainable rather by rapine than by industry, by wicked actions rather than by good. Hence it is that men feed upon each other, and those who cannot defend themselves must be worried.

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Book III, Chapter 13
5 months 1 week ago

The doctrine of the Second Coming has failed, so far as we are concerned, if it does not make us realize that at every moment of every year in our lives Donne's question "What if this present were the world's last night?" is equally relevant.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.

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5 months 1 week ago

New truth is often uncomfortable, especially to the holders of power; nevertheless, amid the long record of cruelty and bigotry, it is the most important achievement of our intelligent but wayward species.

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Religion and Science (1935), Ch. X: Conclusion
3 months 1 week ago

All state obligations are against the conscience of a Christian: the oath of allegiance, taxes, law proceedings and military service.

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Chapter VII, Significance of Compulsory Service
3 months 4 days ago

The selfish gene theory is Darwin's theory, expressed in a way that Darwin did not choose but whose aptness, I should like to think, he would instantly have recognized and delighted in. It is in fact a logical outgrowth of orthodox neo-Darwinism, but expressed as a novel image. Rather than focus on the individual organism, it takes a gene's eye view of nature. It is a different way of seeing, not a different theory.

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Preface to Second Edition
3 months 1 week ago

Lives matter in the sense that they assume physical form within the sphere of appearance; lives matter because they are to be valued equally.

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p. 12
3 months 5 days ago

They pass peaceful lives who ignore mine and thine.

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Maxim 790
4 months ago

I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind, or cannot understand the darker pages of Hegel, it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act.

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5 months 1 week ago

The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever.

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Chapter VII, Part Second, p. 619.
4 months 5 days ago

Freedom is the absolute right of every human being to seek no other sanction for his actions but his own conscience, to determine these actions solely by his own will, and consequently to owe his first responsibility to himself alone.

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As quoted in Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, Daniel Guérin, New York: NY, Monthly Review Press (1970) p. 31
4 months 4 days ago

To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Meditate upon my counsels; love them; follow them; To the divine virtues will they know how to lead thee. I swear it by the One who in our hearts engraved The sacred Tetrad, symbol immense and pure, Source of Nature and model of the Gods.

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As translated by Fabre d'Olivet
1 month 4 weeks ago

Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom - desire coordinated in the light of all experience - can tell us when to heal and when to kill. To observe processes and to construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy: and because in these days our means and instruments have multiplied beyond our interpretation and synthesis of ideals and ends, our life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. For a fact is nothing except in relation to desire; it is not complete except in relation to a purpose and a whole. Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

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Introduction : On the Uses of Philosophy
5 months 3 weeks ago

What is it, in your opinion, to be a great nobleman? It is to be master of several objects that men covet, and thus to be able to satisfy the wants and the desires of many. It is these wants and these desires that attract them towards you, and that make them submit to you: were it not for these, they would not even look at you; but they hope, by these services... to obtain from you some part of the good which they desire, and of which they see that you have the disposal.

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1 month 1 week ago

A vehement eros runs through the Universe. It is like the ether: harder than steel, softer than air. It cuts through and passes beyond all things, it flees and escapes.

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4 months 5 days ago

If the world is a precipitation of human nature, so to speak, then the divine world is a sublimation of the same. Both occur in one act. No precipitation without sublimation. What goes lost there in agility, is won here.

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Fragment No. 96
5 months 3 weeks ago

The fellow who eggs you on to avenge yourself will rob you of what you were going to say, as we forgive our debtors. When you have forfeited that, all your sins will be held against you; absolutely nothing is forgiven.

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2.382673611
1 month 5 days ago

To change your mind and to follow him who sets you right is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before. Remember that to change thy opinion and to follow him who corrects thy error is as consistent with freedom as it is to persist in thy error.

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(Long translation) VIII, 16
3 months 1 week ago

It is terrible when people do not know God, but it is worse when people identify as God what is not God.

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p. 5
5 months 1 week ago

When I was 4 years old ... I dreamt that I'd been eaten by a wolf, and to my great surprise I was in the wolf's stomach and not in heaven.

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BBC interview on "Face to Face" (1959); The Listener, Vol. 61 (1959), p. 503
6 months 1 week ago

The bodies of which the world is composed are solids, and therefore have three dimensions. Now, three is the most perfect number, it is the first of numbers, for of one we do not speak as a number, of two we say both, but three is the first number of which we say all. Moreover, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

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Bukharin, like Lenin, regarded the system of basing economic life on mass terror not as a transient necessity but as a permanent principle of socialist organization. He did not shrink from justifying all means of coercion and held, like Trotsky at the same period, that the new system called essentially for the militarization of labour - i.e. the use of police and military force to compel the whole population to work in such places and conditions as the state might arbitrarily decree. Indeed, once the market is abolished there is no longer any free sale of labour or competition between workers, and police coercion is therefore the only means of allocating "human resources". If hired labour is eliminated, only compulsory labour remains. In other words, socialism - as conceived by both Trotsky and Bukharin at this time - is a permanent, nation-wide labour camp.

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(pg. 28-9)
4 months 1 week ago

A living language can stand on a higher level of culture in comparison with another, but it can never in itself attain that perfection of development which a dead language quite easily attains. In the latter the connotation of words is fixed, and the possibilities of suitable combinations will also gradually become exhausted. Hence, he who wishes to speak this language must speak it just as it is; but, after he has once learnt to do this, the language speaks itself in his mouth and thinks and imagines for him.

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Consequences of the Difference p. 85
3 months 4 days ago

Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name. It may be a unique collection of atoms, such as the Matterhorn, that lasts long enough to be worth naming. Or it may be a class of entities, such as rain drops, that come into existence at a sufficiently high rate to deserve a collective name, even if any one of them is short-lived.

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Ch. 2. The replicators
4 months 4 days ago

I used to ask myself, over a coffin: "What good did it do the occupant to be born?," I now put the same question about anyone alive.

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5 months 1 week ago

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.

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"Myth Became Fact", 1944
1 month 4 weeks ago

Not a May-game is this man's life; but a battle and a march, a warfare with principalities and powers. No idle promenade through fragrant orange-groves and green flowery spaces, waited on by the choral Muses and the rosy Hours: it is a stern pilgrimage through burning sandy solitudes, through regions of thick-ribbed ice. He walks among men; loves men, with inexpressible soft pity,-as they cannot love him: but his soul dwells in solitude, in the uttermost parts of Creation. In green oases by the palm-tree wells, he rests a space; but anon he has to journey forward, escorted by the Terrors and the Splendours, the Archdemons and Archangels. All Heaven, all Pandemonium are his escort. The stars keen-glancing, from the Immensities, send tidings to him; the graves, silent with their dead, from the Eternities. Deep calls for him unto Deep.

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5 months 1 week ago

The poor, short lone fact dies at birth. Memory catches it up into her heaven and bathes it in immortal waters.

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"Memory", p. 66
4 months 2 weeks ago

Given that annihilation of nature in its entirety is impossible, and that death and dissolution are not appropriate to the whole mass of this entire globe or star, from time to time, according to an established order, it is renewed, altered, changed, and transformed in all its parts.

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Fifth Dialogue
3 months 3 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
4 months 1 week ago

To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!

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Ch. 5, as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker
1 month 5 days ago

Everything is in a state of metamorphosis. Thou thyself art in everlasting change and in corruption to correspond; so is the whole universe.

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Meditations. ix. 19.
5 months 1 week ago

In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.

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Section X: Of Miracles; Part I. 87
5 months 3 weeks ago

We make a ladder of our vices, if we trample those same vices underfoot.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

In this life it is necessary that we be on our guard. To begin with we must be constantly aware of the fact that life here below is best described as being a type of continual warfare. This is a fact that Job, that undefeated soldier of vast experience, tells us so plainly. Yet in this matter the great majority of mankind is often deceived, for the world, like some deceitful magician, captivates their minds with seductive blandishments, and as a result most individuals behave as if there had been a cessation of hostilities.

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p.61
5 months 4 weeks ago

Where without any change in circumstances the things held to be just by law are seen not to correspond with the concept of justice in actual practice, such laws are not really just; but wherever the laws have ceased to be advantageous because of a change in circumstances, in that case the laws were for that time just when they were advantageous for the mutual dealings of the citizens, and subsequently ceased to be just when they were no longer advantageous.

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1 month 5 days ago

How easy it is to repel and to wipe away every impression which is troublesome or unsuitable, and immediately to be in all tranquility. To shrug it all off and wipe it clean--every annoyance and distraction--and reach utter stillness. Child's play.

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(Hays translation) V, 2
4 months 1 week ago

Hegel ... proceeds abstractly from the pre-existence of the intellect. ... He does not appeal to the intellect within us.

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Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 68
4 months 4 days ago

Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.

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