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6 months 1 week ago

With an ill-famed man form no connection.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late, which is in due time for thee. There is one light of the sun, though it is interrupted by walls, mountains and infinite other things. There is one common substance, though it is distributed among countless bodies which have their several qualities. There is one soul, though it is distributed among several natures and individual limitations. There is one intelligent soul, though it seems to be divided.

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XII, 30
7 months 2 weeks ago

The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.

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6 months 1 week ago

It has no sense and cannot just unless it comes to terms with death. Mine as (well as) that of the other. Between life and death, then, this is indeed the place of a sententious injunction that always feigns to speak the just.

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Exordium
6 months 2 weeks ago

I doubt not, but from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out.

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Book IV, Ch. 3, sec. 18
3 months 1 week ago

Unless some Hero-worship, in its new appropriate form, can return, this world does not promise to be very habitable long.

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5 months 1 week ago

Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?'"

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Tales of the Hasidim (1947), 1991 Ebook edition, p.251, as quoted in Jewish Currents.
6 months 1 week ago

He was seized and dragged off to King Philip, and being asked who he was, replied, "A spy upon your insatiable greed."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 43. Cf. Plutarch, Moralia, 70CD.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Everything you do reverberates throughout a thousand destinies. As you walk, you cut open and create that river bed into which the stream of your descendants shall enter and flow.

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3 months 3 days ago

No man ought to glory except in that which is his own.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.

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(p. 199)
5 months 1 day ago

Self-expression is impossible in relation with other men; their self-expression interferes with it. The greatest heights of self-expression in poetry, music, painting - are achieved by men who are supremely alone.

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Chapter Eight, The Outsider as a Visionary
2 months 2 weeks ago

Terms must be constructed and appropriated so as to be fitted to enunciate simply and clearly true general propositions.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. The foe long since in silence slept; Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; And Time the ruined bridge has swept Down the dark stream which seaward creeps. On this green bank, by this soft stream, We set to-day a votive stone; That memory may their deed redeem, When, like our sires, our sons are gone. Spirit, that made those heroes dare, To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee.

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Concord Hymn, 1837
4 months 3 weeks 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
5 months 2 weeks ago

So far as it has gone, it probably is the most pure and defecated publick good which ever has been conferred on mankind.

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p. 463 On the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791
5 months 1 day ago

My life - I had lived in its heights and its depths, in bitter sorrow and ecstatic joy, in black despair and fervent hope. I had drunk the cup to the last drop. I had lived my life. Would I had the gift to paint the life I had lived!

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chapter 56
2 months 3 weeks ago

In the same manner therefore as we have laid it down that the Sun holds the supremacy in the Intelligible world, having round about his own being, in one species, a vast multitude of gods (supposing him to have the same in the Sensible world), all of which move along their everlasting and most felicitous course in a circle, so do we prove him to be Leader and Lord, imparting to and filling the whole heaven, as he does, with his own splendour, likewise with infinite other blessings that be invisible to us: whilst the benefits commenced by the other deities are brought to perfection by him; nay, more, before this, these gods themselves were rendered perfect through his spontaneous and divine operation.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

I quite understand the principle of confining employment as far as possible to the British without regard for efficiency. I think, however, that the Ministry is not applying the principle sufficiently widely. I know many Englishmen who have married foreigners, and many English potential wives who are out of a job. Would not a year be long enough to train an English wife to replace the existing foreign one in such cases?

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Enclosed reply to the Ministry of Labour, in defense of A. S. Neill (who declined to send it), 27 January, 1931
10 months 2 weeks ago

Anybody can become angry, that is easy, but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody's power and it is not easy.

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5 months 1 day ago

Man is as much a slave to his immediate surroundings now as he was when he lived in tree-huts. Give him the highest, the most exciting thoughts about man's place in the universe, the meaning of history; they can all be snuffed out in a moment if he wants his dinner, or feels irritated by a child squalling on a bus. He is bound by pettiness.

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Chapter Two, World Without Values
4 months 3 weeks ago

The first consequence of the principle of bounded rationality is that the intended rationality of an actor requires him to construct a simplified model of the real situation in order to deal with it. He behaves rationally with respect to this model, and such behavior is not even approximately optimal with respect to the real world. To predict his behavior we must understand the way in which this simplified model is constructed, and its construction will certainly be related to his psychological properties as a perceiving, thinking, and learning animal.

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p. 198; Cited in P. Slovic (1972, p. 2).
7 months 1 week ago

Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue. 

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Variant: Someone who is a clever speaker and maintains a 'too-smiley' face is seldom considered a humane person.
5 months 2 weeks ago

To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

My method is vertical rather than horizontal so the scenery does not change but the texture does.

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Letter to The Listener October 1971, Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 318
7 months 2 weeks ago
This is the mistake which I seem to make eternally, that I imagine the sufferings of others as far greater than they really are. Ever since my childhood, the proposition, my greatest dangers lie in pity, has been confirmed again and again.
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6 months 2 weeks ago

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 21, § 255
5 months 2 weeks ago

Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.

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6 months 1 week ago

My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have ... "an ambition of transcendence."

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Introduction to Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume I (1991).
4 months 1 day ago

Instead of water belonging to millions of local communities, water too is to be controlled by five or six global water giants. These are recipes that use economic systems to appropriate for the few the base of survival of the majority.

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5 months 1 day ago

Today, tattoos lack symbolic power. All they do is point toward the uniqueness of the bearer. The body is neither a ritual stage nor a surface of projection; rather, it is an advertising space.

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5 months 1 day ago

On the whole, the scientist is better off if he collects his facts by accident, little by little, so he can study them before he tries to fit them into a jigsaw puzzle, This is how the late Tom Lethbridge came to arrive at his theories about other dimensions of reality. It is also how Guy Lyon Playfair came to develop his own theories about the nature of the poltergeist.

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p. 196
6 months 2 weeks ago

The presence of a thought is like the presence of a lover.

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5 months 1 day ago

The case is a good example of what Van Vogt came to call "the violent man" or the "Right Man." He is a man driven by a manic need for self-esteem - to feel that he is a "somebody." He is obsessed by the question of "losing face," so will never, under any circumstances, admit that he might be in the wrong.

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p. 211
7 months 2 weeks ago

But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

I need not tell you, what complaints the more candid and judicious of the Chymists themselves are wont to make of those boasters, that confidently pretend, that they have extracted the salt or sulphur of quicksilver, when they have disguised it by additaments, wherewith it resembles the concretes, whose names are given it; whereas by a skilful and rigid examen, it may be easily enough stripped of its disguises, and made to appear again in the pristine form of running mercury. The pretended salts and sulphurs being so far from being elementary parts extracted out of the body of mercury, that they are rather... de-compound bodies, made up of the whole metal and the menstruum, or other additaments employed to disguise it.

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3 months 1 week ago

Marx sees Epicurus as a destroyer of the Greek myths and as a philosopher bringing to light the break-up of a tribal community. His system destroyed the visible heaven of the ancients as a keystone of political and religious life. Marx allies himself, so to speak, with Epicurean atheism, which he regards at this stage as a challenge by the intellectual élite to the cohorts of common sense. 'As long as a single drop of blood pulses in her world-conquering and totally free heart, philosophy will continually shout at her opponents the cry of Epicurus: "Impiety does not consist in destroying the gods of the crowd but rather in ascribing to the gods the ideas of the crowd."'

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(pp. 102-3)
5 months 1 day ago

The intellectual's spirit as an amateur can enter and transform the merely professional routine most of us go through into something much more lively and radical; instead of doing what one is supposed to do one can ask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnect with a personal project and original thoughts.

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p. 83
5 months 4 days ago

The uniting of Orthodoxy with state absolutism came about on the soil of a non-belief in the Divineness of the earth, in the earthly future of mankind; Orthodoxy gave away the earth into the hands of the state because of its own non-belief in man and mankind, because of its nihilistic attitude towards the world. Orthodoxy does not believe in the religious ordering of human life upon the earth, and it compensates for its own hopeless pessimism by a call for the forceful ordering of it by state authority.

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Nihilism On A Religious Soil
2 months 4 weeks ago

Living, loving, being natural or sincere-all these are spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen "of themselves" like digesting food or growing hair. As soon as they are forced they acquire that unnatural, contrived, and phony atmosphere which everyone deplores-weak and scentless like forced flowers and tasteless like forced fruit. Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith-in life, in other people, and in oneself-is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.

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p. 56
4 months 1 week ago

Where are these rational practices to be taught and acquired? Not within the four walls of a bare building, in which formality predominates... But in the nursery, play-ground, fields, gardens, workshops, manufactures, museums and class-rooms. ...The facts collected from all these sources will be concentrated, explained, discussed, made obvious to all, and shown in their direct application to practice in all the business of life.

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3rd Part
4 months 2 weeks ago

You should hammer your iron when it is glowing hot.

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Maxim 262

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