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John Locke
John Locke
2 months 1 week ago
A criminal who, having renounced reason...

A criminal who, having renounced reason ... hath, by the unjust violence and slaughter he hath committed upon one, declared war against all mankind, and therefore may be destroyed as a lion or tyger, one of those wild savage beasts with whom men can have no society nor security. And upon this is grounded the great law of Nature, "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed."

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Second Treatise of Civil Government, Ch. II, sec. 11
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
2 months 1 week ago
Boundless compassion for all living beings...

Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on no man's rights; he will rather have regard for every one, forgive every one, help every one as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness. ... In former times the English plays used to finish with a petition for the King. The old Indian dramas close with these words: "May all living beings be delivered from pain." Tastes differ; but in my opinion there is no more beautiful prayer than this.

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Part III, Ch. VIII, 4, pp. 213-214 First line often paraphrased as: Compassion is the basis of all morality.
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
3 weeks 1 day ago
Rationalism is an adventure in the...

Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.

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Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 3.
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
1 month 4 weeks ago
The friendship of one wise man...

The friendship of one wise man is better than the friendship of a host of fools.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
2 months 1 week ago
We are in hell and I...

We are in hell and I will have my turn!

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Inès warns Garcin and Estelle not to make love in her presence, Act 1, sc. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
3 weeks ago
It must be borne in mind...

It must be borne in mind that it is through the channel of the child that the development of the mature man must go, and that the present ideas of the educating or training of the latter in the school and the family - even the family of the liberal or radical - are such as to stifle the natural growth of the child. Every institution of our day, the family, the State, our moral codes, sees in every strong, beautiful, uncompromising personality a deadly enemy; therefore every effort is being made to cramp human emotion and originality of thought in the individual into a straight-jacket from its earliest infancy; or to shape every human being according to one pattern; not into a well-rounded individuality, but into a patient work slave, professional automaton, tax-paying citizen, or righteous moralist.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
3 weeks 1 day ago
The English never abolish anything. They...

The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage.

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Ch. 36, January 19, 1945.
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
6 days ago
All of the new media have...

All of the new media have enriched our perceptions of language and older media. They are to the man-made environment what species are to biology.

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(p. 84)
Philosophical Maxims
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
2 months 2 weeks ago
It is easier for the prince...

It is easier for the prince to make friends of those men who were contented under the former government, and are therefore his enemies, than of those who, being discontented with it, were favourable to him and encouraged him to seize it. 

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Ch. 20
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
3 weeks ago
My life - I had lived...

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
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
Just now
It's a waste of energy...
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Main Content / General
Plato
Plato
3 months 6 days ago
As you hope to prove your...

As you hope to prove your own great value to the state, and having proved it, to attain at once to absolute power, so do I indulge a hope that I shall be the supreme power over you, if I am able to prove my own great value to you. Socrates speaking to Alcibiades

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 weeks 3 days ago
An imaginary perfection is automatically at...

An imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it - neither higher nor lower.

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p. 240
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month 1 week ago
Jacobinism is the revolt of the...

Jacobinism is the revolt of the enterprising talents of a country against its property.

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No. 1
Philosophical Maxims
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
2 months 2 weeks ago
It is not titles that make...

It is not titles that make men illustrious, but men who make titles illustrious.

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Book 3, Ch. 38
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 4 days ago
I think of so many people...

I think of so many people who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 1 week ago
The establishment of any new manufacture,...

The establishment of any new manufacture, of any new branch of commerce, or any new practice in agriculture, is always a speculation, from which the projector promises himself extraordinary profits. These profits sometimes are very great, and sometimes, more frequently, perhaps, they are quite otherwise; but in general they bear no regular proportion to those of other older trades in the neighbourhood. If the project succeeds, they are commonly at first very high. When the trade or practice becomes thoroughly established and well known, the competition reduces them to the level of other trades.

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Chapter X, Part I, p. 136 (tendency of the rate of profit to fall).
Philosophical Maxims
Peter Singer
Peter Singer
1 month 4 weeks ago
I never believed in a God....

I never believed in a God. [...] There may have been times when I wondered if there might be a God, but it always seemed to me wildly implausible that a God worth worshipping could allow the Holocaust to occur.

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From an interview, as cited by Dan Goldberg "Peter Singer: is he really the most dangerous man in the world?", The Jewish Chronicle
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
1 month 1 week ago
There are two things which a...

There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult-to begin a war and to end it.

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Book Three, Chapter XXII.
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
2 months 1 week ago
A person who already displays ......

A person who already displays ... cruelty to animals is also no less hardened towards men. We can already know the human heart, even in regard to animals.

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Part II, p. 212
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
3 months 1 week ago
Deep within every human being there...

Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
1 month 4 weeks ago
Complaints about the social irresponsibility of...

Complaints about the social irresponsibility of the intellectual typically concern the intellectual's tendency to marginalize herself, to move out from one community by interior identification of herself with some other community-for example, another country or historical period. ... It is not clear that those who thus marginalize themselves can be criticized for social irresponsibility. One cannot be irresponsible toward a community of which one does not think of oneself as a member. Otherwise runaway slaves and tunnelers under the Berlin Wall would be irresponsible.

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"Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism," Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: 1991), p. 197
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
4 weeks 1 day ago
The assurance that we have no...

The assurance that we have no means of answering [final] questions is no valid excuse for callousness towards them. The more deeply should we feel, down to the roots of our being, their pressure and their sting. Whose hunger has ever been [sated] with the knowledge that he could not eat?

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p. 15
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 week 1 day ago
Not only does the action of...

Not only does the action of Governments not deter men from crimes; on the contrary, it increases crime by always disturbing and lowering the moral standard of society. Nor can this be otherwise, since always and everywhere a Government, by its very nature, must put in the place of the highest, eternal, religious law (not written in books but in the hearts of men, and binding on every one) its own unjust, man-made laws, the object of which is neither justice nor the common good of all but various considerations of home and foreign expediency.

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The Meaning of the Russian Revolution (1906), a work about the 1905 Russian Revolution.
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
2 months 1 week ago
For instance, if you have by...

For instance, if you have by a lie hindered a man who is even now planning a murder, you are legally responsible for all the consequences. But if you have strictly adhered to the truth, public justice can find no fault with you, be the unforeseen consequence what it may. It is possible that whilst you have honestly answered Yes to the murderer's question, whether his intended victim is in the house, the latter may have gone out unobserved, and so not have come in the way of the murderer, and the deed therefore have not been done; whereas, if you lied and said he was not in the house, and he had really gone out (though unknown to you) so that the murderer met him as he went, and executed his purpose on him, then you might with justice be accused as the cause of his death. For, if you had spoken the truth as well as you knew it, perhaps the murderer while seeking for his enemy in the house might have been caught by neighbours coming up and the deed been prevented.

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Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
3 months 6 days ago
Neither perception nor true opinion, nor...

Neither perception nor true opinion, nor reason or explanation combined with true opinion could be knowledge. Then our art of midwifery declare to us that all the offspring that have been born are mere wind-eggs and not worth rearing and if you remain barren, you will be less harsh and gentler to your associates, for you will have the wisdom not to think you know that which you do not know.

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Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
4 weeks ago
The inversion of external compulsion into...

The inversion of external compulsion into the compulsion of conscience ... produces the machine-like assiduity and pliable allegiance required by the new rationality.

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p. 34.
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
1 month 1 week ago
I think that democratic communities have...

I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery.

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Book Two, Chapter I.
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
1 month 1 day ago
The pint would call the quart...

The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him.

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p. 60
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
2 months 1 week ago
It was the excess to which...

It was the excess to which imaginary systems of religion had been carried, and the intolerance, persecutions, burnings, and massacres, they occasioned, that first induced certain persons to propagate infidelity; thinking, that upon the whole, that it was better not to believe at all, than to believe a multitude of things and complicated creeds, that occasioned so much mischief in the world. But those days are past, persecution has ceased, and the antidote then set up against it has no longer even the shadow of apology. We profess, and we proclaim in peace, the pure, unmixed, comfortable, and rational belief of a God, as manifested to us in the universe. We do this without any apprehension of that belief being made a cause of persecution as other beliefs have been, or of suffering persecution ourselves. To God, and not to man, are all men to account for their belief.

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A Discourse, &c. &c.
Philosophical Maxims
Cato the Younger
Cato the Younger
1 month 4 weeks ago
I will begin to speak when...

I will begin to speak when I am not going to say what were better left unsaid.

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Quoted by Plutarch, Life of Cato the Younger, 4 Bernadotte Perrin, ed. Plutarch's Lives, Vol. 8, LCL 100 (1919), pp. 247, 361
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
3 weeks 1 day ago
Black women control the world. We...

Black women control the world. We are through being discriminated against.

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Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002) ISBN 0-06-093829-3
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month 1 week ago
Those who have been once intoxicated...

Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look to any thing but power for their relief.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
4 days ago
It is the mark of a...

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in the retrospect. We should have been cut-throats to do otherwise. And there's an end. We ought to know distinctly that we are damned for what we do wrong; but when we have done right, we have only been gentlemen, after all. There is nothing to make a work about.

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"Reflections and Remarks on Human Life", VI: Right and Wrong, published in Works: Letters and Miscellanies of Robert Louis Stevenson -- Sketches, Criticisms, Etc. (1895), p. 628.
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 1 week ago
Classics which at home are drowsily...

Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.

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Voyage to England
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 week 1 day ago
You will die - and it...

You will die - and it will all be over. You will die and find out everything - or cease asking.

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Bk. V, Ch. 1
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
2 months 1 week ago
Every parting gives...

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 26, § 310, as translated by Eric F. J. Payne
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
1 month 1 week ago
If you want to influence him...

If you want to influence him at all, you must do more than merely talk to him ; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will.

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Addresses to the German Nation (1807), Second Address : "The General Nature of the New Education". Chicago and London, The Open Court Publishing Company, 1922, p. 21
Philosophical Maxims
John Searle
John Searle
1 week 4 days ago
The assertion fallacy ... is the...

The assertion fallacy ... is the fallacy of confusing the conditions for the performance of the speech act of assertion with the analysis of the meaning of particular words occurring in certain assertions.

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P. 141.
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 1 week ago
We are told that Christ was...

We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He has disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself.

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Book II, Chapter 4, "The Perfect Penitent"
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
1 week 5 days ago
Yet sometimes vegetables and animals are,...

Yet sometimes vegetables and animals are, by certain epithets or circumstances, extended to other significations; as a Tree, when called the tree of life or of knowledge; and a Beast, when called the old serpent, or worshiped. When a Beast or Man is put for a kingdom, his parts and qualities are put for the analogous parts and qualities of the kingdom; as the head of a Beast, for the great men who precede and govern; the tail for the inferior people, who follow and are governed; the heads, if more than one, for the number of capital parts, or dynasties, or dominions in the kingdom, whether collateral or successive, with respect to the civil government; the horns on any head, for the number of kingdoms in that head, with respect to military power...

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Vol. I, Ch. 2: Of the Prophetic Language
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
2 months 4 weeks ago
How great is the path proper...

How great is the path proper to the Sage! Like overflowing water, it sends forth and nourishes all things, and rises up to the height of heaven. All-complete is its greatness! It embraces the three hundred rules of ceremony, and the three thousand rules of demeanor. It waits for the proper man, and then it is trodden. Hence it is said, "Only by perfect virtue can the perfect path, in all its courses, be made a fact."

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 4 days ago
The notion of nothingness is not...

The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 1 week ago
Capacity for the nobler feelings is...

Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by the mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in existence.

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Ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 1 week ago
Fine manners need the support of...

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

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Behavior
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 1 week ago
My form remains one, though the...

My form remains one, though the matter in it changes continually. I am, in that respect, like a curve in a waterfall.

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Ch. 16: "Miracles of the New Creation"
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 2 weeks ago
The public weal requires that men...

The public weal requires that men should betray and lie and massacre.

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Book III, Ch. 1. Of Profit and Honesty
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
1 month 1 week ago
Evil always turns up in this...

Evil always turns up in this world through some genius or other.

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As quoted in Dictionary of Foreign Quotations (1980) by Mary Collison, Robert L. Collison, p. 98
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
3 months 6 days ago
It is impossible that evils should...

It is impossible that evils should be done away with, for there must always be something opposed to the good; and they must inevitably hover about mortal nature and this earth. Therefore we ought to try to escape from earth to the dwelling of the gods as quickly as we can; and to escape is to become like God, so far as this is possible, God is in no wise and in no manner unrighteous, but utterly and perfectly righteous, and there is nothing so like him as that one of us who in turn becomes most nearly perfect in righteousness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 4 days ago
No one commits suicide for external...

No one commits suicide for external reasons, only because of inner disequilibrium. Under similar adverse circumstances, some are indifferent, some are moved, some are driven to suicide.

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Philosophical Maxims
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