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4 months 2 weeks ago

Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it - that is what you must do.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation.

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(p. 362)
1 month 2 weeks ago

While the art of printing is left to us science can never be retrograde; what is once acquired of real knowlege can never be lost.

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Letter to William Green Mumford
3 months 2 weeks ago

Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.

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Eye Appeal, p. 79-80
4 months 5 days ago

Glorious is the risk! - καλος γαρ ο κινδυνος, glorious is the risk that we are able to run of our souls never dying ... Faced with this risk, I am presented with arguments designed to eliminate it, arguments demonstrating the absurdity of the belief in the immortality of the soul; but these arguments fail to make any impression on me, for they are reasons and nothing more than reasons, and it is not with reasons that the heart is appeased. I do not want to die - no; I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and ever. I want this "I" to live - this poor "I" that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now, and therefore the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own soul, tortures me.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Old religious factions are volcanoes burnt out.

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Speech on the Petition of the Unitarians
4 months 2 weeks ago

The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Marriage is a union between two persons - one man and one woman. A woman who has given herself up to one, can not give herself up to a second, for her whole dignity requires that she should belong only to this one.

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p. 406
4 months 3 weeks ago

Our youth we can have but to-day, We may always find time to grow old. Can Love be controlled by Advice?

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reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
4 months 2 weeks ago

The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The lowest degree of education is to distinguish oneself from the ignorant ordinary man. The educated man does not loathe honey even if he finds it in the surgeon's cupping-glass; he realizes that the cupping glass does not essentially alter the honey. The natural aversion from it in such a case rests on popular ignorance, arising from the fact that the cupping-glass is made only for impure blood. Men imagine that the blood is impure because it is in the cupping-glass, and are not aware that the impurity is due to a property.

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III. The Classes of Seekers, p. 31.
3 months 2 weeks ago

All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States-and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!

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As quoted in "An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Carey Horwitz, Library Journal, Apr. 15, 1973: 1131
4 months 1 week ago

Scientific truth is characterized by its exactness and the certainty of its predictions. But these admirable qualities are contrived by science at the cost of remaining on a plane of secondary problems. leaving intact the ultimate and decisive questions. ... Yet science is but a small part of the human mind and organism. Where it stops, man does not stop.

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p. 13
4 months 2 weeks ago

First then, we find that when we regard ideas from a nominalistic, individualistic, sensualistic way, the simplest facts of mind become utterly meaningless. That one idea should resemble another or influence another, or that one state of mind should so much as be thought of in another is, from that standpoint, sheer nonsense.

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2 months 1 week ago

The good seed that nature plants in us is so slight and so slippery that it cannot withstand the least harm from wrong nourishment.

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Part 2
5 months 2 weeks ago

For want of the apparatus of propositional functions, many logicians have been driven to the conclusion that there are unreal objects. It is argued, e.g., by Meinong, that we can speak about "the golden mountain," "the round square," and so on; we can make true propositions of which these are the subjects; hence they must have some kind of logical being, since otherwise the propositions in which they occur would be meaningless. In such theories, it seems to me, there is a failure of that feeling for reality which ought to be preserved even in the most abstract studies. Logic, I should maintain, must no more admit a unicorn than zoology can; for logic is concerned with the real world just as truly as zoology, though with its more abstract and general features.

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Ch. 16: Descriptions
5 months 3 weeks ago

Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.

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Chapter IX, p. 117.
5 months 3 weeks ago

I have seen something of the project of M. de St. Pierre, for maintaining a perpetual peace in Europe. I am reminded of a device in a cemetery, with the words: Pax perpetua; for the dead do not fight any longer: but the living are of another humor; and the most powerful do not respect tribunals at all. 

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Taken from Leibniz: Political Writings (2nd Edition, 1988), Edited by Patrick RileyLetter 11 to Grimarest: Passages Concerning the Abbe de St. Pierre's 'Project for Perpetual Peace' (June 1712).
6 months 2 days ago

So potent was Religion in persuading to do wrong.

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Book I, line 101 (tr. Alicia Stallings) H. A. J. Munro's translation: So great the evils to which religion could prompt! W. H. D. Rouse's translation: So potent was Superstition in persuading to evil deeds.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Bold ideas, unjustified anticipations, and speculative thought, are our only means for interpreting nature: our only organon, our only instrument, for grasping her. And we must hazard them to win our prize. Those among us who are unwilling to expose their ideas to the hazard of refutation do not take part in the scientific game.

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Ch. 10 "Corroboration, or How a Theory Stands up to Tests", section 85: The Path of Science, p. 280.
4 months 2 weeks ago

The present state of France was ten times worse than a tyranny. The new constitution was said to be an experiment but the assertion was not true. It had already been tried, and had been found to be only productive of evils. They would go on from tyranny to tyranny, from oppression to oppression, till at last the whole system would terminate in the destruction of that miserable and deluded people... He sincerely hoped that no member of that House would ever barter the constitution of this country, the eternal jewel of their souls, for a wild and visionary system, which could only lead to confusion and disorder.

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Speech in the House of Commons (6 May 1791), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXIX (1817), column 397
4 months 1 week ago

Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.

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Ch. IX.: Justification of Art
5 months 1 week ago

The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. It's matrix-If you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being elliptical in order to come more quickly to my principle theme-is the determination of Being as presence in all sense of this word.

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Structure, Sign and Play
1 month 2 weeks 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
5 months 2 weeks ago

Is a fixed income not a good thing? Does not everyone love to count on a sure thing? Especially every petty-bourgeois, narrow-minded Frenchman? the 'ever needy' man?

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(Bastiat and Carey), pp. 809-810.
2 months 3 days ago

A sword by itself does not slay; it is merely the weapon used by the slayer.

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Line 30 Seneca is here describing arguments used by 'certain men,' not stating his own opinion.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.

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Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League in London, March 1850
4 months ago

If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things which thou seest, and out of there substance will make other things, and again other things from the substance of them, in order that the world may ever be new.

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VII, 25 (See also Charles Darwin)
1 month 2 weeks ago

I hold in fact(1) That small portions of space are in fact of a nature analogous to little hills on a surface which is on the average flat; namely, that the ordinary laws of geometry are not valid in them.(2) That this property of being curved or distorted is continually being passed on from one portion of space to another after the manner of a wave.(3) That this variation of the curvature of space is what really happens in that phenomenon which we call the motion of matter, whether ponderable or etherial.(4) That in the physical world nothing else takes place but this variation, subject possibly to the law of continuity.

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Abstract
3 months 1 week ago

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

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As quoted in The #1 New York Times Bestseller (1992) by John Bear, p. 93

If there is a revelation, it can not then contradict nature.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Classical political economy nearly touches the true relation of things, without, however,consciously formulating it. This it cannot so long as it sticks in its bourgeois skin.

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Vol. I, Ch. 19, pg. 594.
2 months 3 days ago

Nothing lasts forever, few things even last for long: all are susceptible of decay in one way or another; moreover all that begins also ends.

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From Ad Polybium De Consolatione (Of Consolation, To Polybius), chap. I; translation based on work of Aubrey Stewart
5 months 3 weeks ago

Like strawberry wives, that laid two or three great strawberries at the mouth of their pot, and all the rest were little ones.

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No. 54
5 months 1 week ago

Asked where he came from, he said, "I am a citizen of the world."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 63
6 months 3 days ago

In a quarrel for earth, turn not to earth.

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First Homily, as translated by John Burnaby (1955), p. 267
3 months 2 weeks ago

Do not take part in the council, unless you are called.

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Maxim 310
5 months 3 weeks ago

Figure to yourself the mixture of surprise and delight which has this instant been poured into my mind by the sound of my name, as uttered by you, in the speech just read to me out of the Morning Herald... By one and the same man, not only Parliamentary Reform, but Law Reform advocated. Advocated? and by what man? By one who, in the vulgar sense of profit and loss, has nothing to gain by it... Yes, only from Ireland could such self-sacrifice come; nowhere else: least of all in England, cold, selfish, priest-ridden, lawyer-ridden, lord-ridden, squire-ridden, soldier-ridden England, could any approach to it be found.

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Letter to Daniel O'Connell (15 July 1828) , quoted in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. X (1843), pp. 594-595
3 months 2 weeks ago

My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

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Letter to Robert Fulford, 1964. Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 300
5 months 2 weeks ago

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

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"Myth Became Fact", 1944
5 months 2 weeks ago

The principal source of the harm done by the State is the fact that power is its chief end.

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Principles of Social Reconstruction (1917), Ch. II: The State
4 months 5 days ago

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

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Book XXIX: Of the Manner of Composing Laws, Chapter 16: Things to be Observed in the Composing of Laws
4 months 1 day ago

It is not honourable to attack an enemy without putting yourself at risk.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word "experience" have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word. It is to be feared, however, that if the word is avoided the confusions of thought with which it has been associated may persist.

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On the Nature of Acquaintance: Neutral Monism, 1914
4 months 2 weeks ago

I think that the principal and most basic spiritual need of the Russian People is the need for suffering, incessant and unslakeable suffering, everywhere and in everything. I think the Russian People have been infused with this need to suffer from time immemorial. A current of martyrdom runs through their entire history, and it flows not only from external misfortunes and disasters but springs from the very heart of the People themselves. There is always an element of suffering even in the happiness of the Russian People, and without it their happiness is incomplete.

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A Writer's Diary, Vol. 1: 1873-1876 (1994), pp. 161-162

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