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Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 5 days ago
The conviction that it is important...

The conviction that it is important to believe this or that, even if a free inquiry would not support the belief, is one which is common to almost all religions and which inspires all systems of state education. The consequence is that the minds of the young are stunted and are filled with fanatical hostility both to those who have other fanaticisms, and, even more virulently, to those who object to all fanaticisms.

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preface xxiii
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
3 months 2 weeks ago
The fierce willingness to repudiate domination...

The fierce willingness to repudiate domination in a holistic manner is the starting point for progressive cultural revolution.

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Women, Art, and Society: Fourth Edition (2007) by Whitney Chadwick ISBN 0-500-20393-8
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
5 months 6 days ago
The teaching of my philosophy... that...

The teaching of my philosophy... that our whole existence is something which had better not have been, and that to disown and disclaim it is the highest wisdom.

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Ch 1
Philosophical Maxims
A. J. Ayer
A. J. Ayer
4 months 1 day ago
I see philosophy as a fairly...

I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.

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As quoted in Profile of Sir Alfred Ayer (June 1971) by Euro-Television, quoted in A.J. Ayer: A Life (1999), p. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
5 months 1 week ago
The method of the science not...

The method of the science not being practiced much nowadays, except what logic prescribes to all sciences generally, that fitted for the peculiar nature of metaphysics being simply ignored, it is no wonder that those who everlastingly turn the Sisyphean stone of this inquiry do not seem so far to have made much progress. Though here I neither can nor will expatiate upon so important and extensive a subject, I shall briefly shadow forth what constitutes no despicable part of this method, namely, the infection between sensuous and intellectual cognition, not only as creeping in on those incautious in the application of principles, but even producing spurious principles under the appearance of axioms.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 2 days ago
When technology extends one of our...

When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized.

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(p. 47)
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
3 months 3 weeks ago
Hatred is a feeling which leads...

Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.

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Cited in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations by Subject, ed. Susan Ratcliffe (2010), p. 223
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
2 months 1 week ago
Humans kill one another - and...

Humans kill one another - and in some cases themselves - for many reasons, but none is more human than the attempt to make sense of their lives. More than the loss of life, they fear loss of meaning.

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In the Puppet Theatre: Roof Gardens, Feathers and Human Sacrifice (p. 87)
Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
5 months 3 days ago
A scheme is unjust when the...

A scheme is unjust when the higher expectations, one or more of them, are excessive. If these expectations were decreased, the situation of the less favored would be improved.

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Chapter II, Section 13, pg. 79
Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
3 months 2 weeks ago
The sick individual finds himself at...

The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic. In the context of this study the crucial question is whether the hypothesis of a quasi-autistic or of low-grade schizophrenic disturbance would help us to explain some of the violence spreading today.

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p. 395
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months ago
We define only out of despair,...

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.

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Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
5 months 3 days ago
The law of progress holds that...

The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don't you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good? The good is no longer even being measured.

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Interview with French writer Roger Errera in New York Review of Books
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
5 months 5 days ago
Between the Shaman of the Tungus,...

Between the Shaman of the Tungus, the European prelate who rules church and state, the Voguls, and the Puritans, on the one hand, and the man who listens to his own command of duty, on the other, the difference is not that the former make themselves slaves, while the latter is free, but that the former have their lord outside themselves, while the latter carries his lord in himself, yet at the same time is his own slave.

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Philosophical Maxims
Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri
2 months ago
The old form of trade union,...

The old form of trade union, which was born in the nineteenth century and aimed primarily at negotiating wages for a specific trade is no longer sufficient. First of all, as we have been arguing, the old trade unions are not able to represent the unemployed, the poor, or even the mobile and flexible post-Fordist workers with short term contracts, all of whom participate actively in social production and increase social wealth. Second, the old unions are divided according to the various products and tasks defined in the heyday of industrial production - a miners' union, a pipefitters' union, a machinists' union and so forth. Today, insofar as the conditions and the relations of labor are becoming common, these traditional divisions (or even newly defined divisions) no longer make sense and serve only as an obstacle. Finally the old unions have become purely economic, not political, organization.

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136
Philosophical Maxims
Will Durant
Will Durant
1 month 3 weeks ago
Science tells us how to heal...

Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom - desire coordinated in the light of all experience - can tell us when to heal and when to kill. To observe processes and to construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy: and because in these days our means and instruments have multiplied beyond our interpretation and synthesis of ideals and ends, our life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. For a fact is nothing except in relation to desire; it is not complete except in relation to a purpose and a whole. Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

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Introduction : On the Uses of Philosophy
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months ago
Obviously God was a solution, and...

Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 1 week ago
I prefer the company of peasants...

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.

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Philosophical Maxims
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
3 months 3 weeks ago
He felt neither guilt nor distress...

He felt neither guilt nor distress at the pleasure with which he was now filled by the proximity of this young creature, and when he discovered in himself even physical symptoms of his inclination he did not take fright, but continued cheerfully and serenely to see Nick whenever the ordinary run of his duties suggested it, congratulating himself upon the newly achieved solidity and rational calm of his spiritual life.

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The Bell (1958) p. 91
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
3 months 2 weeks ago
I now come to the second...

I now come to the second reason for the modern fading of interest in religion. Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God. The presentation of God under the aspect of power awakens every modern instinct of critical reaction. This is fatal; for religion collapses unless its main positions command immediacy of assent. In this respect the old phraseology is at variance with the psychology of modern civilisations. This change in psychology is largely due to science, and is one of the chief ways in which the advance of science has weakened the hold of the old religious forms of expression.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", pp. 266-267
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 3 weeks ago
This worthy man, whose nephew is...

This worthy man, whose nephew is still minister of Eskdalemuir (and author of a book on the Jews), proved the greatest blessing to that household. My father would, in any case, have saved himself. Of the other brothers, it may be doubted whether William Brown was not the primary preserver. They all learned to he masons from him, or from one another; instead of miscellaneous laborers and hunters, became regular tradesmen, the best in all their district, the skilfullest and faithfullest, and the best-rewarded every way. Except my father, none of them attained a decisive religiousness. But they all had prudence and earnestness, love of truth, industry, and the blessings it brings.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 month 4 days ago
The liberty of the whole earth...

The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam & an Eve left in every country, & left free, it would be better than as it now is.

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Letter to William Short (January 3, 1793), quoted in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (1995), pp. 316-317
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
5 months 4 days ago
The second doctrine of the Perennial...

The second doctrine of the Perennial Philosophy - that it is possible to know the Divine Ground by a direct intuition higher than discursive reasoning - is to be found in all the great religions of the world. A philosopher who is content merely to know about the ultimate Reality - theoretically and by hearsay - is compared by Buddha to a herdsman of other men's cows. Mohammed uses an even homelier barnyard metaphor. For him the philosopher who has not realized his metaphysics is just an ass bearing a load of books. Christian, Hindu, Taoist teachers wrote no less emphatically about the absurd pretensions of mere learning and analytic reasoning.

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Philosophical Maxims
Allan Bloom
Allan Bloom
1 month 2 weeks ago
The highest activities are always essentially...

The highest activities are always essentially lonely and private, and these men had a robust sense of their independence and the ultimate self-sufficiency of the mind. In this they were just like Socrates. The only change they operated was to bring philosophy out of the closet into the open, instead of seeking protection behind a little wall like men in a storm. Of course, in so doing they made philosophy, on the one hand, more vulnerable to the public if the hopes of controlling the public are not fulfilled, and, on the other, put at risk that inner intransigence which is the necessary condition of the quest for truth. Not only the rewards but the new responsibilities might prove irresistible temptations to compromise.

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"Commerce and Culture," p. 290.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 5 days ago
It is not altogether true that...

It is not altogether true that persuasion is one thing and force is another. Many forms of persuasion - even many of which everybody approves - are really a kind of force. Consider what we do to our children. We do not say to them: "Some people think the earth is round, and others think it is flat; when you grow up, you can, if you like, examine the evidence and form your own conclusion." Instead of this we say: "The earth is round." By the time our children are old enough to examine the evidence, our propaganda has closed their minds.

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Ch. 17: The Ethics of Power
Philosophical Maxims
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
3 months 2 weeks ago
A leftist government doesn't exist because...

A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.

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from L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze: G comme Gauche ("Gilles Deleuze's Alphabet Book: Left-wing Politics"), 1988-1989.
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months 1 week ago
All the great speakers....
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Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
4 months 4 weeks ago
The interpretation of a case is...

The interpretation of a case is corroborated only by the successful continuation of a self-formative process, that is by the completion of self-reflection, and not in any unmistakable way by what the patient says or how he behaves.

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p. 266
Philosophical Maxims
Mencius
Mencius
1 month 3 weeks ago
The principles of great men illuminate...

The principles of great men illuminate the universe.

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Discipline and Character, no. 50
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
2 months 3 weeks ago
His imagination resembled the wings of...

His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.

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p. 223
Philosophical Maxims
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
9 months 1 week ago
Ghandi had balls

One should oppose the fascination with Hitler according to which Hitler was, of course, a bad guy, responsible for the death of millions — but he definitely had balls, he pursued with iron will what he wanted. … This point is not only ethically repulsive, but simply wrong: no, Hitler did not ‘have the balls’ to really change things; he did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, i.e., he acted so that nothing would really change, he stages a big spectacle of Revolution so that the capitalist order could survive.”
In this precise sense of violence, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler: Gandhi’s movement effectively endeavored to interrupt the basic functioning of the British colonial state.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
3 months 3 weeks ago
We are sorely deficient in talking...

We are sorely deficient in talking with each other and listening to each other. We lack mobility, criticism and self-criticism. We incline to doctrinism. What makes it worse is that so many people do not really want to think. They want only slogans and obedience. They ask no questions and they give no answers, except by repeating drilled-in phrases. They can only assert and obey, neither probe nor apprehend. Thus they cannot be convinced, either. How shall we talk with people who will not go where others probe and think, where men seek independence in insight and conviction?

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
5 months 5 days ago
How does it become a man...

How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answered that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months ago
In order to conceive, and to...

In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 3 weeks ago
Let the modern eye look earnestly...

Let the modern eye look earnestly on that old midnight hour in St. Edmundsbury Church, shining yet on us, ruddy-bright, through the depths of seven hundred years; and consider mournfully what our Hero-worship once was, and what it now is!

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
3 months 2 weeks ago
The aim of science is to...

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."

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The Concept of Nature (1919), Chapter VII, p.143.
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months ago
I don't understand how people can...

I don't understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.

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Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
4 months 2 weeks ago
Tell not abroad what thou intendest...

Tell not abroad what thou intendest to do; for if thou speed not, thou shalt be mocked!

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
5 months 6 days ago
I am sure, zeal or love...

I am sure, zeal or love for truth can never permit falsehood to be used in the defence of it.

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187
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
5 months 4 days ago
All that the conscious ego can...

All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and understands not at all.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
5 months 1 week ago
Pleasure is in itself a good;...

Pleasure is in itself a good; nay, even setting aside immunity from pain, the only good: pain is in itself an evil; and, indeed, without exception, the only evil; or else the words good and evil have no meaning. And this is alike true of every sort of pain, and of every sort of pleasure.

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Ch. 10: Of Motives
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
3 months 1 day ago
No doubt some of your cousins...

No doubt some of your cousins and great-uncles died in childhood, but not a single one of your ancestors did. Ancestors just don't die young!

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Ch. 3. Immortal Coils
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
3 months 2 weeks ago
For the kingdom of heaven is...

For the kingdom of heaven is with us today.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
6 months 2 days ago
Civilizations have always been pyramidal in...

Civilizations have always been pyramidal in structure. As one climbs toward the apex of the social edifice, there is increased leisure and increasing opportunity to pursue happiness. As one climbs, one finds also fewer and fewer people to enjoy this more and more. Invariably, there is a preponderance of the dispossessed. And remember this, no matter how well off the bottom layers of the pyramid might be on an absolute scale, they are always dispossessed in comparison with the apex.So there is always social friction in ordinary human societies. The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated.

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Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
3 months 6 days ago
To affirm equality is to affirm...

To affirm equality is to affirm a cohabitation defined in part by an interdependency that takes the edge off the individual boundaries of the body, or that works that edge for its social and political potential.

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p. 148
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
6 months 2 days ago
An unpleasant nest of nasty, materialistic...

An unpleasant nest of nasty, materialistic and aggressive people, careless of the rights of others, imperfectly democratic at home though quick to see the minor slaveries of others, and greedy without end.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 months 5 days ago
Nor is prescription of government formed...

Nor is prescription of government formed upon blind unmeaning prejudices-for man is a most unwise, and a most wise, being. The individual is foolish. The multitude, for the moment, is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it almost always acts right.

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Speech in the House of Commons against William Pitt's motion for parliamentary reform (7 May 1782)
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
5 months 3 days ago
The Value of myth is that...

The Value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.

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p. 90
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
4 months ago
Effort supposes resistance....

Effort supposes resistance.

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Vol. I, par. 320
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Simmel
Georg Simmel
1 month 2 weeks ago
Modern mind has become more and...

Modern mind has become more and more calculating. The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world into an arithmetic problem, to fix every part of the world by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones.

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p. 414
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months ago
Great joys, why do they bring...

Great joys, why do they bring us sadness? Because there remains from these excesses only a feeling of irrevocable loss and desertion which reaches a high degree of negative intensity. At such moments, instead of a gain, one keenly feels loss. sadness accompanies all those events in which life expends itself. its intensity is equal to its loss. Thus death causes the greatest sadness.

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Philosophical Maxims
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