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3 weeks 6 days ago

The two processes by which Science is constructed are the 'Explication of Conceptions' and the 'Colligation of Facts'.

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5 months 1 day ago

Society and conversation, therefore, are the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquillity, if, at any time, it has unfortunately lost it; as well as the best preservatives of that equal and happy temper, which is so necessary to self-satisfaction and enjoyment. Men of retirement and speculation, who are apt to sit brooding at home over either grief or resentment, though they may often have more humanity, more generosity, and a nicer sense of honour, yet seldom possess that equality of temper which is so common among men of the world.

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Section I, Chap. III.
9 months 3 days ago

Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable; in its basic dimension, it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our reality itself; an illusion which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one "to have his passion as a profession."

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p. 4
4 months 3 weeks ago

Christianity does not involve the belief that all things were made for man. It does involve the belief that God loves man and for his sake became man and died.

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Ch. 7: "A Chapter of Red Herrings"
4 months 4 weeks ago

Surplus value is exactly equal to surplus labour; the increase of the one [is] exactly measured by the diminution of necessary labour.

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Notebook III, The Chapter on Capital, p. 259.
5 months 4 weeks ago

For legislators make the citizens good by forming habits in them, and this is the wish of every legislator, and those who do not effect it miss their mark, and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

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Letter to François-Joachim de Pierre, cardinal de Bernis, 23 April 1764
3 months 3 weeks ago

The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!

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4 months 1 week ago

Better be mute, than dispute with the Ignorant.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they've slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, 'Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!' And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same.

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5 months 1 day ago

In public, as well as in private expences, great wealth may, perhaps, frequently be admitted as an apology for great folly.

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Chapter V, p. 563.
4 months 3 weeks ago

That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.

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"The Idea of Equality"
3 months 1 week ago

Truths dead and forgotten long ago, conceptions of the world and its people, covered with mould, even during the times of our grandmothers, are being hammered into the heads of our young generation.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted - you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it's an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times - but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness - that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free. War is the father and king of all, and has produced some as gods and some as men, and has made some slaves and some free.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

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Book III, Chapter 8, "The Great Sin"
3 months 1 week ago

The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat.

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The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
4 months 3 weeks ago

Appealing to his [Einstein's] way of expressing himself in theological terms, I said: If God had wanted to put everything into the universe from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man's experience of change. But he seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one.

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As quoted in Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes by Charles Hartshorne
3 months 3 weeks ago

Unity is the great goal toward which humanity moves irresistibly. But it becomes fatal, destructive of the intelligence, the dignity, the well-being of individuals and peoples whenever it is formed without regard to liberty, either by violent means or under the authority of any theological, metaphysical, political, or even economic idea. That patriotism which tends toward unity without regard to liberty is an evil patriotism, always disastrous to the popular and real interests of the country it claims to exalt and serve. Often, without wishing to be so, it is a friend of reaction - an enemy of the revolution, i.e., the emancipation of nations and men.

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3 weeks 3 days ago

So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.

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IV, 49a
2 months 2 weeks ago

It is our deliberate opinion that the French Revolution, in spite of all its crimes and follies, was a great blessing to mankind.

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'Sir James Mackintosh', The Edinburgh Review (July 1835), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review, Vol. II (1843), p. 215
4 months 4 weeks ago

I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country's God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.

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5 months 6 days ago

There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried.

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Aphorism 19
4 months 2 weeks ago

We appear to be faced with a general difficulty about psychophysical reduction. In other areas the process of reduction is a move in the direction of greater objectivity, toward a more accurate view of the real nature of things. ... The less it depends on a specifically human viewpoint, the more objective is our description. ...Experience itself, however, does not seem to fit the pattern. ... If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity - that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint - does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us further away from it.

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p. 174.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

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2 months 6 days ago

The reason for sketching what's technically feasible with the tools of synthetic biology is that only after human complicity in the persistence of suffering in the biosphere is acknowledged can we hope to have an informed socio-political debate on the morality of its perpetuation. No serious ethical discussion of free-living animal suffering can begin in the absence of recognition of human responsibility for nonhuman well-being.

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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
3 months 2 weeks ago

Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself - that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks - he lies to himself. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech - this thing that they call a social product - was made for lying.

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Niebla [Mist]
5 months 3 weeks ago

To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

Men use thought only to justify their wrongdoings, and speech only to conceal their thoughts.

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Dialogue 14, Le Chapon et la Poularde (1766); reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed., 1919
1 month 1 week ago

We witness a strange inversion: on the one hand, the endeavor to turn the social contract into a less calculating and more feeling connection among its members; on the other hand, the endeavor to turn the erotic relationship into a contractual one.

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p. 15.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young And always keep us so.

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Ode to Beauty, st. 2
2 months 3 weeks ago

Confession of our faults is the next thing to innocence.

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Maxim 1060
2 weeks 3 days ago

Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.

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Objecting to the placing of observables at the heart of the new quantum mechanics, during Heisenberg's 1926 lecture at Berlin; related by Heisenberg, quoted in Unification of Fundamental Forces (1990) by Abdus Salam
3 months 3 weeks ago

To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!

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3 months 1 week ago

There is no such thing as data-driven thinking.

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3 months 1 week ago

Our institutions and conditions rest upon deep-seated ideas. To change those conditions and at the same time leave the underlying ideas and values intact means only a superficial transformation, one that cannot be permanent or bring real betterment. It is a change of form only, not of substance, as so tragically proven by Russia.

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3 months 1 week ago

Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad, the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality.

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p. 55
3 months 1 week ago

A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.

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p. 353.
2 months 3 weeks ago

The whole life of the upper classes is a constant inconsistency. The more delicate a man's conscience is, the more painful this contradiction is to him.

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Chapter V, Contradiction Between our Life and our Christian Conscience
3 months 3 weeks ago

I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.

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2 weeks 3 days ago

It has often been said, and certainly not without justification, that the man of science is a poor philosopher. Why then should it not be the right thing for the physicist to let the philosopher do the philosophizing? Such might indeed be the right thing to do at a time when the physicist believes he has at his disposal a rigid system of fundamental laws which are so well established that waves of doubt can't reach them; but it cannot be right at a time when the very foundations of physics itself have become problematic as they are now. At a time like the present, when experience forces us to seek a newer and more solid foundation, the physicist cannot simply surrender to the philosopher the critical contemplation of theoretical foundations; for he himself knows best and feels more surely where the shoe pinches. In looking for an new foundation, he must try to make clear in his own mind just how far the concepts which he uses are justified, and are necessities.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The precarious ontological link between Logos and Eros is broken, and scientific rationality emerges as essentially neutral.

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p. 147
4 months 3 weeks ago

The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.

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p. 125
4 months 4 weeks ago

I cannot guess what may be the fate of Quakerism in America; but I perceive it loses ground daily in England. In all countries, where the established religion is of a mild and tolerating nature, it will at length swallow up all the rest.

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