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2 months 2 weeks ago

What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. The child watching TV loves these people, you know -- they're in color, and they're talking to the child. Why wouldn't a child relate to these people? And you know, if you can't sleep at 3 o'clock in the morning, you can turn on a switch, and there are your friends and relatives, and they obviously like you. And they're charming. Who wouldn't want Peter Jennings for a relative? This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house.

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Interviewed by Frank Houston, "The Salon Interview: Kurt Vonnegut", Salon
4 months 2 weeks ago

The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner "state" in which the thinking comes to pass.

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Lecture XX, "Conclusions"
5 months 2 days ago

since our leading men think themselves in a seventh heaven, if there are bearded mullets in their fish-ponds that will come to hand for food, and neglect everything else, do not you think that I am doing no mean service if I secure that those who have the power, should not have the will, to do any harm?

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Letters to Atticus, Book II, 1.
4 months 1 week ago

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.

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Remarks to John Wisdom, quoted in Zen and the Work of WIttgenstein by Paul Weinpaul in The Chicago Review Vol. 12, (1958), p. 70
4 months 2 weeks ago

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

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Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
4 months 2 days ago

Diogenes the Cynic, when a little before his death he fell into a slumber, and his physician rousing him out of it asked him whether anything ailed him, wisely answered, "Nothing, sir; only one brother anticipates another,-Sleep before Death."

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4 months 1 week ago

...wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong - only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him. in other words badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness.

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Book II, Chapter 2, "The Invasion"
2 months 2 weeks ago

Nonviolence is an ideal that cannot always be fully honored in the practice. To the degree that those who practice nonviolent resistance put their body in the way of an external power, they make physical contact, presenting a force against force in the process. Nonviolence does not imply the absence of force or of aggression. It is, as it were, an ethical stylization of embodiment, replete with gestures and modes of non-action, ways of becoming an obstacle, of using the solidity of the body and its proprioceptive object field to block or derail a further exercise of violence.

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p. 22
1 week 4 days ago

Stir up thy mind, and recall thy wits again from thy natural dreams, and visions, and when thou art perfectly awoken, and canst perceive that they were but dreams that troubled thee, as one newly awakened out of another kind of sleep look upon these worldly things with the same mind as thou didst upon those, that thou sawest in thy sleep.

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VI, 29
4 months 3 weeks ago

Virtue refuses facility for her companion ... the easy, gentle, and sloping path that guides the footsteps of a good natural disposition is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road.

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Ch. 11. Of Cruelty (tr. Donald M. Frame)
3 months 1 week ago

What is Nature? An encyclopedical, systematic Index or Plan of our Spirit. Why will we content us with the mere catalogue of our Treasures? Let us contemplate them ourselves, and in all ways elaborate and use them.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Whatever you do, crush the infamous thing, and love those who love you.

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Letter to Jean le Rond d'Alembert (28 November 1762);
5 months 1 week ago

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest, whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect. If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. 

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Absurdity and Suicide
2 weeks 1 day ago

One day our Sodom and Gomorrah would be trampled by some all-powerful foot, and this world which laughed, reveled, and forgot God would be transformed, in its turn, into a Dead Sea. At the end of every period God's foot comes along in this way and tramples the cities of the overindulged belly, the overdeveloped mind. I felt afraid (Sometimes it seems to me that this world is another Sodom and Gomorrah just before God's passage above it. I think the terrible foot can already be heard approaching).

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Jerusalem, Ch. 20, p. 249
4 months 1 week ago

Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 123
4 months 2 weeks ago

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

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"Slavery in Massachusetts", 1854
1 month 5 days ago

The suffering man ought really 'to consume his own smoke'; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire, - which, in the metaphorical sense too, all smoke is capable of becoming!

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3 months ago

Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.

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Ch. 3, Liberty

There are extraordinary situations which require extraordinary interposition. An exasperated people, who feel that they possess power, are not easily restrained within limits strictly regular.

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1 week 4 days ago

To accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference.

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(Hays translation) VIII, 33
4 months 2 weeks ago

A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

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pp. 366-67
3 months 5 days ago

In most cases, to be reasonable means not to be obstinate, which in turn points to conformity with reality as it is. The principle of adjustment is taken for granted. When the idea of reason was conceived, it was intended to achieve more than the mere regulation of the relation between means and ends: it was regarded as the instrument for understanding the ends, for determining them.

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p. 10.
1 month 3 weeks ago

It's easy to support the status quo if one is not another of its victims.

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Reply to Meet the people who want to turn predators into herbivores, TreeHugger, 4 Dec. 2015
3 months 1 week ago

I am the resurrection and the life. The one who exercises faith in me, even though he dies, will come to life; and everyone who is living and exercises faith in me will never die at all.

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11:25-26, NWT

Life has a value only when it has something valuable as its object.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

It is asserted that beasts have no rights; the illusion is harboured that our conduct, so far as they are concerned, has no moral significance, or, as it is put in the language of these codes, that "there are no duties to be fulfilled towards animals." Such a view is one of revolting coarseness, a barbarism of the West, whose source is Judaism. In philosophy, however, it rests on the assumption, despite all evidence to the contrary, of the radical difference between man and beast,-a doctrine which, as is well known, was proclaimed with more trenchant emphasis by Descartes than by any one else: it was indeed the necessary consequence of his mistakes.

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Part III, Ch. VIII, 7, p. 218
3 months 3 weeks ago

Cut not fire with a sword. Symbol 9 Variant translation: Poke not the fire with a sword.

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As quoted in Short Sayings of Great Men: With Historical and Explanatory Notes‎ (1882) by Samuel Arthur Bent, p. 455
2 months 3 weeks ago

During his lifetime Gurdjieff did not publish any books on the techniques of his teaching, and his pupils were bound to secrecy on the subject. Since his death in Paris in 1949, however, many of his works have been published, and there has been a flood of memoirs by disciples and admirers. Gurdjieff was in almost ever respect the antithesis of Aleister Crowley. Whereas Crowley craved publicity, Gurdjieff shunned it. Crowley was forgotten for two decades after his death; Gurdjieff on the contrary, has become steadily better known, and his influence continues to grow. One of the main reasons for this is that there was so little of the charlatan about him. He is no cult figure with hordes of gullible disciples. What he has to teach makes an appeal to the intelligence, and can be fully understood only by those who are prepared to make a serious effort.

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2 months 1 week ago

An international socialism is the stated ideal of most socialists; an international liberalism is the unstated tendency of the liberal. To neither system is it thinkable that men live, not by universal aspirations but by local attachments; not by a "solidarity" that stretches across the globe from end to end, but by obligations that are understood in terms which separate men from most of their fellows-in terms such as national history, religion, language, and the customs that provide the basis of legitimacy.

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How to be a Non-Liberal, Anti-Socialist Conservative, Intercollegiate Review: A Journal of Scholarship and Opinion
4 months 3 weeks ago

Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.

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Ch. 2
3 months 1 week ago

When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The proximity between the counterfeit and the good coin does not make the good coin counterfeit nor the counterfeit good. In the same way the proximity between truth and falsehood does not make truth falsehood nor falsehood truth.

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III. The Classes of Seekers, p. 33.
2 months 1 week ago

Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

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Chapter 3 "Accumulating Small Change" (p. 50)
1 month 6 days ago

It is a course which perhaps would not have been necessary had it been possible to form a state composed of wise men, but as every multitude is fickle, full of lawless desires, unreasoned passion, and violent anger, the multitude must be held in by invisible terrors and suchlike pageantry. For this reason I think, not that the ancients acted rashly and at haphazard in introducing among the people notions concerning the gods and beliefs in the terrors of hell, but that the moderns are most rash and foolish in banishing such beliefs.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The best friend is he that, when he wishes a person's good, wishes it for that person's own sake.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

A life devoted to science is therefore a happy life, and its happiness is derived from the very best sources that are open to dwellers on this troubled and passionate planet.

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Ch. 2: The Place of Science in a Liberal Education
4 months 2 weeks ago

Whatever happens, I cannot be a silent witness to murder or torture. Anyone who is a partner in this is a despicable individual. I am sorry I cannot be moderate about it...

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Quoted in The New York Times Biographical Service, Vol. I (1970), p. 294, said by Russell "in the spring of 1967"
3 weeks 2 days ago

Is it not absurd when a human being tries to find happiness somewhere outside himself, and thinks that wealth and birth and the influence of friends...is of the utmost importance?

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Oration to the Uneducated Cynics
5 months 1 week ago

Straightforward preaching spoils the effectiveness of a story. If you can't resist the impulse to improve your fellow human beings, do it subtly.

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4 months 1 week ago

He [God] lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another. When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it.

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Book II, Chapter 4, "The Perfect Penitent"
3 months 1 week ago

The conscious side of woman corresponds to the emotional side of man, not to his "mind." Mind makes up the soul, or better, the "animus" of woman, and just as the anima of a man consists of inferior relatedness, full of affect, so the animus of woman consists of inferior judgments, or better, opinions.

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The Secret of the Golden Flower (1931) Commentary by C.G.Jung in CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P. 60
4 months 2 weeks ago

False and doubtful positions, relied upon as unquestionable maxims, keep those who build on them in the dark from truth. Such are usually the prejudices imbibed from education, party, reverence, fashion, interest, et cetera.

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Book IV, Ch. 7
1 month 1 week ago

When I collect my experiences, I notice that fascist is a person who holds one of the following beliefs (by way of example): 1) That people should wash themselves, rather than go dirty; 2) that freedom of the press in America is preferable to the ownership of the whole press by one ruling party; 3) that people should not be jailed for their opinions. both communist and anti-communist - 4), that racial criteria, in favour of either whites or blacks, are inadvisable in admission to Universities; 5 ) that torture is condemnable, no matter who applies it. (Roughly speaking "fascist" was the same as "liberal".) Fascist was, by definition, a person who happened to have been in jail in a communist country. The refugees from Czechoslovakia in 1968 were sometimes met in Germany by very progressive and absolutely revolutionary leftists with placards saying "fascism will not pass".

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My Correct Views on Everything
1 week 5 days ago

There is the same difference between political theory and constitutional laws as there is between poetics and poetry. The illustrious Montesquieu is to Lycurgus, in the intellectual hierarchy, what Batteux is to Homer or Racine. Moreover, these two talents positively exclude each other, as can be seen by the example of Locke, who fumbled badly when he presumed to give laws to the Americans.

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Chapter VI, p. 52
4 months 2 weeks ago

The only government that I recognize-and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army - is that power that establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice.

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4 months 1 week ago

I am my world.

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(The microcosm.) (5.63) Original German: Ich bin meine welt (Der Mikrokosmos.)
3 months 1 day ago

And love, above all when it struggles against destiny, overwhelms us with the feeling of the vanity of this world of appearances and gives us a glimpse of another world, in which destiny is overcome and liberty is law.

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1 month 5 days ago

To fall into mere unreasoning deliquium of love and admiration, was not good; but such unreasoning, nay irrational supercilious no-love at all is perhaps still worse!-It is a thing forever changing, this of Hero-worship: different in each age, difficult to do well in any age. Indeed, the heart of the whole business of the age, one may say, is to do it well.

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3 months 1 week ago

Men do not sufficiently realise that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.

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5 months 1 week ago

Neither family, nor privilege, nor wealth, nor anything but Love can light that beacon which a man must steer by when he sets out to live the better life.

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