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5 months 4 weeks ago

Unlimited exploitation of cheap labour-power is the sole foundation of their power to compete.

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Vol. I, Ch. 15, Section 8, pg. 520.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Whenever convictions are not arrived at by direct contact with the world and the objects themselves, but indirectly through a critique of the opinions of others, the processes of thinking are impregnated with ressentiment. The establishment of "criteria" for testing the correctness of opinions then becomes the most important task. Genuine and fruitful criticism judges all opinions with reference to the object itself. Ressentiment criticism, on the contrary, accepts no "object" that has not stood the test of criticism.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 67-68
4 months 1 week ago

Human nature asserts itself regardless of all laws, nor is there any plausible reason why nature should adapt itself to a perverted conception of morality.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."

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Varnhagen von Ense's Memoirs.
3 months 1 week ago

I have had to suffer the violence and brutality that comes with rising fundamentalism, and I've asked myself how a society that is the cradle of peace, the land of Gandhi and Buddha, could be reduced to one of the most volatile societies in the world.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.

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"Natural History of Massachusetts". The Dial (July 1842) p. 39
5 months 4 weeks ago

Nor is it the irrationality of the form which is taken as characteristic. On the contrary, one overlooks the irrational.

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Vol. II, Ch. I, p. 30.
4 months 3 weeks ago

But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . .

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Often injustice lies in what you aren't doing, not only in what you are doing.

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IX. 5:223
4 months 3 weeks ago

The man old in days will not hesitate to ask a small child seven days old about the place of life, and he will live. For many who are first will become last, and they will become one and the same.

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6 months ago

You have not that power you ought to have over him, till he comes to be more afraid of offending so good a friend than of losing some part of his future expectation.

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Sec. 97
3 months 3 weeks ago

Literacy affects the physiology as well as the psychic life of the African.

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(p. 38)
5 months 4 weeks ago

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

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Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
4 months 3 weeks ago

The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

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5 months 4 weeks ago

There is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see. Abstract rules indeed can help; but they help the less in proportion as our intuitions are more piercing, and our vocation is the stronger for the moral life. For every real dilemma is in literal strictness a unique situation; and the exact combination of ideals realized and ideals disappointed which each decision creates is always a universe without a precedent, and for which no adequate previous rule exists.

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"The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life", International Journal of Ethics, April 1891
5 months 4 weeks ago

As a beast of toil an ox is fixed capital. If he is eaten, he no longer functions as an instrument of labour, nor as fixed capital either.

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Vol. II, Ch. VIII, p. 163.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought as a fish exists in water; that is, it ceases to breathe anywhere else.

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As quoted by David Macey, The lives of Michel Foucault (1993) p. 177. Citing 'Les Intellectuels et le Pouvoir', Le'Arc 49, 1972, pp. 3-10.
6 months ago

But the chief design of this paper is not to disprove it, which many have sufficiently done; but to entreat Americans to consider.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics. ... It is possible only because we possess a certain kind of insight - the capacity to transcend ourselves in thought.If a sense of the absurd is a way of perceiving our true situation (even though the situation is not absurd until the perception arises), then what reason can we have to resent or escape it? ... It results from the ability to understand our human limitations. It need not be a matter of agony unless we make it so. Nor need it evoke a defiant contempt of fate that allows us to feel brave or proud. Such dramatics even if carried on in private, betray a failure to appreciate the cosmic unimportance of the situation. If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

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"The Absurd" (1971), p. 23.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

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Discipline and Punish (1977) as translated by Alan Sheridan, p. 228
5 months 3 weeks ago

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

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Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.

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A 58
4 months 1 week ago

There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilisation at which we have arrived. The stimulus, the training, the time, are all three wanting to us; or, in other words, the means and inducements are not there. Look at the poor lives we lead. It is a wonder that we are so good as we are, not that we are so bad. In looking round we are struck with the power of the organisations we see, not with their want of power. Now and then, it is true, we are conscious that there is an inferior organisation, but, in general, just the contrary.

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7 months 1 day ago
Where there is happiness, there is found pleasure in nonsense. The transformation of experience into its opposite, of the suitable into the unsuitable, the obligatory into the optional (but in such a manner that this process produces no injury and is only imagined in jest), is a pleasure; ...
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2 months 2 weeks ago

Man is a tool-using animal...Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

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Bk. I, ch. 5.
4 months 1 week ago

The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage.

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Ch. 36, January 19, 1945.
5 months 4 weeks ago

Matter is indeed infinitely and incredibly refined. To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the principle of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself to all life's purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities.

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Lecture III, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered
4 months 4 weeks ago

Our patience will achieve more than our force.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand at all, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language, with this 'relation,' precisely, which is yours.

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Derrida Jacques, Elisabeth Weber (1995), Points...: Interviews, 1974-1994. p. 115
4 months 3 weeks ago

The distinction between true and false consciousness, real and immediate interest still is meaningful. But this distinction itself must be validated. Men must come to see it and to find their way from false to true consciousness, from their immediate to their real interest. They can do so only if they live in need of changing their way of life, of denying the positive, of refusing. It is precisely this need which the established society manages to repress to the degree to which it is capable of "delivering the goods" on an increasingly large scale, and using the scientific conquest of nature for the scientific conquest of man.

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pp. xlv-xlvi
4 months 2 weeks ago

And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity.

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6 months 6 days ago

Saying is one thing and doing is another.

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Ch. 31
5 months 4 weeks ago

What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way, - nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.

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The Dilemma of Determinism, 1884
4 months 1 week ago

Behind man lies the abyss, nothingness; the Outsider knows this; it is his business to sink claws of iron into life to grasp it tighter than the indifferent bourgeois, to build, to Will, in spite of the abyss.

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Chapter Seven, The Great Synthesis…
5 months 4 weeks ago

If good music has charms to soothe the savage breast, bad music has no less powerful spells for filling the mildest breast with rage, the happiest with horror and disgust. Oh, those mammy songs, those love longings, those loud hilarities! How was it possible that human emotions intrinsically decent could be so ignobly parodied.

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"Silence is Golden," p. 59
5 months 4 weeks ago

He was often, and much beyond reason, provoked by my failures in cases where success could not have been expected; but in the main his method was right, and it succeeded. I do not believe that any scientific teaching ever was more thorough, or better fitted for training the faculties, than the mode in which logic and political economy were taught to me by my father. Striving, even in an exaggerated degree, to call forth the activity of my faculties, by making me find out everything for myself, he gave his explanations not before, but after, I had felt the full force of the difficulties; and not only gave me an accurate knowledge of these two great subjects, as far as they were then understood, but made me a thinker on both.

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(pp. 28-29)
3 months 3 weeks ago

No man is happy who does not think himself so.

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Maxim 584
2 months 1 week ago

The English, generally remarkable for doing very good things in a very bad manner, seem to have reserved the maturity and plenitude of their awkwardness for the pulpit.

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Vol. I, ch. 3, p. 83
5 months 4 weeks ago

A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.

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Ch. VI: International relations, p. 106

India has always been an object of yearning, a realm of wonder, a world of magic... India is the land of dreams. India had always dreamt - more of the Bliss that is man's final goal. And this has helped India to be more creative in history than any other nation. Hence the effervescence of myths and legends, religious and philosophies, music, and dances and the different styles of architecture." ...

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quoted in Patri, Umesh Hindu scriptures and American transcendentalists 1st ed. quoted from Londhe, S. (2008).
4 months 3 weeks ago

All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice - that is, on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.

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p. 151
2 months 2 weeks ago

In brief, all this Mammon-Gospel, of Supply-and-demand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and Devil take the hindmost, begins to be one of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached on Earth; or altogether the shabbiest.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

What Heaven has conferred is called The Nature; an accordance with this nature is called The Path of duty; the regulation of this path is called Instruction. The path may not be left for an instant. If it could be left, it would not be the path. On this account, the superior man does not wait till he sees things, to be cautious, nor till he hears things, to be apprehensive.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

A common mortal periodically selected by his fellow-citizens to watch over their own interests, can never be supposed to possess this stupendous virtue.

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Book III, Chapter 9
4 months 3 weeks ago

I have taken pains to make my distinction of icons, indices, and tokens clear, in order to enunciate this proposition: in a perfect system of logical notation signs of these several kinds must all be employed. Without tokens there would be no generality in the statements, for they are the only general signs; and generality is essential to reasoning. ... But tokens alone do not state what is the subject of discourse ; and this can, in fact, not be described in general terms ; it can only be indicated. The actual world cannot be distinguished from a world of imagination by any description. Hence the need of pronoun and indices, and the more complicated the subject the greater the need of them.

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