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And what is its moral proof? We may formulate it thus: Act so that in your own judgment and in the judgment of others you may merit eternity, act so that you may become irreplaceable, act so that you may not merit death. Or perhaps thus: Act as if you were to die tomorrow, but to die in order to survive and be eternalized. The end of morality is to give personal, human finality to the Universe; to discover the finality that belongs to it - if indeed it has any finality - and to discover it by acting.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.

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par. 20
2 weeks 2 days ago

A trade begun with savage war, prosecuted with unheard of cruelty, continued during the mid passage with the most loathsome imprisonment, and ending in perpetual exile and unremitting slavery, was a trade so horrid in all its circumstances, that it was impossible a single argument could be adduced in its favour. On the score of prudence nothing could be said in defence of it, nor could it be justified by necessity, and no case of inhumanity could be justified, but upon necessity; but no such necessity could be made out strong enough to bear out such a traffick. It was the duty of that House, therefore, to put an end to it. If it were said, that the interest of individuals required that it should continue, that argument ought not to be listened to.

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Speech in the House of Commons against the slave trade (12 May 1789), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXVIII (1816), columns 68-69
1 month 2 weeks ago

The religious world is but the reflex of the real world.

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Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 4, pg. 91.
2 weeks 2 days ago

Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy for superstition.

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1 week 1 day ago

If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.

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14:26
2 weeks 3 days ago

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.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, - the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.

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The Will to Believe, 1897
1 month 6 days ago

The fact that no one has come up with a really convincing reason for giving greater moral weight to members of our own species, simply because they are members of our species, strongly suggests that there is no such reason. Like racism and sexism, speciesism is wrong.

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p. 343
1 month 2 weeks ago

Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they "own" their bodies - those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!

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Letter XXI
1 week 5 days ago

Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

It seems to me that science has a much greater likelihood of being true in the main than any philosophy hitherto advanced (I do not, of course, except my own). In science there are many matters about which people are agreed; in philosophy there are none. Therefore, although each proposition in a science may be false, and it is practically certain that there are some that are false, yet we shall be wise to build our philosophy upon science, because the risk of error in philosophy is pretty sure to be greater than in science. If we could hope for certainty in philosophy, the matter would be otherwise, but so far as I can see such a hope would be chimerical.

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Logical Atomism, 1924
1 month 2 weeks ago

Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe.

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Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
2 months 2 weeks ago

You wanted God's ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth so that he could properly fulfill your wish. And yet, if he were to share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father.

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What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.

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"Le monde où l'on catche"
2 weeks 2 days ago

We have not made the Revolution, the Revolution has made us.

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Act II.
1 month 2 weeks ago

I mistrust illuminations: what we take for a discovery is very often only a familiar thought that we have not recognized.

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p. 439
1 month 2 weeks ago

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.

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Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"
1 month 3 days ago

As Athenodorus was taking his leave of Cæsar, "Remember," said he, "Cæsar, whenever you are angry, to say or do nothing before you have repeated the four-and-twenty letters to yourself."

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Cæsar Augustus
1 month 2 weeks ago

I am ashamed of belonging to the species Homo Sapiens...You & I may be thankful to have lived in happier times - you more than I, because you have no children.

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Letter to Lucy Donnelly, 6/23/1946
1 week 4 days ago

All religions so far have been the expression of historical stages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples. But communism is the stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and brings about their disappearance.

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1 week 5 days ago

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

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1 week 1 day ago

Persons who feel themselves to be exiles in this world-and what noble mind, from Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?-are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.

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pp. 39-40
1 month 2 weeks ago

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.

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Ch. 9
1 month 2 weeks ago

Though love repine, and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply, - "'T is man's perdition to be safe When for the truth he ought to die."

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Sacrifice
1 month 2 weeks ago

It is a great mortification to the vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value. Art is only the under-workman, and is employed to give a few strokes of embellishment to those pieces, which come from the hand of the master.

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Part I, Essay 15: The Epicurean
1 month 6 days ago

A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental effort of will.

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"Moral Luck" (1976), p. 32.
1 month 2 weeks ago

I call this Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up "our own" when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is "nothing better" now to be had.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go. The difference is that you can compel your car to go to a garage, but you cannot compel Hitler to go to a psychiatrist.

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A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42 (1996), p. 544
2 days ago

No tyranny is more cruel than the one practiced in the shadow of the laws and under color of justice - when, so to speak, one proceeds to drown the unfortunate on the very plank by which they had saved themselves.

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See Chap. XIV of Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence. Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734), p. 89.
1 month 2 weeks ago

A nation never falls but by suicide.

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1861
1 week 5 days ago

My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

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If consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a flash of light between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing more execrable than existence.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Human justice is very prolix, and yet at times quite mediocre; divine justice is more concise and needs no information from the prosecution, no legal papers, no interrogation of witnesses, but makes the guilty one his own informer and helps him with eternity's memory.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

They [Christians] believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else. And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not an impersonal thing nor a static thing-not even just one person-but a dynamic pulsating activity, a life, a kind of drama, almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance ... (The) pattern of this three-personal life is ... the great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality.

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Book IV, Chapter 4, "Good Infection"
2 months 5 days ago

War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free.

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2 weeks 1 day ago

The Age of Empty Freedom ... does not know that man must first through labour, industry, and art, learn how to know; but it has a certain fixed standard for all conceptions, and an established Common Sense of Mankind always ready and at hand, innate within itself and there present without trouble on its part;-and those conceptions and this Common Sense are to it the measure of the efficient and the real. It has this great advantage over the Age of Science, that it knows all things without having learned anything; and can pass judgment upon whatever comes before it at once and without hesitation,-without needing any preliminary evidence:-'That which I do not immediately comprehend by the conceptions which dwell within me, is nothing,'-says Empty Freedom.

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p. 20
1 month 3 weeks ago

In this present that God has made us, there is nothing unworthy our care; we stand accountable for it even to a hair; and is it not a commission to man, to conduct man according to his condition; 'tis express, plain, and the very principal one, and the Creator has seriously and strictly prescribed it to us. Authority has power only to work in regard to matters of common judgment, and is of more weight in a foreign language; therefore let us again charge at it in this place.

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Ch. 13
1 month 2 weeks ago

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience.

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"The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" in address to the Yale Philosophical Club, published in the International Journal of Ethics, April 1891

Religion for [Berdyaev] is a social phenomenon and is adapted to the needs of the masses; as such, it is embodied in visible institutions and in authoritative formulas. The mystic, on the other hand, is aristocratic in temperament and never quite at home where the masses are catered for. He cannot remain in the world of form and convention and second-hand truths which is all about us and with which official religion has to come to terms; he aspires to a contact with spiritual reality as it is, a return to the ultimate sources of his being.

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Edgar Leonard Allen (1893-1961), Freedom in God: A Guide to the Thought of Nicholas Berdyaev
1 week 5 days ago

The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...

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2 months 2 weeks ago
What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him even concerning his own body in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw away the key.
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2 months 1 week ago

But suppose we were to teach creationism. What would be the content of the teaching? Merely that a creator formed the universe and all species of life ready-made? Nothing more? No details?

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1 week 5 days ago

So it is that after each night, facing a new day, the impossible necessity of dealing with it fills us with dread; exiled in light as if the world had just started, inventing the sun, we flee from tears-just one of which would be enough to wash us out of time.

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2 weeks 2 days ago

Germany is now a field of cadavers, soon she will be a paradise.

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1 month 1 week ago

Deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.

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Specters of Marx. Routledge, 1994. p. 115
1 month 2 weeks ago

Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debaucher of sentiment?

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p. 236
1 week 5 days ago

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free," said Jefferson, "it expects what never was and never will be."

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Chapter 4 (p. 34)

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