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8 months 1 week ago

To throw oneself into strange teachings is quite dangerous.

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7 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
6 months 2 weeks ago

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.

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Emphasizing his views on philosophy as something abstract and separate from normal life to Isaiah Berlin, in the early 1930s, as quoted in A.J. Ayer: A Life (1999) by Ben Rogers, p. 2.
7 months 2 weeks ago

It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.

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Preamble, paragraph 3.
5 months 1 week ago

Nationality is not the only kind of social membership, nor is it an exclusive tie. However, it is the only form of membership that has so far shown itself able to sustain a democratic process and a liberal rule of law.

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4 months 1 week ago

The force that had been lent my father he honorably expended in manful well-doing. A portion of this planet bears beneficent traces of his strong hand and strong head. Nothing that he undertook to do but he did it faithfully and like a true man. I shall look on the houses he built with a certain proud interest. They stand firm and sound to the heart all over his little district.

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4 months 3 days ago

A great step towards independence is a good-humored stomach, one that is willing to endure rough treatment.

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Line 3.
8 months 1 week ago

Of all the means which wisdom acquires to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is friendship.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

There are no connections in resonant space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses.

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(p. 75)
4 months 1 week ago

Liberalism... has a left of center meaning in the United States. It has a slightly right of center meaning in much of continental Europe.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means.

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(p.202)
7 months 2 weeks ago

Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.

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Ch. 5
6 months 4 days ago

It is impossible to feel equal respect for things that are in fact unequal unless the respect is given to something that is identical in all of them. Men are unequal in all their relations with the things of this world, without exception. The only thing that is identical in all men is the presence of a link with the reality outside the world. All human beings are absolutely identical in so far as they can be thought of as consisting of a centre, which is an unquenchable desire for good, surrounded by an accretion of psychical and bodily matter.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy.

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4 months 1 week ago

Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not a sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments, - nay on enjoyments of any kind. His household was of the frugalest; his common diet barley-bread and water: sometimes for months there was not a fire once lighted on his hearth. They record with just pride that he would mend his own shoes, patch his own cloak. A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided man; careless of what vulgar men toil for.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

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Worship
4 months 4 days ago

People is the name of the body, State of the spirit, of that ruling person that has hitherto suppressed me.

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Dover 2005, p. 242
5 months 4 weeks ago

The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things. G 46 Variant translation: The inclination of people to consider small things as important has produced many great things.

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6 months 1 week ago

The concept of guilt is found most powerfully developed even in the most primitive communal forms which we know: ... the man is guilty who violates one of the original laws which dominate the society and which are mostly derived from a divine founder; the boy who is accepted into the tribal community and learns its laws, which bind him thenceforth, learns to promise; this promise is often given under the sign of death, which is symbolically carried out on the boy, with a symbolical rebirth.

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p. 178
6 months 5 days ago

We must needs believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us, that in the depths of our own bodies, in animals, in plants, in rocks, in everything that lives, in all the Universe, there is a spirit that strives to know itself, to acquire consciousness of itself, to be itself - for to be oneself is to know oneself - to be pure spirit; and since it can only achieve this by means of the body, by means of matter, it creates and makes use of matter at the same time that it remains a prisoner of it.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Life is just a notebook with blank pages. Every time we make a mistake, the pages get stained and living in it becomes impossible.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

War is never anything less than accelerated technological change.

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(p. 102)
8 months 4 days ago

Inasmuch as love grows in you, in so much beauty grows; for love is itself the beauty of the soul.

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as translated by H. Browne and J. H. Meyers, The Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers (1995)
7 months 2 weeks ago

It might otherwise appear paradoxical that money can be replaced by worthless paper; but that the slightest alloying of its metallic content depreciates it.

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Notebook VII, The Chapter on Capital, p. 734.
6 months 1 week ago

I have cast fire upon the world, and see, I am guarding it until it blazes.

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7 months 6 days ago

Being nimble and light-footed, his father encouraged him to run in the Olympic race. "Yes," said he, "if there were any kings there to run with me."

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41 Alexander
4 months 4 days ago

All this talk: the state should do this or that, ultimately means: the police should force consumers to behave otherwise than they would behave spontaneously.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Forgetting when God does it in relation to sin, is the opposite of creating, since to create is to bring forth from nothing and to forget is to take back into nothing. What is hidden from my eyes, that I have never seen; but what is hidden behind my back, that I have seen. The one who loves forgives in this way; he forgives, he forgets, he blots out the sin, in love he turns toward the one he forgives; but when he turns toward him, he of course, cannot see what is lying behind his back.

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4 months 1 week ago

Thus Mr. Sale informs me, the old Arab Tribes would gather in liveliest gaudeamus, and sing, and kindle bonfires, and wreathe crowns of honour, and solemnly thank the gods that, in their Tribe too, a Poet had shewn himself. As indeed they well might; for what usefuller, I say not nobler and heavenlier thing could the gods, doing their very kindest, send to any Tribe or Nation, in any time or circumstances?

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7 months 2 weeks ago

But ordinary language is all right.

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p. 28
3 months 2 weeks ago

The scene has thoroughly changed. The six weeks' march to Paris has come world drama. Mass murder has become a monotonous task, and yet the final solution is not one step nearer. Capitalist rule is caught in its own trap, and cannot ban the spirit that it has Gone is the first mad delirium. Gone are the patriotic street demonstrations, the chase after suspicious-looking automobiles; the false telegrams, the cholera-poisoned wells. Gone the mad stories of Russian students who hurl bombs from every bridge of Berlin, or French men flying over Nuremberg; gone the excesses of spy-hunting populace, the singing through, the coffee shops with their patriotic songs; gone the violent mobs, ready to denounce, ready to persecute women, ready to whip themselves into a delirious frenzy over every wild rumor; gone the atmosphere of ritual murder, the Kishinev air that left the policeman at the corner as the only remaining representative of human dignity.

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Ch.1
5 months 3 weeks ago

The criterion of efficiency dictates that choice of alternatives which produces the largest result for the given application of resources.

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Simon (1945, p. 179); As cited in: Harry M. Johnson (1966) Sociology: A Systematic Introduction. p. 287.
7 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing prints more lively in our minds than something we wish to forget.

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Book II, Ch. 12
6 months 2 weeks ago

But as to our country and our race, as long as the well compacted structure of our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion-as long as the British Monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the State, shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers, as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land-so long as the mounds and dykes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France.

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pp. 52-53
6 months 3 weeks ago

We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.

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As quoted in Thesaurus of Epigrams: A New Classified Collection of Witty Remarks, Bon Mots and Toasts (1942) by Edmund Fuller
6 months 1 week ago

The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered. And in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent.

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Conscience is absolved by reification. p. 79
8 months 2 weeks ago

The bodies of which the world is composed are solids, and therefore have three dimensions. Now, three is the most perfect number, it is the first of numbers, for of one we do not speak as a number, of two we say both, but three is the first number of which we say all. Moreover, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

People say law but they mean wealth.

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1841
5 months 3 weeks ago

Yet there is a certain solitude like no other - that of the man preparing his meal in public on a wall, or on the hood of his car, or along a fence, alone. You see that all the time here. It is the saddest sight in the world. Sadder than destitution, sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honour of sharing or disputing each other's food. He who eats alone is dead (but not he who drinks alone. Why is this?).

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New York (p. 15)
7 months 2 weeks ago

I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on top. - You need take no notice of these ebullitions of spleen, which are probably quite unintelligible to anyone but myself.

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Letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman (7 June 1899), in The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James, vol. 2, p. 90, 1926
3 months 2 weeks ago

If terms are systematically good, they are not to be rejected because they are etymologically inaccurate.

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6 months 1 week ago

Scientific truth is characterized by its exactness and the certainty of its predictions. But these admirable qualities are contrived by science at the cost of remaining on a plane of secondary problems. leaving intact the ultimate and decisive questions. ... Yet science is but a small part of the human mind and organism. Where it stops, man does not stop.

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p. 13

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