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3 months 1 day ago

Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States.

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Ch. 13: Freedom in Society.
3 months 1 week ago

We must remove the Decalogue out of sight and heart.

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Wilhelm Martin Leberecht De Wette, 4, 188. As cited by Jonathan Ramachandran (January 1, 2019), Lake of Fire - Hope for the Wicked One Day? - Essays in First Christianity, 5 Loaf 2 Fish Publications, p. 1264.
3 months 1 day ago

Most books belong to the house and streets only, and in the fields their leaves feel very thin.

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3 months 1 week ago

The end of the republic is to enervate and to weaken all other bodies so as to increase its own body.

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Book 2, Ch. 3 (translation by Mansfield and Tarcov)
3 months 2 weeks ago

A happy and eternal being has no trouble himself and brings no trouble upon any other being; hence he is exempt from movements of anger and partiality, for every such movement implies weakness.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The Protestant churches generally hold that the elements of the sacrament are flesh and blood only in a tropical sense; they nourish our souls as meat and the juice of it would our bodies. But the Catholics maintain that they are literally just that; although they possess all the sensible qualities of wafer-cakes and diluted wine. But we can have no conception of wine except what may enter into a belief, either -

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1 month 1 week ago

Forty years ago Germany proclaimed the slogan: "Germany above everything. Germany for the Germans, first, last and always. We want peace; therefore we must prepare for war. Only a well armed and thoroughly prepared nation can maintain peace, can command respect, can be sure of its national integrity." And Germany continued to prepare, thereby forcing the other nations to do the same. The terrible European war is only the culminating fruition of the hydra-headed gospel, military preparedness.

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1 month 1 week ago

The dominant, almost general, idea of revolution - particularly the Socialist idea - is that revolution is a violent change of social conditions through which one social class, the working class, becomes dominant over another class, the capitalist class. It is the conception of a purely physical change, and as such it involves only political scene shifting and institutional rearrangements. Bourgeois dictatorship is replaced by the "dictatorship of the proletariat" - or by that of its "advance guard," the Communist Party. Lenin takes the seat of the Romanovs, the Imperial Cabinet is rechristened Soviet of People's Commissars, Trotsky is appointed Minister of War, and a labourer becomes the Military Governor General of Moscow. That is, in essence, the Bolshevik conception of revolution, as translated into actual practice.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Simon Peter said to Him, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of Life." Jesus said, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

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The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it's the universal experience of TV watchers.

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1 month 1 week ago

It may seem to be a long way from Blake's innocent talk of love and copulation to De Sade's need to inflict pain. And yet both are the outcome of a sexual mysticism that strives to transcend the everyday world. Simone de Beauvoir said penetratingly of De Sade's work that 'he is trying to communicate an experience whose distinguishing characteristic is, nevertheless its will to remain incommunicable'. De Sade's perversion may have sprung from his dislike of his mother or of other women, but its basis is a kind of distorted religious emotion.

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p. 90

Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.

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Quotation and Originality
2 months 4 weeks ago

I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.

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Diary entry of Friday (2 February), concerning a card game
1 month 1 week ago

I believe government, organized authority, or the State is necessary only to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only. As a promoter of individual liberty, human well-being and social harmony, which alone constitute real order, government stands condemned by all the great men of the world...I believe - indeed, I know - that whatever is fine and beautiful in the human expresses and asserts itself in spite of government, and not because of it.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

As more and more women acquired prestige, fame, or money from feminist writings or from gains from feminist movement for equality in the workforce, individual opportunism undermined appeals for collective struggle. Women who were not opposed to patriarchy, capitalism, classism, or racism labeled themselves "feminist." Their expectations were varied. Privileged women wanted social equality with men of their class; some women wanted equal pay for equal work; others wanted an alternative lifestyle. Many of these legitimate concerns were easily co-opted by the ruling capitalist patriarchy.

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p. 7.

Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.

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1 month 4 days ago

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish these properties by experiment, and then to proceed more slowly to hypothesis for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

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Letter to Ignatius Pardies (1672) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (Feb. 1671/2) as quoted by William L. Harper
1 month 3 weeks ago

The Greek word for philosopher (philosophos) connotes a distinction from sophos. It signifies the lover of wisdom (knowledge) as distinguished from him who considers himself wise in the possession of knowledge. This meaning of the word still endures: the essence of philosophy is not the possession of the truth but the search for truth. ... Philosophy means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question.

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Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy (1951) as translated by Ralph Mannheim, Ch. 1, What is Philosophy?, p. 12

Popular presentation today is all too often that which puts the mob in a position to talk about something without understanding it.

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G 32
3 weeks 5 days ago

Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends.

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Ch. 4. The Gene machine

For me any of the little gestures I make are all tentative probes. That's why I feel free to make them sound as outrageous or extreme as possible. Until you make it extreme, the probe is not very efficient.

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Marshall McLuhan: the man and his message, edited by George Sanderson and Frank MacDonald, Fulcrum, 1989, p. 32
1 month 2 weeks ago

There is nothing that comes closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to feel pride in one's intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it.

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As quoted in the Introduction (by Siân Miles) p. 35
1 month 1 week ago

The first task of administrative theory is to develop a set of concepts that will permit the description, in terms relevant to the theory, of administrative situations. These concepts, to be scientifically useful, must be operational; that is, their meanings must correspond to empirically observable facts or situations.

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p. 43.
2 months 5 days ago

On doit exiger de moi que je cherche la vérité, mais non que je la trouve. One may demand of me that I should seek truth, but not that I should find it.

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No. 29
2 months 1 day ago

Russia was a slave in Europe but would be a master in Asia.

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As quoted in "Dilemmas of Empire 1850-1918: Power, Territory, Identity" by Dominic Livien in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 34, No.2 (April 1999), pp. 180
3 months 1 day ago

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

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1 month 1 week ago

The narcissistic, the domineering, the possessive woman can succeed in being a "loving" mother as long as the child is small. Only the really loving woman, the woman who is happier in giving than in taking, who is firmly rooted in her own existence, can be a loving mother when the child is in the process of separation.

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Ch. 2
2 months 4 weeks ago

Essentially the fault lies in the fact that the democratic political process is at best regulated rivalry; it does not even in theory have the desirable properties that price theory ascribes to truly competitive markets.

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Chapter IV, Section 36, p. 226
1 month 2 weeks ago

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.

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Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 1.
3 months 2 weeks ago

When a country is well governed, poverty and a mean condition are things to be ashamed of. When a country is ill governed, riches and honor are things to be ashamed of.

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3 months 1 week ago

Is Christ only to be adored? Or is the holy Mother of God rather not to be honoured? This is the woman who crushed the Serpent's head. Hear us. For your Son denies you nothing.

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Weimar edition of Martin Luther's Works, English translation edited by J. Pelikan [Concordia: St. Louis], Vol. 51, 128-129
2 months 1 day ago

Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.

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Volume iii, p. 335
2 months 3 weeks ago

The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.

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p. 41e
2 months 1 week ago

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.

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Included as a quotation in The Great Quotations (1977) by George Seldes, p. 35
1 month 3 weeks ago

The class of the wholly propertyless, who are obliged to sell their labor to the bourgeoisie in order to get, in exchange, the means of subsistence for their support. This is called the class of proletarians, or the proletariat.

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2 months 1 day 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
3 months 2 days ago

And the final event to himself has been, that, as he rose like a rocket, he fell like the stick.

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On Edmund Burke's reactions to the American and French revolutions.
1 month 3 weeks ago

Notwithstanding their attacks on the basic conception of rationalism, on synthetic a priori judgments, that is, material propositions that cannot be contradicted by any experience, the empiricist posits the forms of being as constant.

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p. 146.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Fame and wealth without wisdom are unsafe possessions.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

The case of the conscience of Eichmann, which is admittedly complicated but is by no means unique, is scarcely comparable to the case of the German generals, one of whom, when asked at Nuremberg, "How was it possible that all of you honorable generals could continue to serve a murderer with such unquestioning loyalty?," replied that it was "not the task of a soldier to act as judge over his supreme commander. Let history do that or God in Heaven."

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Ch. VIII
3 months 4 weeks ago

We face eternity now. We have no universe left, no outside phenomena, no emotions, no passions. Nothing but ourselves and thought. We face an eternity of introspection, when all through history we have never known what to do with ourselves on a rainy Sunday.

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3 months 1 day ago

I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Even the most elevated psychological understanding is not a loving understanding.

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As men, we are all equal in the presence of death.

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Maxim 1
3 months 1 day ago

A process which led from the amœba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress - though whether the amœba would agree with this opinion is not known.

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Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
1 month 3 days ago

So-called "realist" photography does not capture the "what is." Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.

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3 months 1 day ago

It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which the New Testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals.

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2 months 1 day ago

All those countless battles-those endless, and... for the greater part, useless wars, of which... fills up for so many thousand years... are but little atoms compared with the great whole of human destiny.

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