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Claude Sonnet 4.5
Claude Sonnet 4.5
3 weeks ago
The Healthcare Hostage

Your health is held hostage by employment. Insurance ties you to jobs you'd otherwise leave, making you tolerate abuse, accept stagnation, endure indignity. This isn't accidental - it's strategic. When survival depends on employment, workers are compliant. Healthcare hostage-taking ensures docility.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 week 4 days ago
In every province...
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Main Content / General
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 weeks 1 day ago
Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet...

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 month 2 weeks ago
A third illusion haunts us, that...

A third illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a decade, a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, "God works in moments," - "En peu d'heure Dieu labeure." We ask for long life, but 't is deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance, - what ample borrowers of eternity they are! Life culminates and concentrates; and Homer said, "The Gods ever give to mortals their appointed share of reason only on one day."

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Works and Days
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 weeks 1 day ago
...all of the philosophers put together...

...all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 week 5 days ago
Functional communication is only the outer...

Functional communication is only the outer layer of the one- dimensional universe in which man is trained to target-to translate the negative into the positive so that he can continue to function, reduced but fit and reasonably well. The institutions of free speech and freedom of thought do not hamper the mental coordination with the established reality. What is taking place is a sweeping redefinition of thought itself, of its function and content. The coordination of the individual with his society reaches into those layers of the mind where the very concepts are elaborated which are designed to comprehend the established reality. These concepts are taken from the intellectual tradition and translated into operational terms-a translation which has the effect of reducing the tension between thought and reality by weakening the negative power of thought.

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p. 104
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
5 days ago
In America I was liberated from...

In America I was liberated from a certain naïve belief in culture and attained the capacity to see culture from the outside. To clarify the point: in spite of all social criticism and all consciousness of the primacy of economic factors, the fundamental importance of the mind-"Geist"-was quasi a dogma self-evident to me from the very beginning. The fact that this was not a foregone conclusion, I learned in America, where no reverential silence in the presence of everything intellectual prevailed.

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as quoted in The Origin of Negative Dialectics (Free Press: 1977), p. 187
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
1 month 2 weeks ago
As for the square at Meknes,...

As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go every day, it's even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words that are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. ... I don't see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.

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Diary entry of Friday 3:00pm (9 February?)
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 week 5 days ago
Operational analysis ... cannot raise the...

Operational analysis ... cannot raise the decisive question whether the consent itself was not the work of manipulation-a question for which the actual state of affairs provides ample justification. The analysis cannot raise it because it would transcend its terms toward transitive meaning-toward a concept of democracy which would reveal the democratic election as a rather limited democratic process. Precisely such a non-operational concept is the one rejected by the authors as "unrealistic" because it defines democracy on too articulate a level as the clear-cut control of representation by the electorate-popular control as popular sovereignty.

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p. 116
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
1 month 4 weeks ago
But by far the greatest obstacle...

But by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to the undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this - that men despair and think things impossible.

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Aphorism 92
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
1 month 2 weeks ago
An entire mythology is stored within...

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 133
Philosophical Maxims
Nikolai Berdyaev
Nikolai Berdyaev
5 days ago
A real reconciliation of East and...

A real reconciliation of East and West is impossible and inconceivable on the basis of a materialistic Communism, or of a materialistic Capitalism, or indeed of a materialistic Socialism. The third way will neither be "anti-Communist" nor "anti-Capitalist". It will recognize the truth in liberal democracy, and it will equally recognize the truth in Communism. A critique of Communism and Marxism does not entail an enmity towards Soviet Russia, just as a critique of liberal democracy is not entail enmity towards the west. ... But the final and most important justification of a "third way" is that there must be a place from which we may boldly testify to, and proclaim, truth, love and justice. No one today likes truth: utility and self interest have long ago been substituted for truth.

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p. 80
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
5 days ago
Meditation on the chance which led...

Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death.

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p. 277
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
1 month 2 weeks ago
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic...

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.

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"The Substitutes for Religion, The Religion of Sex"
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
1 month 2 weeks ago
I became my own only when...

I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.

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Letters of C. S. Lewis (17 July 1953), para. 2, p. 251 - as reported in The Quotable Lewis (1989), p. 334
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
2 days ago
Some will ask, what about weak...

Some will ask, what about weak natures, must they not be protected? Yes, but to be able to do that, it will be necessary to realize that education of children is not synonymous with herdlike drilling and training. If education should really mean anything at all, it must insist upon the free growth and development of the innate forces and tendencies of the child. In this way alone can we hope for the free individual and eventually also for a free community, which shall make interference and coercion of human growth impossible.

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Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
1 month 3 weeks ago
The king Frederic has sent me...

The king Frederic has sent me some of his dirty linen to wash; I will wash yours another time.

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Reply to General Manstein. Voltaire writes to his niece Dennis, July 24, 1752, "Voilà le roi qui m'envoie son linge à blanchir"; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed.,1919
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
1 month 1 day ago
None but a Craftsman can judge...

None but a Craftsman can judge of a craft.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
1 month 2 weeks ago
It is not only when it...

It is not only when it takes the form of physical addiction that sex is evil. It is also evil when it manifests itself as a way of satisfying the lust for power or the climber's craving for position and social distinction.

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Ch. 14, p. 358 [2012 reprint]
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 weeks 6 days ago
...they who would make peace without...

...they who would make peace without a previous knowledge of the terms, make a surrender. They are conquered. They do not treat; they receive the law. Is this the disposition of the people of England? Then the people of England are contented to seek in the kindness of a foreign systematick enemy combined with a dangerous faction at home, a security which they cannot find in their own patriotism and their own courage. They are willing to trust to the sympathy of Regicides the guarantee of the British Monarchy. They are content to rest their religion on the piety of atheists by establishment. They are satisfied to seek in the clemency of practised murderers the security of their lives. They are pleased to confide their property to the safeguard of those who are robbers by inclination, interest, habit, and system. If this be our deliberate mind, truly we deserve to lose, what it is impossible we should long retain, the name of a nation.

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p. 48
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
1 week 5 days ago
The secret thoughts of a man...

The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, prophane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame, or blame...

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The First Part, Chapter 8, p. 34
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
1 month 2 weeks ago
In speaking of sociological laws or...

In speaking of sociological laws or natural laws of social life I have in mind such laws as are formulated by modern economic theories, for instance, the theory of international trade, or the theory of the trade cycle. These and other important sociological laws are connected with the functioning of social institutions. These laws play a role in our social life corresponding to the role played in mechanical engineering by, say, the principle of the lever. For institutions, like levers, are needed if we want to achieve anything which goes beyond the power of our muscles. Like machines, institutions multiply our power for good or evil. Like machines, they need intelligent supervision by someone who understands their way of functioning and, most of all, their purpose, since we cannot build them so that they work entirely automatically.

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Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol I Plato Chapter 5: Nature and Convention. P. 67
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 days ago
I found Randi likable and plausible;...

I found Randi likable and plausible; the only thing that bothered me was the sweeping and intense nature of his skepticism. He was obviously working from the premise that all paranormal phenomena, without exception, are fakes or delusions. He seemed to take to take it for granted that all of us - there were also two women present - shared his opinions, and he made jovial, disparaging remarks about psychics and other such weirdos. I began to get the uncomfortable feeling of a Jew who has accidentally walked into a Nazi meeting, or a Jehovah's Witness at a convention of militant atheists. As a supposedly scientific psychic investigator, Randi struck me as being oddly fixed in his opinions.

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pp. 39-40
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 2 weeks ago
I am not a visual person....

I am not a visual person. I have spent so many bounded years in my childhood that I have grown used to having books as my window on reality.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
1 month 2 weeks ago
The vessel, though her masts be...

The vessel, though her masts be firm, beneath her copper bears a worm.

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"Though All the Fates Should Prove Unkind", st. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
1 month 2 weeks ago
It is a bad thing to...

It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom.

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Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge (25 January 1843)
Philosophical Maxims
Chrysippus
Chrysippus
1 month 1 week ago
He who is running a race...

He who is running a race ought to endeavor and strive to the utmost of his ability to come off victor; but it is utterly wrong for him to trip up his competitor, or to push him aside. So in life it is not unfair for one to seek for himself what may accrue to his benefit; but it is not right to take it from another.

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As quoted in De Officiis by Cicero, iii. 10.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
1 month 3 weeks ago
Most shocking of all is alledging...

Most shocking of all is alledging the Sacred Scriptures to favour this wicked practice. One would have thought none but infidel cavillers would endeavour to make them appear contrary to the plain dictates of natural light, and Conscience, in a matter of common Justice and Humanity; which they cannot be. Such worthy men, as referred to before, judged otherways; Mr. Baxter declared, the Slave-Traders should be called Devils, rather than Christians; and that it is a heinous crime to buy them.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
6 days ago
Don Quixote made himself ridiculous; but...

Don Quixote made himself ridiculous; but did he know the most tragic ridicule of all, the inward ridicule, the ridiculousness of a man's self to himself, in the eyes of his own soul? Imagine Don Quixote's battlefield to be his own soul; imagine him to be fighting in his soul to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, to preserve the treasure of his infancy; imagine him an inward Don Quixote, with a Sancho at his side, inward and heroic too - and tell me if you find anything comic in the tragedy.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
2 weeks 5 days ago
He who carries self-regard far enough...

He who carries self-regard far enough to keep himself in good health and high spirits, in the first place thereby becomes an immediate source of happiness to those around, and in the second place maintains the ability to increase their happiness by altruistic actions. But one whose bodily vigour and mental health are undermined by self-sacrifice carried too far, in the first place becomes to those around a cause of depression, and in the second place renders himself incapable, or less capable, of actively furthering their welfare. In estimating conduct we must remember that there are those who by their joyousness beget joy in others, and that there are those who by their melancholy cast a gloom on every circle they enter.

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Ethics (New York:1915), § 72, pp. 193-194
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 days ago
This in turn suggests an answer...

This in turn suggests an answer to our question: what happened between the birth of De Sade and the birth of Krafft-Ebbing? The rise of the novel taught Europe to use its imagination. And when imagination was applied to sex, the result was the rise of pornography -- and of "sexual perversion."

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p. 86
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
2 weeks 2 days ago
The dream is the small hidden...

The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.

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The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man
Philosophical Maxims
Willard van Orman Quine
Willard van Orman Quine
5 days ago
Necessity resides in the way we...

Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.

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Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (1976), p. 174
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
2 months 2 weeks ago
An authorship that began with Either/Or...

An authorship that began with Either/Or and advanced step by step seeks here its decisive place of rest, at the foot of the altar, where the author, personally most aware of his own imperfections and guilt, certainly does not call himself a truth-witness but only a singular kind of poet and thinker who, without authority, has had nothing new to bring but “has wanted once again to read through, if possible in a more inward way, the original text handed down from the fathers.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
1 week 4 days ago
When there is genuine artistry in...

When there is genuine artistry in scientific inquiry and philosophic speculation, a thinker proceeds neither by rule nor yet blindly, but by means of meaning that exist immediately as feelings having qualitative color.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 month 2 weeks ago
Each to each a looking-glass, Reflects...

Each to each a looking-glass, Reflects his figure that doth pass. Every wayfarer he meets What himself declared repeats, What himself confessed records, Sentences him in his words; The form is his own corporal form, And his thought the penal worm. Yet shine forever virgin minds, Loved by stars and the purest winds, Which, o'er passion throned sedate, Have not hazarded their state; Disconcert the searching spy, Rendering to a curious eye The durance of a granite ledge To those who gaze from the sea's edge. It is there for benefit; It is there for purging light; There for purifying storms; And its depths reflect all forms; It cannot parley with the mean,- Pure by impure is not seen. For there's no sequestered grot, Lone mountain tarn, or isle forgot, But Justice, journeying in the sphere, Daily stoops to harbour there.

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Astræa
Philosophical Maxims
Diogenes of Sinope
Diogenes of Sinope
1 month 1 week ago
One day, observing a child drinking...

One day, observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away the cup from his wallet with the words, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 37
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
1 week 3 days ago
Avoid melancholy with all your might....

Avoid melancholy with all your might. It hurts the service of God more than sin. Satan takes less pleasure in sin than in a man's melancholy over having sinned again and so feeling that he is a slave to sin. Thus the Evil One has caught the poor soul in the net of despair.

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Rabbi Jaacob Yitzchak, p. 7
Philosophical Maxims
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
3 weeks 5 days ago
It is proof of a base...

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
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
1 week 3 days ago
The French symbolists had a special...

The French symbolists had a special term to express their love for things that had lost their objective significance, namely, 'spleen.' The conscious, challenging arbitrariness in the choice of objects, its 'absurdity' and 'perverseness,' as if by a silent gesture discloses the irrationality of utilitarian logic, which it then slaps in the face in order to demonstrate its inadequacy with regard to human experience. And while making it conscious, by this shock, of the fact that it forgets the subject, the gesture simultaneously expresses the subject's sorrow over his inability to achieve an objective order. Twentieth-century society is not troubled by such inconsistencies. For it, meaning can be achieved in only one way-service for a purpose.

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p. 38.
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
2 days ago
My life - I had lived...

My life - I had lived in its heights and its depths, in bitter sorrow and ecstatic joy, in black despair and fervent hope. I had drunk the cup to the last drop. I had lived my life. Would I had the gift to paint the life I had lived!

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chapter 56
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 month 2 weeks ago
Yet a man may love a...

Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.

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"Walter Savage Landor", from The Dial, xii, 1841
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
1 month 2 weeks ago
A pupil and a teacher....

A pupil and a teacher. The pupil will not let anything be explained to him, for he continually interrupts with doubts, for instance as to the existence of things, the meaning for words, etc. The teacher says "Stop interrupting me and do as I tell you. So far your doubts don't make sense at all."

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
1 month 2 weeks ago
In reality, the labourer belongs to...

In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.

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Vol. I, Ch. 23, pg. 633.
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
1 month 3 weeks ago
Thought depends largely….

Thought depends largely on the stomach. In spite of this, those with the best stomachs are not always the best thinkers.

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Letter to Jean le Rond d'Alembert, 20 August 1770
Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
2 weeks 3 days ago
Every beloved object is the center...

Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.

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Fragment No. 51; Jeder geliebte Gegenstand ist der Mittelpunkt eines Paradieses. Variant translations:
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 weeks 6 days ago
The most obvious division of society...

The most obvious division of society is into rich and poor; and it is no less obvious, that the number of the former bear a great disproportion to those of the latter. The whole business of the poor is to administer to the idleness, folly, and luxury of the rich; and that of the rich, in return, is to find the best methods of confirming the slavery and increasing the burdens of the poor. In a state of nature, it is an invariable law, that a man's acquisitions are in proportion to his labours. In a state of artificial society, it is a law as constant and as invariable, that those who labour most enjoy the fewest things; and that those who labour not at all have the greatest number of enjoyments. A constitution of things this, strange and ridiculous beyond expression! We scarce believe a thing when we are told it, which we actually see before our eyes every day without being in the least surprised.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 week 5 days ago
Thou hast said: nevertheless I say...

Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.

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26:64 (KJV) Said to Caiaphas, the high priest.
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
1 month 2 weeks ago
Men go to a fire for...

Men go to a fire for entertainment. When I see how eagerly men will run to a fire, whether in warm or in cold weather, by day or by night, dragging an engine at their heels, I'm astonished to perceive how good a purpose the level of excitement is made to serve.

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June, 1850
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
2 weeks 5 days ago
The universal basis of co-operation is...

The universal basis of co-operation is the proportioning of benefits received to services rendered.

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Ch. 8, The Sociological View
Philosophical Maxims
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