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If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It.

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F 33
5 months 3 weeks ago

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

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"Sixième discours: sur la nature de l'homme," Sept Discours en Vers sur l'Homme, 1738
5 months 2 weeks ago

We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.

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Reported in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) edited by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 225
3 months 3 weeks ago

There are two kinds of people, killers, and everybody else.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Big industry, and the limitless expansion of production which it makes possible, bring within the range of feasibility a social order in which so much is produced that every member of society will be in a position to exercise and develop all his powers and faculties in complete freedom. It thus appears that the very qualities of big industry which, in our present-day society, produce misery and crises are those which, in a different form of society, will abolish this misery and these catastrophic depressions.We see with the greatest clarity: (i) That all these evils are from now on to be ascribed solely to a social order which no longer corresponds to the requirements of the real situation; and (ii) That it is possible, through a new social order, to do away with these evils altogether.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Man cannot be wicked without being evil, nor evil without being degraded, nor degraded without being punished, nor punished without being guilty. In short ... there is nothing so intrinsically plausible as the theory of original sin.

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Second Dialogue, p. 38
6 months 2 weeks ago

Necessity makes a joke of civilization.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: Hell is other people.

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Garcin, Act 1, sc. 5
6 months 6 days ago

Though absent from our eyes, Christ our Head is bound to us by love. Since the whole Christ is Head and body, let us so listen to the voice of the Head that we may also hear the body speak.He no more wished to speak alone than He wished to exist alone, since He says: Behold, I am with you all days, unto the consummation of the world (Matt. 28:20). If He is with us, then He speaks in us, He speaks of us, and He speaks through us; and we too speak in Him.

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pp. 420-421
5 months 3 weeks ago

Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.

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Examen important de milord Bolingbroke (1736): Conclusion
5 months 3 weeks ago

Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.

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Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

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E 65
4 months 1 week ago

To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together.

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"The Irony of Liberalism"
4 months 1 week ago

Antiquity believed that the forces of love in the universe were limited. Therefore they were to be used sparingly,and everyone was to be loved only according to his value.

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L. Coser, trans. (1961), p. 94
1 month 2 weeks ago

War as the most extreme political means discloses the possibility which underlies every political idea, namely, the distinction of friend and enemy.

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4 months 3 days ago

The average mind is slow in grasping a truth, but when the most thoroughly organized, centralized institution, maintained at an excessive national expense, has proven a complete social failure, the dullest must begin to question its right to exist. The time is past when we can be content with our social fabric merely because it is "ordained by divine right," or by the majesty of the law.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation.

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Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe
2 months 4 weeks ago

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

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Poets
3 months 3 weeks ago

People hate it when they're tickled because laughter is not pleasant, if it goes on too long. I think it's a desperate sort of convulsion in desperate circumstances, which helps a little.

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Interview Public Radio International
6 months 3 days ago

All the excesses, all the violence, and all the vanity of great men, come from the fact that they know not what they are: it being difficult for those who regard themselves at heart as equal with all men... For this it is necessary for one to forget himself, and to believe that he has some real excellence above them, in which consists this illusion that I am endeavoring to discover to you.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Where is the boundary for the single individual in his concrete existence between what is lack of will and what is lack of ability; what is indolence and earthly selfishness and what is the limitation of finitude? For an existing person, when is the period of preparation over, when this question will not arise again in all its initial, troubled severity; when is the time in existence that is indeed a preparation? Let all the dialecticians convene-they will not be able to decide this for a particular individual in concreto.

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5 months 1 week ago

The investigation of the meaning of words is the beginning of education.

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Arrian, Discourses of Epictetus, i. 17
4 months 3 weeks ago

Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others.

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Book One, Chapter V.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Some economists also use the terms Fordism and pos-Fordism to mark the shift from an economy characterized by the stable-long-term employment typical of factory workers to one marked by flexible, mobile, and precarious labor relations: flexible because workers have to adapt to different tasks, mobile because workers have to move frequently between jobs, and precarious because no contracts guarantee stable, long-term employment. Whereas economic modernization, which developed Fordist labor relations, centered on the conomies of scale and larga systems of production and exchange, economic postmodernization, with its post-Fordist labor relations, develops smaller-scale, flexible systems.

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112
4 months 6 days ago

The might which kills outright is an elementary and coarse form of might. How much more varied in its devices; how much more astonishing in its effects is that other which does not kill; or which delays killing.

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in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 155
2 months 1 week ago

Cash Payment the sole nexus; and there are so many things which cash will not pay! Cash is a great miracle; yet it has not all power in Heaven, nor even on Earth. 'Supply and demand' we will honour also; and yet how many 'demands' are there, entirely indispensable, which have to go elsewhere than to the shops, and produce quite other than cash, before they can get their supply? On the whole, what astonishing payments does cash make in this world!

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Ch. 7, Not Laissez-Faire.
4 months 5 days ago

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.

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Ch. 22, August 30, 1941.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Moral Teleology supplies the deficiency in physical Teleology, and first establishes a Theology; because the latter, if it did not borrow from the former without being observed, but were to proceed consistently, could only found a Demonology, which is incapable of any definite concept.

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Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgment (1892) Tr. J.H. Bernard
4 months 1 week ago

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

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A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970); 2001, p. 170.
4 months 1 week ago

Take heed lest any man deceive you: For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many. And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows. But take heed to yourselves: for they shall deliver you up to councils; and in the synagogues ye shall be beaten: and ye shall be brought before rulers and kings for my sake, for a testimony against them. And the gospel must first be published among all nations. But when they shall lead you, and deliver you up, take no thought beforehand what ye shall speak, neither do ye premeditate: but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye: for it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Ghost.

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13:5b-11 (KJV)
4 months 1 week ago

I can assure you that no kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ.

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No. 29. (Rica writing to Ibben)
5 months 2 weeks ago

Why you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.

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Ch. 5: Elasticity, section 1 Miss Hardcastle speaking to Mark Studdock
5 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing but the most exemplary morals can give dignity to a man of small fortune.

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Chapter I, Part III, Article III, p. 874.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Money appears as measure (in Homer, e.g. oxen) earlier than as medium of exchange,because in barter each commodity is still its own medium of exchange. But it cannot be its own or its own standard of comparison.

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Notebook I, The Chapter on Money, p. 93.
4 months 1 week ago

Judge not, that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. And why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me remove the speck from your eye'; and look, a plank is in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye. 

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Matthew 7:1-5 (NKJV) (Also Luke 6:37-42)
5 months 2 weeks ago

The militarily-patriotic and the romantic-minded everywhere, and especially the professional military class, refuse to admit for a moment that war may be a transitory phenomenon in social evolution. The notion of a sheep's paradise like that revolts, they say, our higher imagination. Where then would be the steeps of life? If war had ever stopped, we should have to re-invent it, on this view, to redeem life from flat degeneration. Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. It's profits are to the vanquished as well as to the victor; and quite apart from any question of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature at its highest dynamic.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

What I can't understand is why you can't see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing - that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?

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" During his conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, as quoted in The Telegraph, in 2012-02-24. In "Richard Dawkins: I can't be sure God does not exist"
2 months 1 week ago

No, the Great Man does not boast himself sincere, far from that; perhaps does not ask himself if he is so: I would say rather, his sincerity does not depend on himself; he cannot help being sincere! The great Fact of Existence is great to him. Fly as he will, he cannot get out of the awful presence of this Reality. His mind is so made; he is great by that, first of all. Fearful and wonderful, real as Life, real as Death, is this Universe to him. Though all men should forget its truth, and walk in a vain show, he cannot. At all moments the Flame-image glares in upon him; undeniable, there, there!-I wish you to take this as my primary definition of a Great Man. A little man may have this, it is competent to all men that God has made: but a Great Man cannot be without it.

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4 months 3 days ago

The supreme effort of the avant-guard is onward, ever onward.

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Light and Shadows in the Life of an Avant-Guard
5 months 1 week ago

Living virtuously is equal to living in accordance with one's experience of the actual course of nature.

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As quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, vii. 182.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

In no other country in the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States, and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned.

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Book Three, Chapter XXI.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to an opera, to court? He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow.

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Demea to Philo, Part X
3 months 2 weeks ago

Universality is the highest principle....

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2 months 1 week ago

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Never aim at more precision than... required by the problem...

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4 months 3 weeks ago

It is then unnecessary to investigate whether there be beyond the heaven Space, Void or Time. For there is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call Void; in it are innumerable globes like this one on which we live and grow. This space we declare to be infinite, since neither reason, convenience, possibility, sense-perception nor nature assign to it a limit. In it are an infinity of worlds of the same kind as our own.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

It is the preservation of the species, not of individuals, which appears to be the design of Deity throughout the whole of nature.

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Letter 22

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