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6 months 2 weeks ago

To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs.

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(uses, institutions) § 199
5 months 1 day ago

The principle of bounded rationality is the capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world - or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality.

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p. 198.
3 months 1 week ago

I do not trust my eyes to tell me what a man is: I have a better and more trustworthy light by which I can distinguish what is true from what is false: let the mind find out what is good for the mind.

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De Vita Beata (On the Happy Life): cap. 2, line 2 Alternate translation: I do not distinguish by the eye, but by the mind, which is the proper judge of the man. (translator unknown).
5 months 3 weeks ago

There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.

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As quoted in Dictionary of Foreign Quotations (1980) by Mary Collison, Robert L. Collison, p. 235
3 months 2 days ago

The Phoenicians who from their sagacity and learning possess great insight into things divine, hold the doctrine that this universally diffused radiance is a part of the "Soul of the Stars." This opinion is consistent with sound reason: if we consider the light that is without body, we shall perceive that of such light the source cannot be a body, but rather the simple action of a mind, which spreads itself by means of illumination as far as its proper seat; to which the middle region of the heavens is contiguous, from which place it shines forth with all its vigour and fills the heavenly orbs, illuminating at the same time the whole universe with its divine and pure radiance.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.

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"The Precession of Simulacra," p. 12
6 months 3 weeks ago

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past. Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses. We should never know how to adjust means to ends, or to employ our natural powers in the production of any effect. There would be an end at once of all action, as well as of the chief part of speculation. Variant (perhaps a paraphrase of this passage): It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The ethical life... is maintained in being by a common culture, which also upholds the togetherness of society... Unlike the modern youth culture, a common culture sanctifies the adult state, to which it offers rites of passage.

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"Idle Hands" (p. 127)
7 months 2 weeks ago

An observer studying the Solar system dispassionately, and finding himself capable of bringing the four giant planets to his notice, could reasonably say that the Solar system consisted of one star, four planets, and some traces of debris.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Genuine religion is not about speculating about God or the soul or about what happened in the past or will happen in the future; it cares only about one thing-finding out exactly what should or should not be done in this lifetime.

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p. 3
5 months 3 weeks ago

Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new impositions, any bungler can add to the old.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The Palaetiological Sciences point backwards with lines which are broken, but which all converge to the 'same' invisible point: and this point is the Origin of the Moral and Spiritual, as well as of the natural world.

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6 months 3 weeks 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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6 months 2 weeks ago

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.

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p. 42e
6 months 3 weeks ago

My dear Wormwood, I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you suppose that argument was the way to keep him out of the enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier.

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Letter I
2 months 2 weeks ago

Self-control and resistance to distractions. Optimism in adversity-especially illness.

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(Hays translation) I, 15
2 months 3 weeks ago

If God holds all mankind guilty for the sin of Adam, if he has visited upon the innocent the punishment of the guilty, if he is to torture any single soul for ever, then it is wrong to worship him.

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[Lectures and essays (1879), vol. 2, p. 224]
6 months 2 weeks ago

Technology is in its essence something that human beings cannot master of their own accord.

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5 months 6 days ago

Males learn to lie as a way of obtaining power, and females not only do the same but they also lie to pretend powerlessness.

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Chapter 3, pg. 59
6 months 3 weeks ago

Similarly, individual acts of aristocratic generosity do not eliminate pauperism; they perpetuate it.

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p. 219
5 months 2 weeks ago

By MANNERS, I mean not here Decency of behaviour; as how one man should salute another, or how a man should wash his mouth, or pick his teeth before company, and such other points of the Small Morals; But those qualities of mankind that concern their living together in Peace and Unity. To which end we are to consider that the Felicity of this life consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such Finis ultimus (utmost aim) nor Summum Bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old Moral Philosophers. Nor can a man any more live whose desires are at an end than he whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand.

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The First Part, Chapter 11, p. 47
6 months 3 weeks ago

For in every country of the world, I believe, the avarice and injustice of princes and sovereign states, abusing the confidence of their subjects, have by degrees diminished the real quantity of metal, which had been originally contained in their coins.

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Chapter IV, p. 34.
7 months 1 week ago

I am a Roman citizen.

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Against Verres [In Verrem], part 2, book 5, section 57; reported in Cicero, The Verrine Orations, trans. L. H. G. Greenwood (1935), vol. 2, p. 629
2 months 2 weeks ago

The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.

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II, 14
6 months 3 weeks ago

What's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose.

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Introduction, p. 37.
11 months 2 weeks ago

No subgroup, race, nationalism, religious group, gender based groups or other identity essence based groups will ever be more important than, and should never ethically take precedence over the existence based universal group, the human group. Universal identity takes precedence over subgroup identity, and when we are forced to subgroup in reaction to injustice, that is the only ethical subgroup.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing exists! Neither life nor death. I watch mind and matter hunting each other like two nonexistent erotic phantasms - merging, begetting, disappearing - and I say: "This is what I want!" I know now: I do not hope for anything. I do not fear anything, I have freed myself from both the mind and the heart, I have mounted much higher, I am free. This is what I want. I want nothing more. I have been seeking freedom.

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This passage was used for Kazantzakis' epitaph: "Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα, δε φοβούμαι τίποτα, είμαι λεύτερος." I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.
7 months ago

I will first discuss images according to the Law of Moses, and then according to the gospel. And I say at the outset that according to the Law of Moses no other images are forbidden than an image of God which one worships. A crucifix, on the other hand, or any other holy image is not forbidden. Heigh now! you breakers of images, I defy you to prove the opposite!

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pp. 85-86
6 months 3 weeks ago

If there is equality, it is in His love, not in us.

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6 months 1 week ago

One common strategy on which we should all be able to agree is to take steps to reduce the risk of human extinction when those steps are also highly effective in benefiting existing sentient beings. For example, eliminating or decreasing the consumption of animal products will benefit animals, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and lessen the chances of a pandemic resulting from a virus evolving among the animals crowded into today's factory farms, which are an ideal breeding ground for viruses. That therefore looks like a high-priority strategy.

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Chapter 15: Preventing Human Extinction (p. 177)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

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Autobiography (1821), reprinted in Basic Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Philip S. Foner, New York: Wiley Book Company (1944} p. 464
2 months 3 weeks ago

People who live at the lower ends of watersheds cannot be isolationists - or not for long. Pretty soon they will notice that water flows, and that will set them to thinking about the people upstream who either do or do not send down their silt and pollutants and garbage. Thinking about the people upstream out to cause further thinking about the people downstream. Such pondering on the facts of gravity and the fluidity of water shows us that the golden rule speaks to a condition of absolute interdependency and obligation. People who live on rivers - or, in fact, anywhere in a watershed - might rephrase the rule in this way: Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.

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3 months 1 week ago

At bottom, as was said above, we are to consider Luther as a Prophet Idol-breaker; a bringer-back of men to reality. It is the function of great men and teachers.

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3 months 1 day ago

The Chinese believe that when there are too many policemen, there can be no individual liberty, when there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice, and when there are too many soldiers, there can be no peace.

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Between Tears And Laughter (1943), p. 71.
7 months 1 week ago

If you would be a good reader, read; if a writer, write.

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Book II, ch. 18, 1.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Men never respect what they have made themselves. This is why an elective king never possesses the moral power of a hereditary sovereign, because he is not noble enough, that is to say he does not possess that kind of greatness independent of men and that is the work of time.

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p. 72
2 months 2 weeks ago

I suppose I must be out of sorts to feel everything so deeply. Sometimes, however, it seems to me that i am not really a human being at all, but like a bird or a beast in human form. I feel so much more at home even in a scrap of garden like the one here, and still more in the meadows when the grass is humming with bees than - at one of the our party congresses.

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Prison Letter, (May 12, 1917), Rosa Luxemburg Speaks
5 months 3 weeks ago

Every presentation of philosophy, whether oral or written, is to be taken and can only be taken in the sense of a means. Every system is only an expression or image of reason, and hence only an object of reason, an object which reason-a living power that procreates itself in new thinking beings-distinguishes from itself and posits as an object of criticism. Every system that is not recognized and appropriated as just a means, limits and warps the mind for it sets up the indirect and formal thought in the place of the direct, original and material thought.

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Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 67
5 months 1 week ago

The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.

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Proposition 4
4 months 1 day ago

Negative-utilitarianism is only one particular denomination of a broad church to which the reader may well in any case not subscribe. Fortunately, the program can be defended on grounds that utilitarians of all stripes can agree on. So a defence will be mounted against critics of the theory and application of a utilitarian ethic in general. For in practice the most potent and effective means of curing unpleasantness is to ensure that a defining aspect of future states of mind is their permeation with the molecular chemistry of ecstasy: both genetically precoded and pharmacologically fine-tuned. Orthodox utilitarians will doubtless find the cornucopian abundance of bliss this strategy delivers is itself an extra source of moral value. Future generations of native ecstatics are unlikely to disagree.

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2.7 Why Be Negative?
6 months 3 weeks ago

I don't deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people - all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumors. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

People say law but they mean wealth.

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1841
5 months 2 weeks ago

The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Every commodity is compelled to chose some other commodity for its equivalent.

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Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 3, pg. 65.
6 months 3 weeks ago

Free in this world as the birds in the air, disengaged from every kind of chains, those who have practiced the Yoga gather in Brahmin the certain fruit of their works. Depend upon it; rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully. This Yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he heard wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him and he goes, he acts as animating original matter. To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a Yogi.

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Letter to H. G. O. Blake, November 20, 1849

He who is not sure of his memory, should not undertake the trade of lying. 

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Book I, Ch. 9
3 months 1 week ago

He not only overflowed with learning but stood in the slops.

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On Macaulay; reported in Hesketh Pearson, The Smith of Smiths (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1934), p. 180
2 months 3 weeks ago

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

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Letter to William Charles Jarvis

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