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1 month 1 week ago

If melodiously piping flutes sprang from the olive, would you doubt that a knowledge of flute-playing resided in the olive? And what if plane trees bore harps which gave forth rhythmical sounds? Clearly you would think in the same way that the art of music was possessed by plane trees. Why, then, seeing that the universe gives birth to beings that are animate and wise, should it not be considered animate and wise itself?

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As quoted in De Natura Deorum by Cicero, ii. 8.
2 months 1 day ago

In public, as well as in private expences, great wealth may, perhaps, frequently be admitted as an apology for great folly.

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Chapter V, p. 563.
1 month 1 day ago

Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition. The experimental habit of mind is a difficult one for most people to maintain; indeed, the science of one generation has already become the tradition of the next...

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The Scientific Outlook, 1931
1 month 3 weeks ago

The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

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Experience
1 month 3 weeks ago

Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child's small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.

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Lecture IX, "Conversion"
2 months 1 day ago

Speaking generally, he holds dominion, to whom are entrusted by common consent affairs of state - such as the laying down, interpretation, and abrogation of laws, the fortification of cities, deciding on war and peace, &c. But if this charge belong to a council, composed of the general multitude, then the dominion is called a democracy; if the council be composed of certain chosen persons, then it is an aristocracy ; and, if, lastly, the care of affairs of state, and, consequently, the dominion rest with one man, then it has the name of monarchy.

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Ch. 2, Of Natural Right
1 month 3 weeks ago

The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments-of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue-are complete sceptics in religion...

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(p. 45)
1 month 2 weeks ago

It is no more evident that democratic institutions are to be measured by the sort of person they create than that they are to be measured against divine commands. ... Even if the typical character types of liberal democracies are bland, calculating, petty, and unheroic, the prevalence of such people may be a reasonable price to pay for political freedom.

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1 week 6 days ago

The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.

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p. 151
2 months 3 weeks ago

Once you've dissected a joke, you're about where you are when you've dissected a frog. It's dead. Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984), p. 49; comparable to "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."

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Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.

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S. 41
2 months 1 week ago

Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet. As something is being passed around it comes to you; stretch out your hand, take a portion of it politely. It passes on; do not detain it. Or it has not come to you yet; do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you. So act toward children, so toward a wife, so toward office, so toward wealth.

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(15).
1 month 4 weeks ago

The hopes which inspire communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount, but they are held as fanatically and are as likely to do as much harm.

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Part I, The Present Condition of Russia, Ch. 1: What Is Hoped From Bolshevism

Those who have racked their brains to discover new proofs have perhaps been induced to do so by a compulsion they could not quite explain to themselves. Instead of giving us their new proofs they should have explained to us the motivation that constrained them to search for them.

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L24
2 weeks 3 days ago

Beyond all conscious lying and falsifying, there is a deeper "organic mendacity." Here the falsification is not formed in consciousness, but at the same stage of the mental process as the impressions and value feelings themselves: on the road of experience into consciousness. There is "organic mendacity" whenever a man's mind admits only those impressions which serve his "interest" or his instinctive attitude. Already in the process of mental reproduction and recollection, the contents of his experience are modified in this direction. He who is "mendacious" has no need to lie! In his case, the automatic process of forming recollections, impressions, and feelings is involuntarily slanted, so that conscious falsification becomes unnecessary.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 77-78
1 month 4 weeks ago

Philosophy of religion ... really amounts to ... philosophizing on certain favorite assumptions that are not confirmed at all.

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E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 143
1 month 3 weeks ago

Courage, not cleverness; not even inspiration, is the grain of mustard that grows up to be a great tree.

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p. 44e
2 months 5 days ago

The will is not free to strive toward whatever is declared good.

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Thesis 10
3 weeks 2 days ago

Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

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"The Tragic", p. 217. From The Dial (April 1844) p. 515
1 month 4 weeks ago

It is generally admitted that most grown-up people, however regrettably, will try to have a good time.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.

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p. 491
1 week 2 days ago

The "dreams of youth" have become a proverb. That organisations, early rich, fall far short of their promise has been repeated to satiety. But is it extraordinary that it should be so? For do we ever utilise this heroism? Look how it lives upon itself and perishes for lack of food. We do not know what to do with it. We had rather that it should not be there. Often we laugh at it. Always we find it troublesome. Look at the poverty of our life! Can we expect anything else but poor creatures to come out of it?

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1 month 2 days ago

The President ... may err ... Congress may decide amiss ... But if the Supreme Court is ever composed of imprudent or bad men, the Union may be plunged into anarchy or civil war.

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Chapter XVIII.
1 month 2 weeks ago

States are doomed when they are unable to distinguish good men from bad.

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§ 5
2 weeks 5 days ago

Serious reflexion about one's own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.)

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Ch. 8, p. 119
1 month 3 weeks ago

Absurdity destroys the and of the enumeration by making impossible the in where the things enumerated would be divided up.

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Preface
1 week 3 days ago

The principle of brotherhood expounded by the agitator of Nazareth preserved the germ of life, of truth and justice, so long as it was the beacon light of the few. The moment the majority seized upon it, that great principle became a shibboleth and harbinger of blood and fire, spreading suffering and disaster. The attack on the omnipotence of Rome was like a sunrise amid the darkness of the night, only so long as it was made by the colossal figures of a Huss, a Calvin, or a Luther. Yet when the mass joined in the procession against the Catholic monster, it was no less cruel, no less bloodthirsty than its enemy. Woe to the heretics, to the minority, who would not bow to its dicta. After infinite zeal, endurance, and sacrifice, the human mind is at last free from the religious phantom; the minority has gone on in pursuit of new conquests, and the majority is lagging behind, handicapped by truth grown false with age.

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3 weeks 6 days ago

When he entered into the Whig party, he did not conceive that they pretended to any discoveries. They did not affect to be better Whigs, than those were who lived in the days in which principle was put to the test. Some of the Whigs of those days were then living. They were what the Whigs had been at the Revolution; what they had been during the reign of queen Anne; what they had been at the accession of the present royal family.

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p. 409
1 month 4 days ago

Our philosophy... reduceth to a single origin and relateth to a single end, and maketh contraries to coincide so that there is one primal foundation both of origin and of end. From this coincidence of contraries, we deduce that ultimately it is divinely true that contraries are within contraries; wherefore it is not difficult to compass the knowledge that each thing is within every other.

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As translated by Dorothea Waley Singer
2 months 4 weeks ago

Alas, time comes and time goes, it subtracts little by little; then it deprives a person of a good, the loss of which he indeed feels, and his pain is great. Alas, and he does not discover that long ago it has already taken away from him the most important thing of all-the capacity to make a resolution-and it has made him so familiar with this condition that there is no consternation over it, the last thing that could help gain new power for renewed resolution!

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Clearly when the liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another.

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Chapter IV, Section 32, p. 203
3 weeks 2 days ago

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

In... "The Education of Children"... Plutarch gives an anecdote of Theocritus, a sophist, as an example of athuroglossos... he is... "a giant in impudence"... strong not because of his reason, or his rhetorical ability... or his ability to pronounce the truth, but only because he is arrogant. ...His fourth trait is... "putting his confidence in bluster." He is confident in thorubos... the noise made by a strong voice, by a scream, a clamor, or uproar. ...The final characteristic ...his confidence in ..."ignorant outspokenness..." ... it lacks mathesis ...-learning or wisdom.

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Ref: Plutarch, "The Education of Children", Moralia (1927) Vol. 1, Tr. Frank Cole Babbit, p. 4, The Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press.
1 month 3 weeks ago

The mere word 'design' by itself has no consequences and explains nothing. It is the barrenest of principles. The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer - and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.

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Lecture III, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered
1 week 6 days ago

It appears that liberty is bound up with imperfection, with a right to imperfection. Socialism leads to the same type of authoritarian state as Theocracy. ... One must choose: either Socialism or liberty of spirit, the liberty of man's conscience. ... Socialism uses a "sacred" authority and establishes a "sacred" society in which there is no place for the "lay," for the free, for choice, for the unrestrained activity of human forces.

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pp. 188-189
3 weeks 3 days ago

By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward.

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As quoted in The Explorers (1996) by Paolo Novaresio ISBN 1-55670-495-X
1 month 3 weeks ago

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances...Strong men believe in cause and effect.

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Worship
1 month 4 days ago

We indeed, who are beings of finite powers, are forced to make use of instruments. And the use of an instrument sheweth the agent to be limited by rules of another's prescription, and that he cannot obtain his end but in such a way, and by such conditions. Whence it seems a clear consequence, that the supreme unlimited agent useth no tool or instrument at all. The will of an Omnipotent Spirit is no sooner exerted than executed, without the application of means; which, if they are employed by inferior agents, it is not upon account of any real efficacy that is in them, or necessary aptitude to produce any effect, but merely in compliance with the laws of nature, or those conditions prescribed to them by the First Cause, who is Himself above all limitation or prescription whatsoever.

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Philonous to Hylas. The Second Dialogue
2 months 2 weeks ago

He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

In justice as fairness society is interpreted as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage.

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Chapter II, Section 14, pg. 84
2 months 4 weeks ago

People are scarcely aware that it is a slavery they are creating; they forget this in their zeal to make people free by overthrowing dominions. They are scarcely aware that it is slavery; how could it be possible to be a slave in relation to equals?

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Apart from the fact there is no normal standard of health, nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful by nature. And further, man, by the very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith - of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

If any one hearken with understanding to these sayings of mine many a deed worthy of a good man shall he perform and many a foolish deed be spared.

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2 months 5 days ago

We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.

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Book I, Ch. 25

We are in a logic of simulation, which no longer has anything to do with a logic of facts and an order of reason. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all the models based on the merest fact-the models come first, their circulation, orbital like that of the bomb, constitutes the genuine magnetic field of the event. The facts no longer have a specific trajectory, they are born at the intersection of models, a single fact can be engendered by all the models at once.

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"The Precession of Simulacra," pp. 16-17
2 weeks 5 days ago

If I compare arithmetic with a tree that unfolds upward into a multitude of techniques and theorems while its root drives into the depths, then it seems to me that the impetus of the root.

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Gottlob Frege, Montgomery Furth (1964). The Basic Laws of Arithmetic: Exposition of the System. p. 10
3 weeks 6 days ago

I think I can hardly overrate the malignity of the principles of Protestant ascendancy, as they affect Ireland; or of Indianism, as they affect these countries, and as they affect Asia; or of Jacobinism, as they affect all Europe, and the state of human society itself. The last is the greatest evil.

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Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (26 May 1795), quoted in R. B. McDowell (ed.)

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