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8 months 4 days ago

Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.

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An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940), Introduction, p. 15
8 months 4 days ago

Only that position can impart dignity in which we do not appear as servile tools but rather create independently within our circle.

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Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 38
4 months 1 week ago

A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined for him already.

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p. 163
7 months 4 days ago

An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.

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Speech on the sixth article of charge in the impeachment of Warren Hastings (5 May 1789), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Tenth (1899), p. 306
7 months 1 week ago

For the first time in sixty years, the priests, the old aristocracy and the people met in a common sentiment-a feeling of revenge, it is true, and not of affection; but even that is a great thing in politics, where a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.

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6 months ago

The first cause cannot have been an intelligence, let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshiped. Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. 

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"Why There Almost Certainly Is No God", The Huffington Post, 23/10/2006
8 months 4 days ago

Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest return of wisdom.

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par. 28
8 months 4 days ago

He is great who is what he is from Nature, and who never reminds us of others.

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Uses of Great Men
6 months ago

The wheel may be one of those cases where the engineering solution can be seen in plain view, yet be unattainable in evolution because it lies on the other side of a deep valley, cutting unbridgeably across the massif of Mount Improbable.

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Dawkins, Richard (24 November 1996). "Why don't animals have wheels?". The Sunday Times. Retrieved on 29 October 2008.
8 months 2 days ago

Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.

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Existentialism and Human Emotions
7 months 1 day ago

To get to know a truth properly, one must polemicize it.

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Quoted in The Viking Book of Aphorisms by Wystan Hugh Auden (1962) p. 323
7 months 1 day ago

No man must encroach upon my province nor I upon his. He may advise me, moderately and without perniciousness, but he must not expect to dictate to me. He may censure me freely and without reserve but he should remember that I am to act by my deliberation and not his. He may exercise a republican boldness in judging, but he must not be peremptory and imperious in prescribing. Force may never be resorted to but, in the most extraordinary and imperious emergency.

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Book II, "Of Rights"
8 months 3 days ago

The proper study of mankind is books.

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Ch. XXVIII
6 months 3 weeks ago

The ontological concept of truth is in the centre of a logic which may serve as a model of pre- technological rationality. It is the rationality of a two-dimensional universe of discourse which, contrasts with the of thought and behavior that develop in the execution of the technological project.

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p. 130
8 months 1 week ago

The plague of man is boasting of his knowledge.

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Ch. 12 (tr. ?)
8 months 5 days ago

All men would then be necessarily equal, if they were without needs. It is the poverty connected with our species which subordinates one man to another. It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.

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"Equality", 1764
8 months 3 days ago

It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.

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8 months 4 days ago

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
4 months ago

The things... which are proper to the understanding no other man is used to impede, for neither fire, nor iron, nor tyrant, nor abuse, touches it in any way. When it has been made a sphere, it continues a sphere.

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VIII, 41
1 month 1 week ago

You could have totally different rules for killing in a constructed situation where all the parties maintain consent in the process. But, I consider this a detached state of war. It's not equal to the notion of emergent justice. It's a captured degradation.

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7 months ago

The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed are those who suffer from it, who are a prey to questioning, and who can accept no given because they were born in consternation.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

For no man is free who is a slave to his body.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

I would in fact tend to have more confidence in the outcome of a democratic decision if there was a minority that voted against it, than if it was unanimous... Social psychology has amply shown the strength of this bandwagon effect.

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Habermas (1993) "Further reflections on the public sphere", in: Craig Calhoun Eds. Habermas and the Public Sphere. MIT Press. p. 441
2 months 3 weeks ago

"We are by no means opposed to the globalization of relationships as such-in fact, as we said, the strongest forces of Leftist internationalism have effectively led this process. The enemy, rather, is a specific regime of global relations that we call Empire."
- Antonio Negri

See biography for Antonio Negri:
https://civilsimian.com/AntonioNegri

Read Antonio Negri's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/201/content

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8 months 2 days ago

Justice as fairness provides what we want.

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Chapter III, Section 30, pg. 190
8 months 4 days ago

The unity is brought about by force.

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Notebook I, The Chapter on Money, p. 70.
6 months 1 week ago

The empirical research of the last fifteen years on the structure of large organizations seems to confirm the hypothesis of Herbert Simon that human cognitive limits are a basic limiting factor in determining organization structures .

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Jay R. Galbraith, "Organization design: An information processing view." Organizational Effectiveness Center and School 21 (1977). p. 21
8 months 4 days ago

Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid person's notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from their own nature and faculties.

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Ch. 1
3 months 3 weeks ago

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of every day thinking.

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"[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016003236910475 Physics and Reality]" (as translated by Jean Piccard) in the Journal of the Franklin Institute Vol. 221, Issue 3 (March 1936), at p. 349
6 months 6 days ago

Nonviolence is perhaps best described as a practice of resistance that becomes possible, if not mandatory, precisely at the moment when doing violence seems most justified and obvious. In this way, it can be understood as a practice that not only stops a violent act, or a violent process, but requires a form of sustained action, sometimes aggressively pursued. So, one suggestion I will make is that we can think of nonviolence not simply as the absence of violence, or as the act of refraining from committing violence, but as a sustained commitment, even a way of rerouting aggression for the purposes of affirming ideals of equality and freedom.

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p. 27
4 months 4 weeks ago

In situations of de facto diversity, attempts to impose a single way of life on an entire population is a formula for dictatorship.

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7 months ago

Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

You are a little soul carrying a corpse around, as Epictetus used to say.

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Fragment 26 (Oldfather translation). This fragment originates from Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV. 41.
7 months 4 weeks ago

"For many, abstract thinking is toil; for me, on good days, it is feast and frenzy." (XIV, 24) Abstract thinking a feast? The highest form of human existence? ... "The feast implies: pride, exuberance, frivolity; mockery of all earnestness and respectability; a divine affirmation of oneself, out of animal plenitude and perfection-all obviously states to which the Christian may not honestly say Yes. The feast is paganism par excellence." (WM, 916). For that reason, we might add that thinking never takes place in Christianity. That is to say, there is no Christian philosophy. There is no true philosophy that could be determined anywhere else than from within itself.

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p. 5
1 month 1 week ago

There should be more dignity for those that need help. There's a stigma around needing charitable help people don't deserve.

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8 months 1 week ago

Writing does not cause misery. It is born of misery.

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8 months 4 days ago

There is no knowledge that is not power.

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Old Age
7 months 1 week ago

The New Englander is attached to his township because it is strong and independent; he has an interest in it because he shares in its management; he loves it because he has no reason to complain of his lot; he invests his ambition and his future in it; in the restricted sphere within his scope, he learns to rule society; he gets to know those formalities without which freedom can advance only through revolutions, and becoming imbued with their spirit, develops a taste for order, understands the harmony of powers, and in the end accumulates clear, practical ideas about the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights.

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Chapter V.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Mussolini is a man no less extraordinary than Lenin. He, too, is a political genius, of a greater reach than all the statesmen of the day, with the only exception of Lenin...

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As quoted in The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarization in the 20th Century, Jacob L. Talmon, University of California Press (1981) p. 451.
4 months 1 week ago

A vague uncritical idealism always lends itself to ridicule and too much of it might be a danger to mankind, leading it round in a futile wild-goose chase for imaginary ideals.

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Ch. I : The Awakening, p. 4
4 months 4 days ago

I wanted to offer a supreme model to the man who struggles; I wanted to show him that he must not fear pain, temptation or death - because all three can be conquered, all three have already been conquered.

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9 months 1 day ago

I believe that every human being with a physically normal brain can learn a great deal and can be surprisingly intellectual. I believe that what we badly need is social approval of learning and social rewards for learning.We can all be members of the intellectual elite and then, and only then, will a phrase like "America's right to know" and, indeed, any true concept of democracy, have any meaning.

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4 months ago

Love the little trade which thou hast learned, and be content therewith.

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IV, 31
7 months 1 week ago

Be substantially great in thyself, and more than thou appearest unto others.

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Part I, Section XIX

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