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4 months 3 weeks ago

No one deserves to live who has not at least one good-man-and-true for a friend.

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5 months 4 days ago

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next... It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth "thrown in": aim at earth and you will get neither.

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Book III, Chapter 10, "Hope"
1 month 1 week ago

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

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As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) by Alan L. Mackay, p. 35
5 months 1 week ago

T is one and the same Nature that rolls on her course, and whoever has sufficiently considered the present state of things might certainly conclude as to both the future and the past.

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Book II, Ch. 12. Apology for Raimond Sebond
4 months 2 days ago

There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They rarely coincide. Men and circumstances generally modify the ideal train of events, so that it seems imperfect, and its consequences are equally imperfect. Thus with the Reformation; instead of Protestantism came Lutheranism.

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Epigraph, "The Mystery Of Marie Rogêt" (1842) by Edgar Allan Poe, adapted from Fragments from German Prose Writers (1841) by Sarah Austin
5 months 5 days ago

Every man is a new method.

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"The Natural History of Intellect", p. 28
3 months 2 weeks ago

Scientists, animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless, constitute an interesting subject for study.

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4 months 4 days ago

The Teutons believed that the only possible way to get rid of barbarism was to become Romans. The immigrants to what was formerly Roman soil became as Roman as they possibly could. But in their imagination the term "barbarous" soon acquired the secondary meaning of " common, plebeian, and loutish," and in this way "Roman," on the contrary, became synonymous with " distinguished."

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Consequences of the Difference p. 81
1 month 4 days ago

If we can but prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy.

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Letter to Thomas Cooper
3 months 2 weeks ago

In classroom settings I have often listened to groups of students tell me that racism really no longer shapes the contours of our lives, that there is no such thing as racial difference, that "we are all just people." Then a few minutes later I give them an exercise. I ask if they were about to die and could choose to come back as a white male, a white female, a black female, or a black male, which identity would they choose. Each time I do this exercise, most individuals, irrespective of gender or race invariably choose whiteness, and most often male whiteness. Black females are the least chosen. When I ask students to explain their choice they proceed to do a sophisticated analysis of privilege based on race (with perspectives that take gender and class into consideration).

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Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope
2 months 2 weeks ago

Suppose we encounter an advanced civilization that has engineered a happy biosphere. Population sizes are controlled by cross-species immunocontraception. Free-living herbivores lead idyllic lives in their wildlife parks. Should we urge the reintroduction of starvation, asphyxiation, disemboweling and being eaten alive by predators? Is their regime of compassionate stewardship of the biosphere best abandoned in favour of "re-wilding"? I suspect the advanced civilization would regard human pleas to restore the old Darwinian regime of "Nature, red in tooth and claw" as callous if not borderline sociopathic.

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Reply to "I am horrified at what goes on in philosophy departments, personally", Freethought Blogs, 10 Sept. 2015
4 months 2 days ago

Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word Liberty entire nations.

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Fragment No. 2
6 months 2 days ago

Without the interplay of human against human, the chief interest in life is gone; most of the intellectual values are gone; most of the reason for living is gone.

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3 months 2 days ago

Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete.

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(p. 99)
5 months 4 days ago

No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.

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Lecture II, What Pragmatism Means
1 month 2 weeks ago

To no creature besides man has been given wisdom, foresight, industry, and reflection.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.

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p. 277
5 months 1 week ago

Popery so threatens and so nearly surrounds us...every sober man would think it seasonable at this time that all dissenting Protestants should be brought to a good understanding and compliance one with another...I think all Protestants ought now by all ways to be stirred up against them [Catholics] as People that have declared themselves ready by blood, violence, and destruction to ruine our Religion and Government...they are nothing but either Enemys in our bowells or spies among us, whilst their General commanders whom they blindly obey declare warr, and an unalterable designe to destroy us.

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Critical Notes Upon Edward Stillingfleet's Mischief and Unreasonableness of Separation' (c. May 1681), quoted in John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 110
4 months 1 day ago

Feeling which has not yet emerged into immediate consciousness is already affectible and already affected. In fact, this is habit, by virtue of which an idea is brought up into the present consciousness by a bond that has already been established between it and another idea while it was still in futuro.

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3 months 2 days ago

Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life.

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(p. 33)
3 months 2 days ago

I don't explain-I explore.

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5 months 5 days ago

The days .... come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

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Works and Days
3 months 3 weeks ago

And because the condition of Man, (as hath been declared in the precedent Chapter) is a condition of Warre of every one against everyone; in which case every one is governed by his own Reason; and there is nothing he can make use of, that may not be a help unto him, in preserving his life against his enemyes; It followeth, that in such a condition, every man has a Right to every thing; even to one anothers body.

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The First Part, Chapter 14, p. 64
3 months 1 week ago

It is not my aim to surprise or shock you - but the simplest way I can summarize is to say that there are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until - in a visible future - the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied.

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Newell & Simon (1958), quoted in AI, by Daniel Crevier
5 months 2 weeks ago

The mind itself, its love [of itself] and its knowledge [of itself] are a kind of trinity.

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(Cambridge: 2002), Book 9, Chapter 4, Section 4, p. 27
4 months 5 days ago

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.

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5 months 4 days ago

A man, an adult, is precisely what [Aeneas] is: Achilles had been little more than a passionate boy.

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A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), Chapter 6: "Virgil and the Subject of Secondary Epic"
3 months 2 weeks ago

Jung fiercely resented the implication that he was a hypocritical, self-seeking Judas, a 'rat'. Yet there was just enough truth in it to strike home. He was undoubtedly a man who liked his own way, no matter what the cost to others.

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p. 72
5 months 5 days ago

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. 6. Nature, Addresses and Lectures.

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The American Scholar
5 months 1 week ago

It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.

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5 months 4 days ago

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.

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Do What You Will, 1929
1 month 5 days ago

How can you reach the womb of the Abyss to make it fruitful? This cannot be expressed, cannot be narrowed into words, cannot be subjected to laws; every man is completely free and has his own special liberation. No form of instruction exists, no Savior exists to open up the road. No road exists to be opened.

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5 months 5 days ago

The governors of the world believe, and have always believed, that virtue can only be taught by teaching falsehood, and that any man who knew the truth would be wicked. I disbelieve this, absolutely and entirely. I believe that love of truth is the basis of all real virtue, and that virtues based upon lies can only do harm.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Joe Hume talked to me very earnestly about the necessity of an union of Liberals. He said much about Ballot and the Franchise. I told him that I could easily come to some compromise with him and his friends on these matters, but that there were other questions about which I feared that there was an irreconcileable difference, particularly the vital question of national defence. He seemed quite confounded, and had absolutely nothing to say. I am fully determined to make them eat their words on that point, or to have no political connection with them.

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Journal entry (November 1852), quoted in George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Volume II (1876), p. 368
2 months 1 week ago

Talk of secularism is meaningful when it refers to the weakness of traditional religious belief or the lack of power of churches and other religious bodies. That is what is meant when we say Britain is a more secular country than the United States, and in this sense secularism is an achievable condition. But if it means a type of society in which religion is absent, secularism is a kind of contradiction, for it is defined by what it excludes. Post-Christian secular societies are formed by the beliefs they reject, whereas a society that had truly left Christianity behind would lack the concepts that shaped secular thought.

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Post-Apocalypse: After Secularism (pp. 267-8)
5 months 3 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
4 months 2 days ago

Privilege is a regulation rendering a few men, and those only, by the accident of their birth, eligible to certain situations. It kills all liberal ambition in the rest of mankind, by opposing to it an apparently insurmountable bar. It diminishes it in the favored class itself, by showing them the principal qualification as indefeasibly theirs. Privilege entitles a favored few to engross to themselves gratifications which the system of the universe left at large to all her sons; it puts into the hands of those few the means of oppression against the rest of their species; it fill them witth vain-glory, and affords them every incitement to insolence and a lofty disregard to the feeling and interests of others.

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Book V, Chapter 11, "Moral Effects of Aristocracy"
3 months 2 weeks ago

It is not enough to accept a concept of order and live by it; that is cowardice, and such cowardice cannot result from freedom. Chaos must be faced. Real order must be preceded by a descent into chaos.

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Chapter Three, The Romantic Outsider
5 months 2 weeks ago

It is not the pleasure of curiosity, nor the quiet of resolution, nor the raising of the spirit, nor victory of wit, nor faculty of speech that are the true ends of knowledge, but it is a restitution and reinvesting, in great part, of man to the sovereignty and power, for whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names, he shall again command them.

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Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature (ca. 1603), in Works, Vol. I, p. 83; The Works of Francis Bacon (1819), Vol. 2, p. 133
5 months 2 weeks ago

Christ is not valued at all unless He be valued above all.

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p. 395
6 months 2 days ago

For it is the chief characteristic of the religion of science, that it works, and that such curses as that of Aporat's are really deadly.

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6 months 5 days ago

The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.

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5 months 5 days ago

The fact that a belief has a good moral effect upon a man is no evidence whatsoever in favor of its truth.

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BBC Radio Debate on the Existence of God, Russell vs. Copleston, 1948
4 months 1 day ago

There are questions which, once approached, either isolate you or kill you outright.

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