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7 months 2 weeks ago

Those who deny the first principle should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Fools learn wisdom through misfortune.

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5 months 1 week ago

Our whole civilization, our entire culture is concentrated in the mad demand for the most perfected weapons of slaughter. Ammunition! Ammunition! O, Lord, thou who rulest heaven and earth, thou God of love, of mercy and of justice, provide us with enough ammunition to destroy our enemy. Such is the prayer which is ascending daily to the Christian heaven.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.

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Chapter 3 (pp. 19-20)
4 months 4 days ago

Humanists today, who claim to take a wholly secular view of things, scoff at mysticism and religion. But the unique status of humans is hard to defend, and even to understand, when it is cut off from any idea of transcendence. In a strictly naturalistic view - one in which the world is taken on its own terms, without reference to a creator or any spiritual realm - there is no hierarchy of value with humans at the top. There are simply multifarious animals, each with their own needs. Human uniqueness is a myth inherited from religion, which humanists have recycled into science.

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An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (p. 77)
5 months ago

You need to know enough of the natural sciences so that you are not a stranger in the world.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

He wanted to assume his entire condition, to carry the world on his shoulders and to become, in defiance of all, what all have made of him.

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p. 384
5 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophy, as I understand the word, is a positive theoretical science, and a science in an early stage of development. As such it has no more to do with belief than any other science. Indeed, I am bound to confess that it is at present in so unsettled a condition, that if the ordinary theorems of molecular physics and of archaeology are but the ghosts of beliefs, then to my mind, the doctrines of the philosophers are little better than the ghosts of ghosts. I know this is an extremely heretical opinion.

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Lecture II : The Universal Categories, §3. Laws: Nominalism, CP 5.61
3 months 1 week ago

Who can be forced has not learned how to die.

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line 426; (Megara). Alternate translation: Who can be compelled does not know how to die.
6 months 4 weeks ago

A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest but poor.

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Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), part II, chapter 1, p. 74
3 months 2 weeks 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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7 months 3 weeks ago

The fact is that I've never called myself a genius, and I think the term has been cheapened by overuse into meaninglessness. If other people want to call me that, that's their problem.

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4 weeks ago

That's just like your opinion, man....

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5 months 3 weeks ago

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude, towards the nobler and showier sides of national life.

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Crabbed Age and Youth.
6 months 3 weeks ago

To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 119
6 months 4 days ago

Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.

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His famous response to his judges upon his conviction as a heretic, prior to his transfer to the civil authorities for execution. (16 February 1600); as quoted by Gaspar Schopp of Breslau in a letter to Conrad Rittershausen
6 months 3 days ago

Burden not the back of Aries, Leo, or Taurus, with thy faults, nor make Saturn, Mars, or Venus, guilty of thy Follies.

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Part III, Section VII
3 months 3 weeks ago

Yet when we speak of time... do we not unconsciously adopt this hypothesis... and put ourselves in the place of this imperfect god... Do not even the atheists put themselves in the place where god would be..?

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6 months 3 weeks ago

We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

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Page 159
6 months 3 weeks ago

A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befal him must be from himself. He only can do himself any good or any harm. Nothing can be given to him or can taken from him but always there is a compensation.. There is a correspondence between the human soul and everything that exists in the world; more properly, everything that is known to man. Instead of studying things without the principles of them, all may be penetrated unto with him. Every act puts the agent in a new position. The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself. He is not to live the future as described to him but to live the real future to the real present. The highest revelation is that God is in every man.

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September 8, 1833
6 months 4 weeks ago

Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don't.

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"The Nature of Philosophy" (p. 6)
7 months 4 weeks ago

The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner "state" in which the thinking comes to pass.

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Lecture XX, "Conclusions"
5 months ago

The Intentionality of the mind not only creates the possibility of meaning, but limits its forms.

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P. 166.
5 months 1 week ago

Elements of empirical language are manipulated in their rigidity, as if they were elements of a true and revealed language. The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.

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p. 7
3 months 5 days ago

An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.

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As quoted by Edward Teller, in Dr. Edward Teller's Magnificent Obsession by Robert Coughlan, in LIFE magazine (6 September 1954), p. 62
5 months 3 weeks ago

Idea or Vision, in its sensuous meaning, would be something that could be perceived only by the bodily eye and not by any other sense such as taste, hearing, etc.; it would be such a thing as a rainbow, or the forms which pass before us in dreams. Idea or Vision, in its supersensuous meaning, would denote, first of all, in conformity with the sphere in which the word is to be valid, something that cannot be perceived by the body at all, but only by the mind; and then, something that cannot, as many other things can, be perceived by the dim feeling of the mind, but only by the eye of the mind, by clear perception.

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The Chief Difference Between The Germans And The Other Peoples Of Teutonic Descent p. 59
2 months 3 weeks ago

But what has been the experience of the Russian socialist movement up to now? The most important and fruitful changes in its tactical policy during the last ten years have not been the inventions of several leaders and even less so of any central organizational organs. They have always been the spontaneous product of the movement in ferment.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.

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Volume iii, p. 344
7 months 4 weeks ago

A person might fairly doubt also what in the world they mean by the absolute - this that or the other, since, as they would themselves allow, the account of the humanity is one and the same in the absolute man, and in any individual man: for so far as the individual and the absolute man are both man, they will not differ at all: and if so, then the essential good and any particular good will not differ, in so far as both are good. Nor will it do to say that the eternity of the absolute good makes it to be more good; for a white thing which has lasted white ever so long, is no whiter than that which only lasts for a day.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

So, this is ooold school, like old old school. So, I think we've had it backward for a long time. I think we are entering a new era and it's time to directly say Existence>essence. Being>identity.

"being" here is referring to our contingent identity. But I think we have to face the fact we don't know what happens to the identity when we die. But we know, when the body exists, our identity persists. We can't let identity particularity subvert life. Subvert existence.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The Constitution has made no provision for our holding foreign territory, still less for incorporating foreign nations into our Union. The Executive, in seizing the fugitive occurrence which so much advances the good of their country, have done an act beyond the Constitution. The Legislature, in casting behind them metaphysical subtleties and risking themselves like faithful servants, must ratify and pay for it, and throw themselves on their country for doing for them unauthorized what we know they would have done for themselves had they been in a situation to do it.

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On the Louisiana Purchase, Letter to John Breckinridge
5 months 3 weeks ago

Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source -- next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.

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The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
2 months 3 weeks ago

Know the joy of life by piling good deed on good deed until no rift or cranny appears between them.

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XII, 29
3 months 2 weeks ago

Curious, if we will reflect on it, this of having no books. Except by what he could see for himself, or hear of by uncertain rumor of speech in the obscure Arabian Desert, he could know nothing. The wisdom that had been before him or at a distance from him in the world, was in a manner as good as not there for him. Of the great brother souls, flame-beacons through so many lands and times, no one directly communicates with this great soul. He is alone there, deep down in the bosom of the Wilderness; has to grow up so,-alone with Nature and his own Thoughts. But, from an early age, he had been remarked as a thoughtful man.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Do a man dirt, yourself you hurt.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Animals no doubt have different interests from humans, and may experience different pleasures and pains, but the principle of equal consideration for similar interests still holds, and pleasures and pains of similar intensity and duration should be given equal weight, whether they are experienced by humans or by animals.

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p. 342
4 months 3 weeks ago

To spendthrifts money is so living and actual-it is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune-that of time; and a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a breath.

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A Lodging for the Night.
3 months 1 week ago

Would not anyone who is a man have his slumbers broken by a war-trumpet rather than by a chorus of serenaders?

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Sleep on now, and take your rest: behold, the hour is at hand, and the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise, let us be going: behold, he is at hand that doth betray me.

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26:45-46 (KJV)
7 months 3 weeks ago

A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images. And in a good novel, the whole of the philosophy has passed into the images. But if once the philosophy overflows the characters and action, and therefore looks like a label stuck on the work, the plot loses its authenticity and the novel its life. Nevertheless, a work that is to last cannot dispense with profound ideas. And this secret fusion between experiences and ideas, between life and reflection on the meaning of life, is what makes the great novelist.

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5 months 1 week ago

Architecture is a way for power to achieve eloquence through form.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The many are mean; only the few are noble.

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5 months 1 week ago

The necessity for power is obvious, because life cannot be lived without order; but the allocation of power is arbitrary because all men are alike, or very nearly. Yet power must not seem to be arbitrarily allocated, because it will not then be recognized as power. Therefore prestige, which is illusion, is of the very essence of power.

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p. 235
2 months 3 weeks ago

Eating is an agricultural act.

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The Pleasures of Eating

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