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From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free.

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4 months 1 week ago

No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession.

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3 months 1 week ago

It seems to me that science has a much greater likelihood of being true in the main than any philosophy hitherto advanced (I do not, of course, except my own). In science there are many matters about which people are agreed; in philosophy there are none. Therefore, although each proposition in a science may be false, and it is practically certain that there are some that are false, yet we shall be wise to build our philosophy upon science, because the risk of error in philosophy is pretty sure to be greater than in science. If we could hope for certainty in philosophy, the matter would be otherwise, but so far as I can see such a hope would be chimerical.

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Logical Atomism, 1924
4 months 1 day ago

Of Every One-Hundred Men, Ten shouldn't even be there, Eighty are nothing but targets, Nine are real fighters... We are lucky to have them... They make the battle. Ah but the One, One of them is a Warrior... and He will bring the others back.

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1 month 1 week ago

Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up.

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The Intellectual and Moral Courage of Atheism
1 month 1 week ago

A wise man rules his passions, a fool obeys them.

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Maxim 49
2 weeks 4 days ago

The mass political movements of the 20th century were vehicles for myths inherited from religion, and it is no accident that religion is reviving now that these movements have collapsed.

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3 weeks 6 days ago

The language of the chalk is not hard to learn, not nearly so hard as Latin, if you only want to get at the broad features of the story it has to tell; and I propose that we now set to work to spell that story out together.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

To become like God is the ultimate end of all.

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2 months 1 week ago

The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.

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2 months 1 week ago

I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

A young delicate tree, that is being clipped and cut by the gardener in order to give it an artificial form, will never reach the majestic height and the beauty as when allowed to grow in nature and freedom.

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4 months 2 weeks ago
Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!
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2 months 1 week ago

The free being with absolute freedom proposes to itself certain ends. It wills because it wills, and the willing of an object is itself the last ground of such willing. Thus we have previously determined a free being, and any other determination would destroy the conception of an Ego, or of a free being. Now, if it could be so arranged that the willing of an unlawful end would necessarily - in virtue of an always effective law - result in the very reverse of that end, then the unlawful will would always ANNIHILATE ITSELF. A person could not will that end for the very reason because he did will it; his unlawful will would become the ground of its own annihilation, as the will is indeed always its own last ground.

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p. 193
2 months 4 days ago

Everything ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development.

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3 months 1 week ago

What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?

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Shakespeare; or, The Poet
1 month 1 week ago

People never remember but the computer never forgets.

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(p. 69)
2 weeks 6 days ago

If we don't address the genetic causes of suffering (physical and mental) we will find ourselves in 500 years enjoying material abundance via nanotech, living in a perfect democracy, colonizing space, and still sitting around wondering "Why are we miserable so much of the time? Why can't we all just get along? Why are we not all happy?"

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David Pearce in SF, Qualia Computing, 7 Oct. 2018
3 months 2 weeks ago

At the very beginning of my fevers and sicknesses that cast me down, whilst still entire, and but little, disordered in health, I reconcile myself to Almighty God by the last Christian, offices, and find myself by so doing less oppressed and more easy, and have got, methinks, so much the better of my disease. And I have yet less need of a notary or counsellor than of a physician.

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Ch. 9

Can the man say, Fiat lux, Let there be light; and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there is light in himself, will he accomplish this.

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2 weeks 4 days ago

No doubt markets transmit information in the way that Hayek claimed. But what reason is there to believe that - unlike any other social institution - they have a built-in capacity to correct their mistakes? History hardly supports the supposition. Moods of irrational exuberance and panic can, and often do, swamp the price-discovery functions of markets.

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2 months 1 week ago

Since space is continuous, it follows that there must be an immediate community of feeling between parts of mind infinitesimally close together. Without this, I believe it would have been impossible for any co-ordination to be established in the action of the nerve-matter of one brain.

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3 months 1 week ago

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.

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Preface
3 weeks 6 days ago

Whether we take these characters then, or such minor ones as those which are derivable from the proportional length of the spines in the cervical vertebrae, and the like, there is no doubt whatsoever as to the marked difference between Man and the Gorilla; but there is as little, that equally marked differences, of the very same order, obtain between the Gorilla and the lower apes.

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Ch.2, p. 92
2 months 1 week ago

It is provable both that the historical sequence was, in its main outlines, a necessary one; and that the causes which determined it apply to the child as to the race. ...as the mind of humanity placed in the midst of phenomena and striving to comprehend them has, after endless comparisons, speculations, experiments, and theories, reached its present knowledge of each subject by a specific route; it may rationally be inferred that the relationship between mind and phenomena is such as to prevent this knowledge from being reached by any other route; and that as each child's mind stands in this same relationship to phenomena, they can be accessible to it only through the same route. Hence in deciding upon the right method of education, an inquiry into the method of civilization will help to guide us.

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2 months 1 week ago

Lassalle. It would be a pity about the fellow because of his great ability, but these goings-on are really too bad. He was always a man one had to keep a devilish sharp eye on and as a real Jew from the Slav border was always to exploit anyone for his own private ends on party pretexts. And then his urge to push his way into polite society, de parvenir, if only for appearance's sake, to disguise the greasy Breslau Jew with all kinds of pomade and paint was always repulsive.

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Letter to Karl Marx (7 March 1856), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 40. Letters 1856-59 (2010), p. 27
3 months 1 week ago

Lord, you have cursed Cain and Cain's children: thy will be done. You have allowed men's hearts to be corrupted, that their intentions be rotten, that their actions putrefy and stink: thy will be done.

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Act 1
2 months 4 days ago

Are ye also yet without understanding? Do not ye yet understand, that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught? But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man: but to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man.

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15:16-20 (KJV)
2 months 2 days ago

Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.

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Cited in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations by Subject, ed. Susan Ratcliffe (2010), p. 223
4 months 1 week ago

Knowledge of the fact differs from knowledge of the reason for the fact.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The issue over there being classes seems more a question of convenient conceptual scheme; the issue over there being centaurs, or brick houses on Elm Street, seems more a question of fact. But I have been urging that this difference is only one of degree, and that it turns upon our vaguely pragmatic inclination to adjust one strand of the fabric of science rather than another in accommodating some particular recalcitrant experience. Conservatism figures in such choices, and so does the quest for simplicity.

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"Two Dogmas of Empiricism"
3 months 1 week ago

Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.

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Civil government does by its nature include much that is mechanical, and must be treated accordingly. We term it indeed, in ordinary language, the Machine of Society, and talk of it as the grand working wheel from which all private machines must derive, or to which they must adapt, their movements.

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3 months 1 week ago

The religion and philosophy of the Hebrews are those of a wilder and ruder tribe, wanting the civility and intellectual refinements and subtlety of Vedic culture.

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A Tribute to Hinduism, 2008
3 months 1 week ago

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

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As quoted in Think, Vol. 27 (1961), p. 32
2 months 1 week ago

Demonstrating is therefore only the means through which I strip my thought of the form of "mine-ness" so that the other person may recognize it as his own.

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Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 66
2 months 4 days ago

The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest.

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9:37-38 (KJV)
4 months 2 weeks ago
He who humbleth himself wants to be exalted.
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3 months 2 weeks ago

Finally, every man will become dear and pleasing to every other man; all will be beloved by all! and, what is still more desirable, beloved also by Christ; to become acceptable to whom is the highest felicity of human nature.

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2 months 4 days ago

Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him.

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2 weeks 4 days ago

The idea of politics as a conservation in which the collision of opinions is moderated and accommodated, in which what is sought is not truth but peace, has been almost entirely lost, and supplanted by a legalist paradigm in which all political claims and conflicts are modelled in the jargon of rights.

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'Oakeshott as a Liberal' (p.80)

An empire derives no advantage from the caresses of two turtledoves who spend a year cooing to each other in public meetings.

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Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World, J. Beecher (1986), p. 315

But among all the discoveries and corrections probably none has resulted in a deeper influence on the human spirit than the doctrine of Copernicus.... Possibly mankind has never been demanded to do more, for considering all that went up in smoke as a result of realizing this change: a second Paradise, a world of innocence, poetry and piety: the witness of the senses, the conviction of a poetical and religious faith. No wonder his contemporaries did not wish to let all this go and offered every possible resistance to a doctrine which in its converts authorized and demanded a freedom of view and greatness of thought so far unknown indeed not even dreamed of.

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Zur Farbenlehre, Materialien zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre (1810), Frankfurt am Main, 1991, Seite 666.
3 months 1 week ago

We invite this Congress, and through it the scientists of the world and the general public, to subscribe to the following resolution: "In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them".

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3 months 1 week ago

The possession and the exercise of political, and among others of electoral, rights, is one of the chief instruments both of moral and of intellectual training for the popular mind; and all governments must be regarded as extremely imperfect, until every one who is required to obey the laws, has a voice, or the prospect of a voice, in their enactment and administration.

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Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859), p. 22
3 months 1 week ago

Each piece of money is a mere coin, or means of circulation, only so long as it actually circulates.

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Vol. I, Ch. 3, Section 2(c), pg. 145.
3 months 1 week ago

Paradise on earth is where I am.

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Le Mondain, 1736

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