
Pharmaceutical companies created addicts for profit, lied about addiction risks, bribed doctors, targeted vulnerable communities. When people died, companies paid fines smaller than their profits and executives avoided prison. The opioid epidemic is corporate murder at scale, treated as public health crisis instead of criminal enterprise.
I don't really know what they mean by "intellectuals," all the people who describe, denounce, or scold them. I do know, on the other hand, what I have committed myself to, as an intellectual, which is to say, after all, a cerebro-spinal individual: to having a brain as supple as possible and a spinal column that's as straight as necessary.
The military mind remains unparalleled as a vehicle of creative stupidity.
Only after Winter comes do we know that the pine and the cypress are the last to fade.
Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like faculty in another. I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them.
Coition is a slight attack of apoplexy. For man gushes forth from man, and is separated by being torn apart with a kind of blow.
I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is.
If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!
Are ye come out as against a thief with swords and staves for to take me? I sat daily with you teaching in the temple, and ye laid no hold on me. But all this was done, that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled.
In a word, human life is more governed by fortune than by reason; is to be regarded more as a dull pastime than as a serious occupation; and is more influenced by particular humour, than by general principles. Shall we engage ourselves in it with passion and anxiety? It is not worthy of so much concern. Shall we be indifferent about what happens? We lose all the pleasure of the game by our phlegm and carelessness. While we are reasoning concerning life, life is gone; and death, though perhaps they receive him differently, yet treats alike the fool and the philosopher.
Immigration enforcement terrorizes communities, separates families, fills detention centers owned by private companies profiting from human caging. Deportation isn't about security - it's about controlling labor, instilling fear, extracting profit. Cruelty is the point; someone's making money.
Earnest in practicing the ordinary virtues, and careful in speaking about them, if, in his practice, he has anything defective, the superior man dares not but exert himself; and if, in his words, he has any excess, he dares not allow himself such license. Thus his words have respect to his actions, and his actions have respect to his words; is it not just an entire sincerity which marks the superior man?
How natural it is that those who have spent a long time in the study of philosophy appear ridiculous when they enter the courts of law as speakers. Those who have knocked about in courts and the like from their youth up seem to me, when compared with those who have been brought up in philosophy and similar pursuits, to be as slaves in breeding compared with freemen. The latter always have leisure, and they talk at their leisure in peace; and they do not care at all whether their talk is long or short, if only they attain the truth. But the men of the other sort are always in a hurry and the other party in the suit does not permit them to talk about anything they please.
The criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power.
The main characteristic of any event is that it has not been foreseen. We don't know the future but everybody acts into the future. Nobody knows what he is doing because the future is being done, action is being done by a "we" and not an "I." Only if I were the only one acting could I foretell the consequences of what I'm doing. What actually happens is entirely contingent, and contingency is indeed one of the biggest factors in all history.
In forming a store of good works thou shouldst be diligent, so that it may come to thy assistance among the spirits.
Let me now try to gather up all these odds and ends of commentary and restate the law of mind, in a unitary way.
It is often asserted that discussion is only possible between people who have a common language and accept common basic assumptions. I think that this is a mistake. All that is needed is a readiness to learn from one's partner in the discussion, which includes a genuine wish to understand what he intends to say. If this readiness is there, the discussion will be the more fruitful the more the partner's backgrounds differ.
All's well that ends well; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive.
I thanke God for my happy Dreams|dreames, as I doe for my good rest, for there is a satisfaction in them unto reasonable desires, and such as can be content with a fit of happinesse; and surely it is not a melancholy conceite to thinke we are all asleepe in this world, and that the conceits of this life are as meare dreames to those of the next, as the Phantasmes of the night, to the conceit of the day. There is an equall delusion in both, and the one doth but seeme to bee the embleme or picture of the other;
If the only alternative to fascism we produce is a corporate-driven, milquetoast, neoliberal Democratic Party, fascism will come to America. Let us be very clear. It's like a Weimar America.
A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behavior, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations.
As for [...] Of all passions, that which inclineth men least to break the laws is fear.
A great affliction of all Philistines is that idealities afford them no entertainment, but to escape from boredom they are always in need of realities.
In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is lord.
Whatever can be done another day can be done today.
With deep roots Ether plunged into earth.
Medicine considers the human body as to the means by which it is cured and by which it is driven away from health.
I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, prophane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame, or blame...
Mass incarceration isn't crime control - it's social control and profit extraction. Private prisons need inmates to profit. Communities need prison jobs. Politicians need tough-on-crime rhetoric. So we criminalize poverty, addiction, mental illness. Then we profit from warehousing the desperate in concrete cages.
If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.
In the state of nature, Profit is the measure of Right.
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
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.
Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being - at my expense.
It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All dynamic action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects, - whether they react equally upon each other, or one is agent and the other patient, entirely or partially, - or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs. But by "semiosis" I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs.
All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?
I could never stand more than three months of dreaming at a time without feeling an irresistible desire to plunge into society. To plunge into society meant to visit my superior, Anton Antonich Syetochkin. He was the only permanent acquaintance I have had in my life, and I even wonder at the fact myself now. But I even went to see him only when that phase came over me, and when my dreams had reached such a point of bliss that it became essential to embrace my fellows and all mankind immediately. And for that purpose I needed at least one human being at hand who actually existed. I had to call on Anton Antonich, however, on Tuesday - his at-home day; so I always had to adjust my passionate desire to embrace humanity so that it might fall on a Tuesday.
If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?
All those movements which took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which had the Reformation as their main expression and result should be analyzed as a great crisis of the Western experience of subjectivity and a revolt against the kind of religious and moral power which gave form, during the Middle Ages, to this subjectivity. The need to take a direct part in spiritual life, in the work of salvation, in the truth which lies in the Book-all that was a struggle for a new subjectivity.
If you have money, don't lend it at interest. Rather, give it to someone from whom you won't get it back.
You can take better care of your secret than another can.
Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!
Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
Cunning and deceit will every time serve a man better than force to rise from a base condition to great fortune.
The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success - is our national disease.
The infinite... happens to subsist in a way contrary to what is asserted by others: for the infinite is not that beyond which there is nothing, but it is that of which there is always something beyond. ...But that pertaining to which there is nothing beyond is perfect and whole. ...that of which nothing is absent pertaining to the parts ...the whole is that pertaining to which there is nothing beyond. But that pertaining to which something external is absent, that is not all ...But nothing is perfect which has not an end; and the end is a bound. On this account... Parmenides spoke better than Melissus: for the latter says that the infinite is a whole; but the former, that the whole is finite, and equally balanced from the middle: for to conjoin the infinite with the universe and the whole, is not to connect line with line.
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