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2 months 2 weeks ago

Our true Deity is Mechanism. It has subdued external Nature for us, and we think it will do all other things. We are Giants in physical power: in a deeper than metaphorical sense, we are Titans, that strive, by heaping mountain on mountain, to conquer Heaven also.

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6 months 5 days ago

In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have any other tie upon another, but by our word.

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Book I, Ch. 9
4 months 4 weeks ago

A diversity of opinion upon almost every principle of politics, had indeed drawn a strong line of separation between them and some others. However, they were desirous not to extend the misfortune by unnecessary bitterness; they wished to prevent a difference of opinion on the commonwealth from festering into rancorous and incurable hostility. Accordingly they endeavoured that all past controversies should be forgotten; and that enough for the day should be the evil thereof. There is however a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue. Men may tolerate injuries, whilst they are only personal to themselves. But it is not the first of virtues to bear with moderation the indignities that are offered to our country.

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Describing the Government's position at a previous time of deep division in British politics in fact over policy on America, Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769), page 2
4 months 3 weeks ago

Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation.

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(p. 362)
5 months 3 weeks ago

Human beings are not born identical. There are many different temperaments and constitutions; and within each psycho-physical class one can find people at very different stages of spiritual development. Forms of worship and spiritual discipline which may be valuable for one individual maybe useless or even positively harmful for another belonging to a different class and standing, within that class, at a lower or higher level of development.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Your own philosophy condemns you and supports us.

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Salbatore Mitxelena (1958): Unamuno eta Abendats, Baiona: Darracq
6 months 1 week ago

Who is not tempted by attractive and wide-awake children to join their sports, and crawl on all fours with them, and talk baby talk with them?

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Book II, ch. 24, 18
4 months 3 weeks ago

Consciousness must essentially cover an interval of time; for if it did not, we could gain no knowledge of time, and not merely no veracious cognition of it, but no conception whatever. We are therefore, forced to say that we are immediately conscious through an infinitesimal interval of time.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were on the heights; they have developed this 'defeat' into one of the historical defeats which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And that is why the future victory will bloom from this 'defeat'. 'Order reigns in Berlin!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I will be!

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"Order reigns in Berlin", Last written words. Collected Works 4
5 months 3 weeks ago

Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdain - under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.

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The Social Value of the College-Bred
6 months 2 weeks ago

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

I have been writing & speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty five or thirty years, & have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. I delight in driving them from me. What could I do, if they came to me? - they would interrupt and encumber me. This is my boast that I have no school & no follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did not create independence.

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April 1859
2 months 2 weeks ago

Where this will end? In the Abyss, one may prophecy; whither all Delusions are, at all moments, travelling; where this Delusion has now arrived. For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live for ever. The very Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against them, and Heaven's Chancery itself; and, slowly or fast, advance incessantly towards their hour.

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Pt. I, Bk. VI, ch. 3.
2 months 1 week ago

Whoso is full of sacred (religious, moral, humane) love loves only the spook, the "true man," and persecutes with dull mercilessness the individual, the real man.

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S. Byington, trans. (1913), p. 383
5 months 2 days ago

When an opinion has taken root in a democracy and established itself in the minds of the majority, it afterward persists by itself, needing no effort to maintain it since no one attacks it. Those who at first rejected it as false come in the end to adopt it as accepted, and even those who still at the bottom of their hearts oppose it keep their views to themselves, taking great care to avoid a dangerous and futile contest.

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Book Three, Chapter XXI.
3 months 2 weeks ago

All of us need an identity which unites us with our neighbours, our countrymen, those people who are subject to the same rules and the same laws as us, those people with whom we might one day have to fight side by side to protect our inheritance, those people with whom we will suffer when attacked, those people whose destinies are in some way tied up with our own.

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Rivers of Blood BBC2 documentary
5 months 3 days ago

We vainly accuse the fury of guns, and the new inventions of death; it is in the power of every hand to destroy us, and we are beholden unto every one we meet he doth not kill us.

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Section 44
3 months 3 weeks ago

The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity.

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(p. 135)
5 months 4 weeks ago

In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 27, § 370 Variant translation: To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties.
3 months 3 weeks ago

The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment.

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(p. 30)
5 months 3 weeks ago

The past is the luxury of proprietors.

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2 months 6 days ago

I too am not one to despise myths, and I am far from rejecting those that have the right tendency; indeed I am of the same opinion as you and your admired, or rather the universally admired, Plato. He also often conveyed a serious lesson in his myths.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

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Ch. 9: On the Notion of Cause
1 month 3 weeks ago

While the art of printing is left to us science can never be retrograde; what is once acquired of real knowlege can never be lost.

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Letter to William Green Mumford
2 months 2 weeks ago

In a valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful making others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

To think that so many have succeeded in dying!

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Those who are most to be considered, those for whose help the struggle must be made, if labor is to be enfranchised, and social justice won, are those least able to help or struggle for themselves, those who have no advantage of property or skill or intelligence, - the men and women who are at the very bottom of the social scale. In securing the equal rights of these we shall secure the equal rights of all. Hence it is, as Mazzini said, that it is around the standard of duty rather than around the standard of self-interest that men must rally to win the rights of man. And herein may we see the deep philosophy of Him who bade men love their neighbors as themselves. In that spirit, and in no other, is the power to solve social problems and carry civilization onward.

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Ch. 21 : Conclusion
6 months 4 weeks ago

Confession should be only in secret before God, who knows everything anyway, and thus it could remain hidden in one's innermost being. But at a dinner and a woman! A dinner-it is not some hidden, remote place, nor is the lighting dim, nor is the mood like that among graves, nor are the listeners silent or invisibly present.

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4 months 1 week ago

Violence may capture space, but it does not create space.

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6 months 5 days ago

Concerning the female sorcerer. Roman law also prescribes this. Why does the law name women more than men here, even though men are also guilty of this? Because women are more susceptible to those superstitions of Satan; take Eve, for example. They are commonly called "wise women." Let them be killed.

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Sermon on Exodus, 1526, WA XVI, p. 551 as quoted in Luther on Women: A Sourcebook, edited by Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, (2003), p. 231

Much more naturally than you do: because flight is a much more natural consequence of fear than of hate. He doesn't flee men because he hates them, but because he is afraid of them. He doesn't flee them in order to harm them, but to try o escape the harm they wish to do to him. They, on the contrary, don't seek him through friendship, but through hate. They seek him and he flees from them just as in the wilderness of Africa, where there are few men and many tigers, the men flee the tigers, the men flee the tigers, and the tigers seek the men.

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Second Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
3 months 3 weeks ago

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

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From tail to tale on the path of pilgrims in life, The Scotsman
5 months 3 weeks ago

Mr. Galton ...in his English Men of Science, has given ...cases showing individual variations in the type of memory... Some have it verbal. Others... for facts and figures, others for form. Most say... [it] must first be rationally conceived and assimilated.

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Ch. 16
5 months 3 weeks ago

Savage - There is only one way fit for a man - Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.

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Pilgrim's Regress 100
1 month 3 weeks ago

For it very rarely otherwise happens, than that theories, that are grounded but upon few and obvious experiments, are subject to be contradicted by some such instances, as more free and diligent inquiries into what of nature is more abstruse, or even into the less obvious qualities of things, are wont to bring to light.

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4 months 1 week ago

Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or "filiation"), the Text is without a source - the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text.

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Proposition 5
1 month 3 weeks ago

Of Fronto, to how much envy and fraud and hypocrisy the state of a tyrannous king is subject unto, and how they who are commonly called [Eupatridas Gk.], i.e. nobly born, are in some sort incapable, or void of natural affection.

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I, 8
6 months 2 weeks ago

The end of living, or the ultimate good, which is to be sought for its own sake, according to the universal opinion of mankind, is happiness; yet men, for the most part, fail in the pursuit of this end, either because they do not form a right idea of the nature of happiness, or because they do not make use of proper means to attain it.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

At last I have attained true glory. As I walked through Fleet Street the day before yesterday, I saw a copy of Hume at a bookseller's window with the following label: "Only 2l. 2s. Hume's History of England in eight volumes, highly valuable as an introduction to Macaulay." I laughed so convulsively that the other people who were staring at the books took me for a poor demented gentleman.

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Alas for poor David! Journal entry (8 March 1849), quoted in George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Volume II (1876), p. 253
4 months 4 weeks ago

The earth with yellow pears And overgrown with roses wild Upon the pond is bent, And swans divine, With kisses drunk You drop your heads In the sublimely sobering water. But where, with winter come, am I To find, alas, the floweres, and where The sunshine And the shadow of the world? Cold the walls stand And the wordless, in the wind The weathercocks are rattling.

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"Halves of Life"
6 months 3 weeks ago

Some say that the body is the "tomb" of the soul, their notion being that the soul is buried in the present life; and again, because by its means the soul gives any signs which it gives, it is for this reason also properly called "sign". But I think it most likely that the Orphic poets gave this name, with the idea that the soul is undergoing punishment for something; they think it has the body as an enclosure to keep it safe, like a prison, and this is, as the name itself denotes, the "safe" for the soul, until the penalty is paid, and not even a letter needs to be changed.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

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We have now but to prove a third attribute: I mean the faculty of feeling which the philosophers of all centuries have found in this same substance. ...The Cartesians have made, in vain, to rob matter of this faculty. But in order to avoid insurmountable difficulties, they have flung themselves into a labyrinth from which they have thought to escape by this absurd system "that animals are pure machines."An opinion so absurd has never gained admittance among philosophers... Experience gives us no less proof of the faculty of feeling in animals than of feeling in men.

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Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter
5 months 3 weeks ago

But a punishment like forced labour or even imprisonment - mere loss of liberty - has never functioned without a certain additional element of punishment that certainly concerns the body itself: rationing of food, sexual deprivation, corporal punishment, solitary confinement ... There remains, therefore, a trace of 'torture' in the modern mechanisms of criminal justice - a trace that has not been entirely overcome, but which is enveloped, increasingly, by the non-corporal nature of the penal system

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