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John Locke
John Locke
4 months 1 week ago
Whensoever therefore the legislative shall transgress...

Whensoever therefore the legislative shall transgress this fundamental rule of society; and either by ambition, fear, folly or corruption, endeavour to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people; by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society.

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Second Treatise of Civil Government, Ch. XIX, sec. 222
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 5 days ago
But since he has decided to...

But since he has decided to have the impossibility of living, every misfortune is an opportunity which lays this importance of living before his eyes and obliges him to decide, once again, to die.

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p. 158
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 4 weeks ago
I thank thee, O Father, Lord...

I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in thy sight. All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him. Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

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11:25-30 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Emperor Julian
Emperor Julian
2 weeks 2 days ago
I consider myself especially indebted to...

I consider myself especially indebted to all the gods together, and more than all to the Great Mother in this particular instance (as in all others) that she did not suffer me to wander about, as it were in the dark, but firstly commanded me to cut away, not as regards my body, but as regards the irrational appetites and motions of the soul, all that was superfluous and empty, by the aid of the Cause, the object of intellect, and which presides over souls, whilst she herself enabled me to conceive certain notions perhaps not discordant with a true, and at the same time, reverential understanding of divine matters.

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Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
3 months 3 days ago
Indeed, even this last moment will...

Indeed, even this last moment will be recognized like the rest, at least, be just beginning to be so.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 1 week ago
I did not know that mankind...

I did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.

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p. 488
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 2 weeks ago
Means at our disposal...
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Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
2 months 3 weeks ago
"There is no God," cry the...

"There is no God," cry the masses more and more vociferously; and with the loss of God man loses his sense of values - is, as it were, massacred because he feels himself of no account.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 4 days ago
Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed...

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

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Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
3 months 4 days ago
The proper method for hastening the...

The proper method for hastening the decay of error is not by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavour to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself.

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Vol. 2, bk. 8, ch. 6
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 3 weeks ago
The vanity of the passing world...

The vanity of the passing world and love are the two fundamental and heart-penetrating notes of true poetry. And they are two notes of which neither can be sounded without causing the other to vibrate. The feeling of the vanity of the passing world kindles love in us, the only thing that triumphs over the vain and transitory, the only thing that fills life again and eternalizes it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig von Mises
Ludwig von Mises
3 weeks 1 day ago
There is no means of avoiding...

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

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Chapter XX: Interest, Credit Expansion, The Trade Cycle, § 8 : The Monetary or Circulation Theory of the Trade Cycle
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 months 1 week ago
If we command our wealth, we...

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

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No. 1
Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
4 months 2 weeks ago
I doubt if a single individual...

I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.

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As quoted in Words from the Wise : Over 6,000 of the Smartest Things Ever Said (2007) by Rosemarie Jarski, p. 312. From The Praise of Folly.
Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
1 month 2 weeks ago
Too many of our preferences reflect...

Too many of our preferences reflect nasty behaviours and states of mind that were genetically adaptive in the ancestral environment. Instead, wouldn't it be better if we rewrote our own corrupt code?

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The Abolitionist Project, Talks given at the FHI (Oxford University) and the Charity International Happiness Conference, 2007
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
4 months 3 weeks ago
If it is my interest to...

If it is my interest to have a farm, it is my interest to take it away from my neighbour; if it is my interest to have a cloak, it is my interest also to steal it from a bath. This is the source of wars, seditions, tyrannies, plots.

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Book I, ch. 22, 14.
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
2 months 3 weeks ago
A man really writes for an...

A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content.

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p. 66
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
2 months 2 weeks ago
It is characteristic of theistic "tolerance"...

It is characteristic of theistic "tolerance" that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
1 month 2 weeks ago
Many city-dwellers have a romanticized conception...

Many city-dwellers have a romanticized conception of the living world. From another perspective, some "conservation biologists" favour e.g. "Pleistocene rewilding". By contrast, I think any truly compassionate person should be horrified at the terrible suffering of Nature "red in tooth and claw". Why not aim for a cruelty-free world instead?

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"Interview with Pensata Animal", Pensata Animal, 25 Oct. 2009
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
5 months 1 week ago
I have never worked as hard...

I have never worked as hard as now. I go for a brief walk in the morning. Then I come home and sit in my room without interruption until about three o'clock. My eyes can barely see. Then with my walking stick in hand I sneak off to the restaurant, but am so weak that I believe that if somebody were to call out my name, I would keel over and die. Then I go home and begin again. In my indolence during the past months I had pumped up a veritable shower bath, and now I have pulled the string and the ideas are cascading down upon me: healthy, happy, merry, gay, blessed children born with ease and yet all of them with the birthmark of my personality.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
3 months 1 week ago
Laws are always unstable unless they...

Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.

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Chapter XVI.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 week ago
The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines...

The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw in the mysticism of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system, which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child ; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them; and for this obvious reason, that nonsense can never be explained.

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Letter to John Adams (5 July 1814).
Philosophical Maxims
Henry George
Henry George
5 days ago
The rights of men to the...

The rights of men to the use of land are not joint rights: they are equal rights. Were there only one man on earth, he would have a right to the use of the whole earth or any part of the earth. When there is more than one man on earth, the right to the use of land that any one of them would have, were he alone, is not abrogated: it is only limited. The right of each to the use of land is still a direct, original right, which he holds of himself, and not by the gift or consent of the others; but it has become limited by the similar rights of the others, and is therefore an equal right.

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Part I : Declaration, Ch. III : "Social Statics" - The Right of Property
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
4 months 1 day ago
Not only must people know, they...

Not only must people know, they must see with their own eyes. Because they must be made to be afraid; but also because they must be the witnesses, the guarantors, of the punishment, and because they must to a certain extent take part in it.

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Chapter One, pp.58
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Owen
Robert Owen
2 months ago
It is therefore, the interest of...

It is therefore, the interest of all, that every one, from birth, should be well educated, physically and mentally, that society may be improved in its character, - that everyone should be beneficially employed, physically and mentally, that the greatest amount of wealth may be created, and knowledge attained, - that everyone should be placed in the midst of those external circumstances that will produce the greatest number of pleasurable sensations, through the longest life, that man may be made truly intelligent, moral and happy, and be thus prepared to enter upon the coming Millennium.

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A Development of the Principles & Plans on which to establish self-supporting Home Colonies
Philosophical Maxims
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
6 days ago
We Americans are not usually thought...

We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all - by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians - be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us. How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.

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Compromise, Hell! Orion magazine
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 5 days ago
Generosity is nothing else than a...

Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away.... To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.

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Part 2
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
3 weeks ago
A trifling debt…

A trifling debt makes a man your debtor; a large one makes him an enemy.

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Line 11.
Philosophical Maxims
Ernst Mach
Ernst Mach
3 months 2 days ago
Some Machians were sufficiently impressed by...

Some Machians were sufficiently impressed by Einstein's interpretations of Brownian movement to accept atomism. Mach himself brushed such objections aside, and also emphatically rejected Einstein's relativity theory.

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W. W. Bartley III, "Philosophy of biology versus philosphy of physics" (2004) p. 412, Karl Popper: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, Vol. III: Philosophy of Science 2.
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
1 month 1 week ago
Throughout the years in which the...

Throughout the years in which the US was punishing countries that departed from fiscal prudence, it was borrowing on a colossal scale to finance tax cuts and fund its over-stretched military commitments. Now, with federal finances critically dependent on continuing large inflows of foreign capital, it will be the countries that spurned the American model of capitalism that will shape America's economic future.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
4 months 6 days ago
Democracy can hardly be expected to...

Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.

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Chapter 3 (p. 19)
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 4 days ago
Chinese script is not visual but...

Chinese script is not visual but iconic and tactile. It does not disturb the tribal bonds.

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(p. 72)
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 1 week ago
Born for success he seemed, With...

Born for success he seemed, With grace to win, with heart to hold, With shining gifts that took all eyes.

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In Memoriam E. B. E.
Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
1 month 2 weeks ago
To be sure, risks abound; but...

To be sure, risks abound; but no one is proposing compassionate stewardship of ecosystems by philosophers. Humans are capable of choosing our own future pain-sensitivity too; but any species-wide genomic shift in human pain tolerance will depend on the willingness of prospective parents to use preimplantation genetic screening.

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Compassionate Biology: How CRISPR-based gene drives" could cheaply, rapidly and sustainably reduce suffering throughout the living world", BLTC Research, 2016
Philosophical Maxims
Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg
3 days ago
The self-discipline of the Social Democracy...

The self-discipline of the Social Democracy is not merely the replacement of the authority of bourgeois rulers with the authority of a socialist central committee. The working class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility.

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Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
2 months 4 weeks ago
We have reached the point where...

We have reached the point where the Objective Logic turns into the Subjective Logic, or, where subjectivity emerges as the true form of objectivity. We may sum up Hegel's analysis in the following schema: The true form of reality requires freedom. Freedom requires self-consciousness and knowledge of the truth. Self-consciousness and knowledge of the truth are the essentials of the subject. The form of reality must be conceived as subject.

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P. 154-155
Philosophical Maxims
Protagoras
Protagoras
3 months 2 weeks ago
There are two sides to every...

There are two sides to every question.

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As quoted in Lives of Eminent Philosophers, by Diogenes Laërtius, Book IX, Sec. 51
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
3 days ago
Choose what's best.-Best is what benefits...

Choose what's best.-Best is what benefits me.

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(Hays translation) III, 6
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 1 week ago
What is a weed? A plant...

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered.

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Fortune of the Republic, 1878
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
5 months 1 week ago
Of things said without any combination,...

Of things said without any combination, each signifies either substance or quantity or qualification or a relative or where or when or being-in-a-position or having or doing or being affected. To give a rough idea, examples of substance are man, horse; of quantity: four-foot, five-foot; of qualification: white, grammatical; of a relative: double, half, larger; of where: in the Lyceum, in the market-place; of when: yesterday, last-year; of being-in-a-position: is-lying, is sitting; of having: has-shoes-on, has-armour-on; of doing: cutting, burning; of being-affected: being-cut, being-burned.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 months 1 week ago
...my extreme anxiety about the Object...

...my extreme anxiety about the Object of our common sollicitude and my clear and decided conviction, that there is one part of the War, which instead of being postponed and considered in a secondary light, ought to have priority over every other, and requires our most early and our most careful attention; I mean La Vendée. ... This is a War directly against Jacobinism and its principles. It strikes at the Enemy in his weakest and most vulnerable part. At La Vendée with infinitely less Charge, we may make an impression likely to be decisive. This goes to the heart of the Business.

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Letter to the Home Secretary Henry Dundas (8 October 1793), quoted in P. J. Marshall and John A. Woods (eds.)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
3 months 1 week ago
Art is the perfection of nature....

Art is the perfection of nature.

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Section 16
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Büchner
Georg Büchner
3 months 1 week ago
The world is chaos. Nothingness is...

The world is chaos. Nothingness is the yet-to-be-born god of the world.

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Act IV
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
4 months 1 day ago
The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence,...

The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphroditism" made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of "perversity"; but it also made possible the formation of a "reverse" discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or "naturality" be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.

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Vol. I, p. 101
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
2 months 2 weeks ago
It is obvious that many women...

It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term "feminism," to focus on the fact that to be "feminist" in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.

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Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
3 months 3 days ago
Life has always seemed to me...

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. Closing lines of the preface

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Philosophical Maxims
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva
1 month 2 weeks ago
I have had to suffer the...

I have had to suffer the violence and brutality that comes with rising fundamentalism, and I've asked myself how a society that is the cradle of peace, the land of Gandhi and Buddha, could be reduced to one of the most volatile societies in the world.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alan Watts
Alan Watts
2 weeks 4 days ago
You do not ask what is...

You do not ask what is the value, or what is the use, of this feeling. Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies? Yet just because it has no use, it has a use-which may sound like a paradox, but is not. What, for instance, is the use of playing music? If you play to make money, to outdo some other artist, to be a person of culture, or to improve your mind, you are not really playing-for your mind is not on the music. You don't swing. When you come to think of it, playing or listening to music is a pure luxury, an addiction, a waste of valuable time and money for nothing more than making elaborate patterns of sound.

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p. 92
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
4 months 6 days ago
The practical consequence of such a[n...

The practical consequence of such a[n individualistic] philosophy is the well-known democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality,-is, at any rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant. These phrases are so familiar that they sound now rather dead in our ears. Once they had a passionate inner meaning. Such a passionate inner meaning they may easily acquire again if the pretension of our nation to inflict its own inner ideals and institutions vi et armis upon Orientals should meet with a resistance as obdurate as so far it has been gallant and spirited. Religiously and philosophically, our ancient national doctrine of live and let live may prove to have a far deeper meaning than our people now seem to imagine it to possess.

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"Preface"
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
2 months 3 weeks ago
The demagogues, impresarios of alteracion, who...

The demagogues, impresarios of alteracion, who have already caused the death of several civilizations, harass men so that they shall not reflect, see to it that they are kept herded together in crowds so that they cannot reconstruct their individuality in the one place where it can be reconstructed, which is in solitude.

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p. 33
Philosophical Maxims
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