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6 months 1 week ago

A book can never be anything more than the impression of its author's thoughts [Ein Buch kann nie mehr seyn, als der Abdruck der Gedanken des Verfassers]. The value of these thoughts lies either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form in which he develops his matter - that is to say, what he has thought about it.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The great and inspiring aims of the Revolution became so clouded with and obscured by the methods used by the ruling political power that it was hard to distinguish what was temporary means and what final purpose. Psychologically and socially the means necessarily influence and alter the aims. The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization. In that lies the real tragedy of the Bolshevik philosophy as applied to the Russian Revolution. May this lesson not be in vain.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Rationality requires a complete knowledge and anticipation of the consequences that will follow on each choice. In fact, knowledge of consequences is always fragmentary.

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6 months 2 days ago

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.

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§ 109
2 months 6 days ago

We were laboring under a dropsical fulness of circulating medium. Nearly all of it is now called in by the banks, who have the regulation of the safety-valves of our fortunes, and who condense and explode them at their will. Lands in this State cannot now be sold for a year's rent; and unless our Legislature have wisdom enough to effect a remedy by a gradual diminution only of the medium, there will be a general revolution of property in this state.

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Letter to John Adams (7 November 1819) ME 15:224 : The Writings of Thomas Jefferson "Memorial Edition" (20 Vols., 1903-04) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 15, p. 224
2 months 1 week ago

I hate all virtues based on food and bloated bellies;though food and drink are good, I'm better slaked and fedby that inhuman flame which burns in our black bowels.I like to name that flame which burns within me God!

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Odysseus, Book XI, line 840
6 months 1 week ago

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

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"Slavery in Massachusetts", 1854
5 months 1 week ago

Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the mania Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth, and one way.

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"The Root of All Evil" as translated by Michael Hamburger
4 months 4 weeks ago

Behold, a sower went forth to sow; And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up: Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth: And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them: But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.

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13:3-9 (KJV)
3 months 2 weeks ago

On this showing, the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

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Vol. 4 (1955 ), part B, p. 6
7 months 1 week ago

But it is better to assume principles less in number and finite, as Empedocles makes them to be. All philosophers... make principles to be contraries... (for Parmenides makes principles to be hot and cold, and these he demominates fire and earth) as those who introduce as principles the rare and the dense. But Democritus makes the principles to be the solid and the void; of which the former, he says, has the relation of being, and the latter of non-being. ...it is necessary that principles should be neither produced from each other, nor from other things; and that from these all things should be generated. But these requisites are inherent in the first contraries: for, because they are first, they are not from other things; and because they are contraries, they are not from each other.

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6 months 5 days ago

The strangest mores of the most of-the-way societies will, in spite of everything, be relatively comprehensible to the person who has a flesh-and-blood knowledge of man's needs, anxieties, and hopes. If, on the other hand, this experience is lacking, he will not even be able to understand the customs of those about him.

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p. 139
3 months 1 week ago

Many people today hold to a Gnostic view of things without realizing the fact. Believing that human beings can be fully understood in the terms of scientific materialism, they reject any idea of free will. But they cannot give up hope of being masters of their destiny. So they have come to believe that science will somehow enable the human mind to escape the limitations that shape its natural condition. Throughout much of the world, and particularly in western countries, the Gnostic faith that knowledge can give humans a freedom no other creature can possess has become the predominant religion.

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The Faith of Puppets: The Freedom of the Marionette (p. 9)
6 months 6 days ago

As for 'taking sides' - the choice, it seems to me, is no longer between two users of violence, two systems of dictatorship. Violence and dictatorship cannot produce peace and liberty; they can only produce the results of violence and dictatorship, results with which history has made us only too sickeningly familiar. The choice now is between militarism and pacifism. To me, the necessity of pacifism seems absolutely clear.

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Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (1937) edited by Nancy Cunard and published by the Left Review
2 months 3 weeks ago

The work we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

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6 months 1 week ago

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

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Section 12 : Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy Pt. 3
4 months 4 weeks ago

Our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the commonweal, and the whole appeals to be the very embodiment of Reason.

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p. xli
7 months 1 week ago

It was a purely Christian satisfaction to me that if ordinarily there was no one else there was one who in action tried a little to do the doctrine about loving the neighbor, alas, one who precisely by his act also received a frightful into what an illusion Christendom is and indeed, particularly later, also into how the common people let themselves be seduced by wretched journalists, whose striving and fighting for equality can only lead, if it leads to anything, since it is in the service of the lie, to making the elite, in self-defense, proud of their aloofness from the common man, and the common man brazen in his rudeness.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

An autonomous electorate, free because it is free from indoctrination and manipulation, would indeed be on a "level of articulate opinion and ideology" which is not likely to be found. Therefore, the concept has to be rejected as "unrealistic"-has to be if one accepts the factually prevailing level of opinion and ideology as prescribing the valid criteria for sociological analysis. And-if indoctrination and manipulation have reached the stage where the prevailing level of opinion has become a level of falsehood, where the actual state of affairs is no longer recognized as that which it is, then an analysis which is methodologically committed to reject transitive concepts commits itself to a false consciousness. Its very empiricism is ideological.

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p. 117
6 months 1 week ago

Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind.

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Ch. 4: The Study of Mathematics
6 months 2 days ago

We must plow through the whole of language.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 131
6 months 3 weeks ago

By extensively studying all learning, and keeping himself under the restraint of the rules of propriety, one may thus likewise not err from what is right.

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4 months 4 days ago

The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos - resonant utterance or word.

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p. 35
4 months 2 weeks ago

First, most producers are employees of firms, not owners. Viewed from the vantage point of classical economic theory, they have no reason to maximize the profits of firms, except to the extent that they can be controlled by owners. Moreover, profit-making firms, nonprofit organizations, and bureaucratic organizations all have exactly the same problem of inducing their employees to work toward organizational goals. There is no reason, a priori, why it should be easier (or harder) to produce this motivation in organizations aimed at maximizing profits than in organizations with different goals. If it is true in an organizational economy that organizations motivated by profits will be more efficient than other organizations, additional postulates will have to be introduced to account for it.

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Simon (1991) "Organizations and Markets:" in: Journal of Economic Perspectives. 5 (2 Spring 1991): p. 28.
6 months 3 weeks ago

Those who deny the first principle should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped.

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5 months 3 days ago

Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it.

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2 months 3 days ago

In matter of writing or reading thou must needs be taught before thou can do either: much more in matter of life.

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XI, 29 (el en)
6 months 2 weeks ago

In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is lord.

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Act III, scene ix
6 months 1 week ago

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

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p. 167
5 months 3 weeks ago

Now, that we do not really know of what sort each thing is, or is not, has often been shown.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The two most far-reaching critical theories at the beginning of the latest phase of industrial society were those of Marx and Freud. Marx showed the moving powers and the conflicts in the social-historical process. Freud aimed at the critical uncovering of the inner conflicts. Both worked for the liberation of man, even though Marx's concept was more comprehensive and less time-bound than Freud's.

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The Art of Being" Pt. 3
5 months 1 week ago

A gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

In our opinion, the task of a far-sighted policy of the Third Reich ought to have been that of seeking every possible means to obtain at least the neutrality of the western nations so as to have free hands for a devestating attack exclusively against the Soviet Union-but that would have required the shrewdness and genius of a Metternich.

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pp. 81-82
1 month 3 weeks ago

We may assume the existence of an aether; only we must give up ascribing a definite state of motion to it, i.e. we must by abstraction take from it the last mechanical characteristic which Lorentz had still left it. ... But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable media, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it.

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On the irrelevance of the luminiferous aether hypothesis to physical measurements, in [https://www.refcm.org/scripture-science-stott/aarch/pages/12-einstein-sidelights-relativity.htm an address at the University of Leiden (5 May 1920)]
2 months 6 days ago

It is not by the consolidation or concentration, of powers, but by their distribution that good government is effected.

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Memoirs, Correspondence and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1829) edited by Thomas Jefferson Randolph, p. 70
2 months 3 days ago

Wipe out the imagination. Stop pulling the strings. Confine thyself to the present. ...Divide and distribute every object into the causal [formal] and the material. ...Let the wrong which is done by a man stay there where the wrong was done.

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VII, 29
4 months 4 days ago

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)
2 months 1 week ago

Profound and incommensurable is the worth of this flowing world: God clings to it and ascends, God feeds upon it and increases.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts.

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p. 15
4 months 2 weeks ago

Most of the propositions that make up the body of administrative theory today share, unfortunately, this defect of proverbs. For almost every principle one can find an equally plausible and acceptable contradictory principle.

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Simon, Herbert A. "The proverbs of administration." Public Administration Review 6.1 (1946): 53-67.
3 months 2 days ago

There is no idea more novel, more surprising, than that of associating three hundred families of different degrees of fortune, knowledge and capacity.

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The Theory of Social Organization. Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier, p. 5.
6 months 3 weeks ago

The Master said, "He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it."

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6 months 1 week ago

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 19, § 233
4 months 4 days ago

The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.

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Media as the New Nature, 1969, p. 14
1 month 3 weeks ago

So, this is ooold school, like old old school. So, I think we've had it backward for a long time. I think we are entering a new era and it's time to directly say Existence>essence. Being>identity.

"being" here is referring to our contingent identity. But I think we have to face the fact we don't know what happens to the identity when we die. But we know, when the body exists, our identity persists. We can't let identity particularity subvert life. Subvert existence.

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