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8 months 1 week ago

Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.

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Act 5, sc. 3
7 months 1 week ago

The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.

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2 months ago

I'd think that is impossible because it ceases to be truth about something at some point and just becomes the thing.

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5 months 5 days ago

As the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden- "Speech is silvern, Silence is golden"; or, as I might rather express it: speech is of time, silence is of eternity.

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Bk. III, ch. 3.
7 months 1 week ago

The proper method for hastening the decay of error is not by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavour to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself.

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Vol. 2, bk. 8, ch. 6
7 months 1 week ago

Suppose a surface to be part red and part blue; so that every point on it is either red or blue, and of course, no part can be both red and blue. What then, is the color of the surface in the immediate neighborhood of the point. ...it follows that the boundary is half red and half blue. In like manner, we find it necessary to hold that consciousness essentially occupies time... Thus, the present is half past and half time to come. ...Take another case: the velocity of a particle at any instant of time is its mean velocity during an infinitesimal instant in which that time is consumed. Just so, my immediate feeling is my feeling through an infinitesimal duration containing the present instant.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

In the long run, there is nothing to stop intelligent agents from identifying the molecular signature of experience below hedonic zero and eliminating it altogether - even in insects. Nociception is vital; pain is optional. I tentatively predict that the world's last unpleasant experience in our forward light-cone will be a precisely datable event - perhaps some micro-pain in an obscure marine invertebrate a few centuries hence.

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The Radical Plan to Phase out Earth's Predatory Species, io9, 30 Jul. 2014
8 months 2 weeks ago

Ignorance is the mother of Devotion: A maxim that is proverbial, and confirmed by general experience. Look out for a people, entirely destitute of religion: If you find them at all, be assured, that they are but few degrees removed from brutes. What so pure as some of the morals, included in some theological system? What so corrupt as some of the practices, to which these systems give rise?

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Part XV - General corollary
9 months 4 days ago

The superior man, even when he is not moving, has a feeling of reverence, and while he speaks not, he has the feeling of truthfulness.

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7 months 6 days ago

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

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p. 60
7 months 1 day ago

To believe in God is to long for His existence and, further, it is to act as if he existed; it is to live by this longing and to make it the inner spring of our action. This longing or hunger for divinity begets hope, hope begets faith, and faith and hope beget charity. Of this divine longing is born our sense of beauty, of finality, of goodness.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted. The only self-renunciation which it applauds, is devotion to the happiness, or to some of the means of happiness, of others; either of mankind collectively, or of individuals within the limits imposed by the collective interests of mankind.

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Ch. 2
4 months 2 weeks ago

I agree ... that a professorship of Theology should have no place in our institution. But we cannot always do what is absolutely best. Those with whom we act, entertaining different views, have the power and the right of carrying them into practice. Truth advances, and error recedes step by step only; and to do to our fellow men the most good in our power, we must lead where we can, follow where we cannot, and still go with them, watching always the favorable moment for helping them to another step.

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Comment on establishing the University of Virginia, in a letter to Thomas Cooper (7 October 1814); published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1905) edited by Andrew Adgate Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol VII, p. 200
4 months 3 weeks ago

I distrust all dead and mechanical formulas for expressing anything connected with human affairs and human personalities. Putting human affairs in exact formulas shows in itself a lack of the sense of humor and therefore a lack of wisdom.

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Ch. I : The Awakening, p. 5
4 months 1 week ago

How easy it is to repel and to wipe away every impression which is troublesome or unsuitable, and immediately to be in all tranquility. To shrug it all off and wipe it clean--every annoyance and distraction--and reach utter stillness. Child's play.

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(Hays translation) V, 2
8 months 2 weeks ago

The value which the workmen add to the materials, therefore, resolves itself in this case into two parts, of which the one pays their wages, the other the profits of the employer upon the whole stock of materials and wages which he advanced.

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Chapter VI, p. 58.
8 months 2 weeks ago

My opinion concerning God differs widely from that which is ordinarily defended by modern Christians. For I hold that God is of all things the cause immanent, as the phrase is, not transient. I say that all things are in God and move in God, thus agreeing with Paul, and, perhaps, with all the ancient philosophers, though the phraseology may be different ; I will even venture to affirm that I agree with all the ancient Hebrews, in so far as one may judge from their traditions, though these are in many ways corrupted. The supposition of some, that I endeavour to prove in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus the unity of God and Nature (meaning by the latter a certain mass or corporeal matter), is wholly erroneous. As regards miracles, I am of opinion that the revelation of God can only be established by the wisdom of the doctrine, not by miracles, or in other words by ignorance.

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Letter 21 (73) to Henry Oldenburg , November
4 months 2 weeks ago

Murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them, thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another. In every stage of these repressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms, our repreated petitions have been answered only by repreated injury.

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Article No. 20
9 months 2 weeks ago

It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good. But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

I have the consolation to reflect that during the period of my administration not a drop of the blood of a single fellow citizen was shed by the sword of war or of the law.

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Letter to papal nuncio Count Dugnani
4 months 2 weeks ago

If a due participation of office is a matter of right, how are vacancies to be obtained? Those by death are few; by resignation, none.

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Letter to Elias Shipman and others of New Haven (12 July 1801). Often misquoted as, "few die and none resign".
8 months 2 weeks ago

The supreme maxim in scientific philosophising is this: wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities.

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Quoted in Hawes The Logic of Contemporary English Realism (1923), p. 110
6 months 3 weeks ago

Militarism, the destroyer of youth, the raper of women, the annihilator of the best in the race, the very mower of life.

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4 months 1 week ago

The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were on the heights; they have developed this 'defeat' into one of the historical defeats which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And that is why the future victory will bloom from this 'defeat'. 'Order reigns in Berlin!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I will be!

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"Order reigns in Berlin", Last written words. Collected Works 4
5 months 5 days ago

Few people who are not actually practitioners of a mature science realize how much mop-up work of this sort a paradigm leaves to be done or quite how fascinating such work can prove in the execution.

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p. 24
1 year 2 weeks ago

First, [the bourgeoisie] must recognize his own impotence, his incapacity to believe in a sense of history, even if his reason leans towards the truth, the passions and prejudices produced by his class position, prevent him from accepting it. So he should not exert himself with proving the truth of the historical mission of the working class; rather, he should learn to subdue his petty bourgeois passions and prejudices. He should take lessons from those who were once as important as he is now but are ready to risk all for the revolutionary Cause.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

Mucius put his hand into the fire. It is painful to be burned; but how much more painful to inflict such suffering upon oneself!

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8 months 1 week ago

The standard of permanent Christianity must be kept clear in our minds and it is against that standard that we must test all contemporary thought. In fact, we must at all costs not move with the times.

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"Christian Apologetics" (1945), p. 92
6 months 1 week ago

Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.

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(p. 11)
5 months 6 days ago

The cultural atmosphere of Russia in those years had an adolescent quality, common to all periods of revolution: the belief that life is just beginning, that the future is unlimited, and that mankind is no longer bound by the shackles of history.

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(pg. 47)
7 months 2 weeks ago

In the United States, except for slaves, servants and the destitute fed by townships, everyone has the vote and this is an indirect contributor to law-making. Anyone wishing to attack the law is thus reduced to adopting one of two obvious courses: they must either change the nation's opinion or trample its wishes under foot.

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Chapter XIV.
5 months 1 week ago

We are by no means opposed to the globalization of relationships as such-in fact, as we said, the strongest forces of Leftist internationalism have effectively led this process. The enemy, rather, is a specific regime of global relations that we call Empire.

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45-46
5 months 3 weeks ago

Against the many Russian thinkers influenced by Hegel who believed that history was governed by universal laws to which one could only submit, Turgenev upheld the freedom of different societies to pursue different paths of development and of individuals to pursue, even in opposition to powerful historical forces, their own goals and values. Here Turgenev endorsed the celebrated dictum of Alexander Herzen, with whom he disagreed on other matters: that history has no libretto. Human history is a realm of contingency and unpredictability, in which each generation faces conflicts that have no ideal solution.

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'Isaiah Berlin: The Value of Decency' (p.105)
8 months 1 week ago

There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But this, I hold, is an offence against every decent conception of mankind. It is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or of robbery or of poisoning as the history of mankind. For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder (including it is true, some of the attempts to suppress them). This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as heroes. 

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Vol 2, Ch. 25 "Has History any Meaning?" Variant: There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.
8 months 1 week 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
4 months 2 weeks ago

I had always hoped that the younger generation receiving their early impressions after the flame of liberty had been kindled in every breast, & had become as it were the vital spirit of every American, that the generous temperament of youth, analogous to the motion of their blood, and above the suggestions of avarice, would have sympathized with oppression wherever found, and proved their love of liberty beyond their own share of it.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

What most astonishes me in the United States, is not so much the marvelous grandeur of some undertakings, as the innumerable multitude of small ones.

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Book Two, Chapter XIX.
7 months 1 week ago

The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity... Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Every crusader is apt to go mad. He is haunted by the wickedness which he attributes to his enemies; it becomes in some sort a part of him.

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Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudon Chatto & Windus, London, (1951), ch. 9, p. 274
6 months 1 week ago

The man is making preparations for a year, and does not know that he will die before evening. And I remembered God's second saying, "Learn what is not given to man." 'What dwells in man" I already knew. Now I learnt what is not given him. It is not given to man to know his own needs.

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Ch. XI
6 months 1 week ago

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

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"What is Culture?" (p. 2)
7 months 2 weeks ago

The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.

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Book One, Chapter V.
8 months 2 weeks ago

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.

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Said in conversation with Mrs. Alan Wood; quoted in Alan Wood's Bertrand Russell, the Passionate Sceptic (Allen and Unwin, 1957), pp. 236-7
6 months 1 week ago

Condemn me if you choose - I do that myself, - but condemn me, and not the path which I am following, and which I point out to those who ask me where, in my opinion, the path is.

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"Letter to N.N.," quoted by Havelock Ellis in "The New Spirit" (1892) p. 226
8 months 2 weeks ago

Only that position can impart dignity in which we do not appear as servile tools but rather create independently within our circle.

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Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 38
7 months 1 week ago

To be or not to be...Neither one nor the other.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos. ...I have heard friends and colleagues try to popularize philosophy... but they soon grew dry, and then technical, and the results were only partially encouraging. So my enterprise is a bold one. The founder of pragmatism... gave... lectures... with that very word in its title,-flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness! None of us... understood all that he said-yet here I stand making a very similar venture. ...There is... a curious fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even though neither we nor the disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of the vastness.

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Lecture I, The Present Dilemma in Philosophy

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