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7 months 1 week ago

He is a dreamer of ancient times, or rather, of the myths of what ancient times used to be. Such men are harmless in themselves, but their queer lack of realism makes them fools for others.

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People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.

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According to Kenneth Owen Morgan (The Illustrated History of Britain (1984) p. 421) this was said by Macaulay in 1832. If so, he was quoting a letter written by Edmund Burke in 1777.
2 months 1 week ago

What is my ruling faculty now to me? and of what nature am I now making it? and for what purpose am I now using it? is it void of understanding? is it loosed and rent asunder from social life? is it melted and mixed with the poor flesh so as to move together with it?

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X, 24
3 months 2 weeks ago

A global transition to a cruelty-free vegan diet won't just help non-human animals. The transition will also help malnourished humans who could benefit from the grain currently fed to factory-farmed animals. For factory-farming is not just cruel; it's energy-inefficient. Let's take just one example. Over the past few decades, millions of Ethiopians have died of "food shortages" while Ethiopia grew grain to sell to the West to feed cattle. Western meat-eating habits prop up the price of grain so that poor people in the developing world can't afford to buy it. In consequence, they starve by the millions.In my work, I explore futuristic, hi-tech solutions to the problem of suffering. But anybody who seriously wants to reduce human and non-human suffering alike should adopt a cruelty-free vegan lifestyle today.

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"A World Without Suffering?", Instituto Humanitas Unisinos, Jan. 2011
2 months 3 weeks ago

Mankind is born for mutual assistance, anger for mutual ruin: the former loves society, the latter estrangement.

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6 months 6 days ago

In the old system, the body of the condemned man became the king's property, on which the sovereign left his mark and brought down the effects of his power. Now he will be rather the property of society, the object of a collective and useful appropriation.

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Chapter Three, The Gentle Way in Punishment
2 months 1 week ago

And first the Doctrine that all their Theory is grounded on, seems to me Inevident and undemonstrated, not to say precarious.

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4 months 1 week ago

The remedy for loneliness is human fellowship, the warmth of real, live, flesh-and-blood companions and loved-ones; not prating in a vacuum to an imaginary friend for whose existence there is no vestige of serious evidence. Even an AI robot is better than that. At least ChatGPT exists, really talks back at you, will actually hold a friendly conversation. But talk to the imaginary friend which is God (Allah, Virgin Mary, Lord Krishna, Thor, Zeus, Mithras, name yours) and the only reply you'll get is conjured within your own imagination. You'll be talking to yourself, which is really rather sad, and hardly an antidote to loneliness. No Satisfying Alternative to Religion? Try Reality.

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23-Apr-25
4 months 1 week ago

The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property.

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(p. 122)
2 months 1 week ago

The mixture of children and men is precisely one of the most beautiful features of aristocratic government. All roles are distributed wisely in the world: that of the young is to do good, and that of old age is to prevent evil. The impetuosity of young men, who demand only action and creation, is very useful to the State; but they are too likely to innovate and destroy, and they would do much evil without the elderly, who are there to stop them. The latter in their turn oppose even useful reforms; they are too inflexible, they do not know how to accommodate themselves to circumstances, and sometimes a twenty-year old senator can very well be placed beside another of eighty.

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p. 137

Imagination is the soul, since it plays all the roles of the soul.

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5 months 1 week ago

Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where the profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.

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Chapter III, Part I.
6 months 1 week ago

One might say: art shows us the miracles of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature.

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6 months 6 days ago

All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects that [the norm's] general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone's interests, and the consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation.

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p. 65
6 months 1 week ago

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

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Quoted in Library of Living Philosophers: The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, 1944
7 months 1 week ago

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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2 months 1 week ago

It is impossible to care for each other more or differently than we care for the earth. This last statement becomes obvious enough when it is considered that the earth is what we all have in common, that it is what we are made of and what we live from, and that we therefore cannot damage it without damaging those with whom we share it. But I believe it goes farther and deeper than that. There is an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth. Between our relation to our own sexuality and our relation to the reproductivity of the earth, for instance, the resemblance is plain and strong. By some connection we do not recognize, the willingness to exploit one becomes the willingness to exploit the other.

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The Unsettling of America (1977), Chapter Seven : The Body and the Earth
6 months 2 weeks ago

The greatest error of all the rest is the mistaking or misplacing of the last or farthest end of knowledge: for men have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of their gift of reason, to the benefit and use of men: as if there were sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit; or a tarrasse, for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower of state, for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or a fort or commanding ground, for strife and contention; or a shop, for profit or sale; and not a rich storehouse, for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate.

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Book I, v, 11
4 months 3 weeks ago

We live in a nightmare of falsehoods, and there are few who are sufficiently awake and aware to see things as they are. Our first duty is to clear away illusions and recover a sense of reality. If war should come, it will do so on account of our delusions, for which our hag-ridden conscience attempts to find moral excuses. To recover a sense of reality is to recover the truth about ourselves and the world in which we live, and thereby to gain the power of keeping this world from flying asunder.

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p. 80
6 months 1 week ago

[Mortals] say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death.

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Ch. 9
6 months 1 week ago

Self-command is the main elegance.

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p. 205
4 months 4 days ago

Much of junk culture has a core of crisis - shoot-outs, conflagrations, bodies weltering in blood, naked embracers or rapist-stranglers. The sounds of junk culture are heard over a ground bass of extremism. Our entertainments swarm with specters of world crisis. Nothing moderate can have any claim to our attention.

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A Second Half Life (1991), p. 326
3 months 2 days ago

I warmly second the advice of the wisest of men-"Don't be ambitious; don't be at all too desirous to success; be loyal and modest." Cut down the proud towering thoughts that you get into you, or see they be pure as well as high. There is a nobler ambition than the gaining of all California would be, or the getting of all the suffrages that are on the planet just now.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

There are two sides to every question.

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As quoted in Lives of Eminent Philosophers, by Diogenes Laërtius, Book IX, Sec. 51
2 months 1 week ago

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

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5 months 1 week ago

Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.

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"Selected Ideas (1799-1800)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (1968) #98
7 months 1 week ago

The purpose of aphorisms is to keep fools who have memorised them from having nothing to say.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The trial that begins Awards to him who wins The fairest prize to-day. And lo, the hour is here And summons you. Appear! Ye may no more delay. Come hear the herald's call Ye princes one and all. Many tribes of men Submissive to you then! How keen in war your swords! But now 'tis wisdom's turn; Now let your rivals learn How keen can be your words.

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6 months 1 week ago

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Of all these experiences that seem so frightful, none is insuperable. Separate trials have been over- come by many: fire by Mucius, crucifixion by Regulus, poison by Socrates, exile by Rutilius, and a sword-inflicted death by Cato; therefore, let us also overcome something.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

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C 26

Opinion considers the opposition of what is true and false quite rigid, and, confronted with a philosophical system, it expects agreement or contradiction. And in an explanation of such a system, opinion still expects to find one or the other.

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Preface, § 2
6 months 1 week ago

None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.

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Attributed to Russell in M. Kumar Dictionary of Quotations, p. 76, but actually said by Marshal Lannes, according to The London Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences (1824), p. 664
6 months 1 week ago

Do not most of us resemble that old general of ninety who, having come upon some young officers debauching some girls, said to them angrily: "Gentlemen, is that the example I give you?" "Character"

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1764
5 months 1 week ago

Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart; nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.

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6 months 1 week ago

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. The first kind have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, while the second kind need money and consequently write for money.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

A grievous crime indeed against religion has been committed by the man who imagines that Islam is defended by the denial of the mathematical sciences.

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III. The Classes of Seekers, p. 23.
3 months 2 days ago

I feel that these old Northmen wore looking into Nature with open eye and soul: most earnest, honest; childlike, and yet manlike; with a great-hearted simplicity and depth and freshness, in a true, loving, admiring, unfearing way.

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5 months 1 week ago

The general co-operation of all members of society for the purpose of planned exploitation of the forces of production, the expansion of production to the point where it will satisfy the needs of all, the abolition of a situation in which the needs of some are satisfied at the expense of the needs of others, the complete liquidation of classes and their conflicts, the rounded development of the capacities of all members of society through the elimination of the present division of labor, through industrial education, through engaging in varying activities, through the participation by all in the enjoyments produced by all, through the combination of city and country - these are the main consequences of the abolition of private property.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The mariner of old said to Neptune in a great tempest, "O God! thou mayest save me if thou wilt, and if thou wilt thou mayest destroy me; but whether or no, I will steer my rudder true."

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Book II, Ch. 16. Of Glory
4 months 1 week ago

Environment is process, not container.

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(p. 30)
5 months 4 days ago

The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.

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p. 64
6 months 1 day ago

It is difficult to speak of the universal specifically.

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Line 128

Liberalism, neoliberalism, libertarianism...Democrats and Republicans switched values at one point...people don't even agree what liberalism is in your average thread. It's associated with treating each individual as an end in themselves and universal human rights, supporting the quote below.

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7 months 1 day ago

When the Superior Man (Junzi) eats he does not try to stuff himself; at rest he does not seek perfect comfort; he is diligent in his work and careful in speech. He avails himself to people of the Tao and thereby corrects himself. This is the kind of person of whom you can say, "he loves learning."

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3 months 6 days ago

That liberal world that emerged after 1945 led to one of the most spectacularly successful periods in human history. There was material progress. There was stability. There was human freedom. There was the flourishing of many human activities that can only take place in a liberal, and therefore free society...

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10:06
7 months 1 week ago

Every rebellion implies some kind of unity.

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