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2 months 2 weeks ago

In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.

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Ch. 5: "The Romantic Reaction", p. 128

When common words are appropriated as technical terms, their meaning and relations in common use should be retained as far as can conveniently be done.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Better be mute, than dispute with the Ignorant.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Do you think that God will punish them for not practicing a religion which he did not reveal to them?

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No. 35. (Usbek writing to Gemchid)
3 months 5 days ago

My immediate consciousness, my absolute perception, cannot go beyond myself, - I have immediate knowledge only of myself, whatever I know further I know only by reasoning, in the same manner in which I have come to those conclusions concerning the original powers of Nature, which certainly do not lie within the circle of my perceptions. I, however, - that which I call myself, - am not the man-forming power of Nature, but only one of its manifestations ; and only of this manifestation am I conscious, not of that power, whose existence I have only discovered from the necessity of explaining my own.

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Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 13
4 months 1 week ago

The scene should be gently open'd, and his entrance made step by step, and the dangers pointed out that attend him from several degrees, tempers, designs, and clubs of men. He should be prepared to be shocked by some, and caress'd by others; warned who are like to oppose, who to mislead, who to undermine him, and who to serve him. He should be instructed how to know and distinguish them; where he should let them see, and when dissemble the knowledge of them and their aims and workings.

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Sec. 94
4 months 1 week ago

The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

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Chapter II, Part II, Article I, p. 911.
4 months 2 weeks ago

All things must needs be borne on through the calm void moving at equal rate with unequal weights.

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Book II, lines 238-239 (tr. Bailey)
2 weeks 6 days ago

Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.

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Line 18.

The centuries are thick, dark waves that rise and fall, steeped in blood. Every moment is a gaping abyss. Gaze on the dark sea without staggering, confront the abyss every moment without illusion or impudence or fear. ... But this is not enough; take a further step: battle to give meaning to the confused struggles of man.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

There is no such thing as gratitude in international politics.

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Abridgement of Vols. 7-10 by D. C. Somervell
2 months 2 weeks ago

I do not mean to deny the biologic, physiologic, or psychologic factors in creating crime; but there is hardly an advanced criminologist who will not concede that the social and economic influences are the most relentless, the most poisonous germs of crime.

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3 months 5 days ago

Germany is now a field of cadavers, soon she will be a paradise.

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2 weeks 6 days ago

If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes.

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2 months 1 week ago

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called 'sex' is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.

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Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
2 months 1 week ago

I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy - because we're experienced with it, you know. And, in democracy, after a hundred years, you have to let your slaves go. And, after a hundred and fifty years, you have to let your women vote. And, at the beginning of democracy, is that quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite okay. And that's what's going on now.

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Interviewed by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show
3 weeks 3 days ago

Thiel's Antichrist obsession is the rare religious position that unites the Vatican and the godless. When your eschatology makes secular humanists and the Catholic Church exchange uncomfortable glances, you've left Christianity behind and entered something else entirely.

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4 months 1 day ago

But in fact there is no circle at all in the formulation of our question. Beings can be determined in their being without the explicit concept of the meaning of being having to be already available. If this were not so there could not have been as yet any ontological knowledge. And prob­ably no one would deny the factual existence of such knowledge. It is true that "being" is "presupposed" in all previous ontology, but not as an available concept-not as the sort of thing we are seeking.

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Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)
3 months 3 weeks ago

Rather, we heirs of Enlightenment think of enemies of liberal democracy like Nietzsche or Loyola as, to use Rawls's word, "mad." We do so because there is no way to see them as fellow citizens of our constitutional democracy, people whose life plans might, given ingenuity and good will, be fitted in with those of other citizens. They are crazy because the limits of sanity are set by what we can take seriously. This, in turn, is determined by our upbringing, our historical situation.

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4 months 4 days ago

The homosexual never thinks of himself when someone is branded in his presence with the name homosexual. ...His sexual tastes will doubtless lead him to enter into relationships with this suspect category, but he would like to make use of them without being likened to them. Here, too, the ban that is cast on certain men by society has destroyed all possibility of reciprocity among them. Shame isolates.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The double meaning has been given to suit people's diverse intelligence. The apparent contradictions are meant to stimulate the learned to deeper study.

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4 months 5 days ago

I am well aware of how anarchic much of what I say may sound. Expressing myself thus abstractly and briefly, I may seem to despair of the very notion of truth. But I beseech you to reserve your judgment until we see it applied to the details which lie before us. I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.

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Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
4 months 5 days ago

Solvency is maintained by means of the national debt, on the principle, "If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?"

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Ability
2 months 2 weeks ago

Logos is powerless without the force of eros.

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2 months 2 weeks 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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3 months 1 day ago

One disgust, then another - to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.

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4 months 1 week ago

To an atheist all writings tend to atheism: he corrupts the most innocent matter with his own venom.

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Ch. 12
3 months 2 weeks ago

Holding fast to these things, you will know the worlds of gods and mortals which permeates and governs everything. And you will know, as is right, nature similar in all respects, so that you will neither entertain unreasonable hopes nor be neglectful of anything.

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As quoted in Divine Harmony: The Life and Teachings of Pythagoras by John Strohmeier and Peter Westbrook.
3 months 3 days ago

Nothing could be more natural than the developement of the passions, nor more striking than the views of the human heart. What delicate struggles! and uncommonly pretty turns of thought!

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Mary: A Fiction
1 month 1 week ago

Echoing the Christian faith in free will, humanists hold that human beings are - or may someday become - free to choose their lives. They forget that the self that does the choosing has not itself been chosen.

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Beyond the Last Thought: Freud's cigars and the long way round to Nirvana (p. 86)
2 months 4 weeks ago

I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.

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Speech at the Descartes Conference in Paris (1937) Quoted in The Forbes Scrapbook of Thoughts on the Business of Life (1950), p. 442, as "Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought."
1 month 1 day ago

Today we have arrived at a point when the three principles [of modern resistance: 1. measure of efficacy, 2. the form of political and military organization correspond to the current forms of economic and social production, 3. democracy and freedom] coincide. The distributed network structure provides the model for an absolutely democratic organization that corresponds to the dominant forms of economic and social production and is also the most powerful weapon against the ruling power structure.

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88
2 weeks 2 days ago

The man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life in his own.

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4 months 1 week ago

Concerning the female sorcerer. Roman law also prescribes this. Why does the law name women more than men here, even though men are also guilty of this? Because women are more susceptible to those superstitions of Satan; take Eve, for example. They are commonly called "wise women." Let them be killed.

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Sermon on Exodus, 1526, WA XVI, p. 551 as quoted in Luther on Women: A Sourcebook, edited by Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, (2003), p. 231
4 months 5 days ago

To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.

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Spinoza's Worm," p. 75
2 weeks 6 days ago

And yet life, Lucilius, is really a battle.

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3 weeks ago

All right, men are as they should be, can be. What should they be? Surely not more than they can be! And what can they be? Not more, again, than they - can, than they have the competence, the force, to be. But this they really are, because what they are not, they are incapable of being; for to be capable means - really to be. One is not capable for anything that one really is not; one is not capable of anything that one does not really do. Could a man blinded by cataract see? Oh, yes, if he had his cataract successfully removed. But now he cannot see because he does not see. Possibility and reality always coincide. One can do nothing that one does not, as one does nothing that one cannot.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 291
3 months 1 week ago

The man who makes his religion a means to the gaining of this world, will lose both worlds alike; whereas the man who gives up this world for the sake of religion, will get both worlds alike.

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The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazali, Allen & Unwin (1963), p. 152.
2 months 4 weeks ago

In which the technical apparatus of production and distribution (with an increasing sector of automation) functions, not as the sum-total of mere instruments which can be isolated from their social and political effects, but rather as a system which determines a priori the product of the apparatus as well as the operations of servicing and extending it. In this society, the productive apparatus tends to become totalitarian to the extent to which it determines not only the socially needed occupations, skills, and attitudes, but also individual needs and aspirations. It thus obliterates the Opposition between the private and public existence, between individual and social needs.

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p. xlvii
4 months 4 days ago

What is now common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H.C.F. [Highest Common Factor], and Man's conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.

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3 weeks ago

Because the Egoist is to himself the warder of the human, and has nothing to say to the state except: "Get out of my sunshine!"

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Tucker 1907, p. 307
1 month 2 days ago

The straightening board was created because of warped wood, and the plumb line came into being because of things that are not straight. Rulers are established and ritual and rightness are illuminated because the nature is evil.

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Sources of Chinese Tradition (1999), vol. 1, p. 182
4 months 4 days ago

At best the principles that economists have supposed the choices of rational individuals to satisfy can be presented as guidelines for us to consider when we make our decisions.

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Chapter IX, Section 84, p. 558
2 weeks 6 days ago

Friendship is always helpful, but love sometimes even does harm

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2 months 5 days ago

People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing-refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.

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p. 210
3 months 6 days ago

The end of the philosophical dialogue lies in itself; it can never serve a purpose outside of itself. Just as a sculptor does not cease to be a work of art even if it lies at the bottom of the sea, so indeed every work of philosophy endures, even if uncomprehended in its own time. One would be grateful if it were merely a matter of incomprehension. Instead, the work is usually refitted and appropriated by various entities-some playing the part of the opponent; others, that of the proponent.

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P.3-4
3 weeks 6 days ago

For what gives my work its peculiar quality, and what is most remarkable in the present age, is this. Fortune has guided almost all the affairs of the world in one direction and has forced them to incline towards one and the same end; a historian should likewise bring before his readers under one synoptical view the operations by which she has accomplished her general purpose.

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