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5 months 3 days ago

The irrationality of the "appeal to Nature" is illustrated by a simple thought-experiment. Imagine, fancifully, if starvation, disease, parasitism, disembowelling, asphyxiation and being eaten alive were not endemic to the living world - or such miseries have already been abolished and replaced by an earthly paradise. Would anyone propose there is ethical case for (re)introducing them? Even proposing such a thought-experiment can sound faintly ridiculous.

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"A Welfare State For Elephants?: A Case Study of Compassionate Stewardship", Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism, Vol. 3, Iss. 2 (Nov. 2015), p. 162
8 months 1 week ago

Chance seldom interferes with the wise man; his greatest and highest interests have been, are, and will be, directed by reason throughout his whole life.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm.

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Act 4, sc. 5
4 months 2 weeks ago

Is not every true Reformer, by the nature of him, a Priest first of all? He appeals to Heaven's invisible justice against Earth's visible force; knows that it, the invisible, is strong and alone strong. He is a believer in the divine truth of things; a seer, seeing through the shows of things; a worshipper, in one way or the other, of the divine truth of things; a Priest, that is. If he be not first a Priest, he will never be good for much as a Reformer.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.

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Freedom and the control of men (1955/1956) American Scholar, 25 (1), 47-65
4 months 1 week ago

When the changes of our times gave you an opportunity, you restored to the use of man that genius of your father for which he had suffered, and made him in real truth immortal by publishing as an eternal memorial of him those books which that bravest of men had written with his own blood. You have done a great service to Roman literature: a large part of Cordus's books had been burned; a great service to posterity, who will receive a true account of events, which cost its author so dear; and a great service to himself, whose memory flourishes and ever will flourish, as long as men set any value upon the facts of Roman history, as long as anyone lives who wishes to review the deeds of our fathers, to know what a true Roman was like - one who still remained unconquered when all other necks were broken in to receive the yoke of Sejanus, one who was free in every thought, feeling, and act.

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4 months 5 days ago

Psychotherapists ... are dealing with people whose distress arises from what may be termed maya, to use the Hindu-Buddhist word whose exact meaning is not merely 'illusion' but the entire world-conception of a culture, considered as illusion in the strict etymological sense of a play (Latin, ludere). The aim of a way of liberation is not the destruction of maya but seeing it for what it is, or seeing through it. Play is not to be taken seriously, or, in other words, ideas of the world and of oneself which are social conventions and institutions are not to be confused with reality.

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p. 9
7 months 2 weeks ago

I focus on popular culture because I focus on those areas where black humanity is most powerfully expressed, where black people have been able to articulate their sense of the world in a profound manner. And I see this primarily in popular culture. Why not in highbrow culture? Because the access has been so difficult. Why not in more academic forms? Because academic exclusion has been the rule for so long for large numbers of black people that black culture, for me, becomes a search for where black people have left their imprint and fundamentally made a difference in terms of how certain art forms are understood. This is currently in popular culture. And it has been primarily in music, religion, visual arts and fashion.

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"Cornel West interviewed by bell hooks" in Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life
8 months 3 weeks ago

Generals are, as a matter of course, allowed to be far more idiotic than ordinary human beings are permitted to be.

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4 months 1 week ago

Just as we suffer from excess in all things, so we suffer from excess in literature; thus we learn our lessons, not for life, but for the lecture room.

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Line 12 Alternate translation: Not for life, but for school do we learn. (translator unknown) Alternate translation: We are taught for the schoolroom, not for life. (translator unknown).
6 months 3 weeks ago

The same energy of character which renders a man a daring villain would have rendered him useful to society, had that society been well organized.

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Letter 19

The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.

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K 27
7 months 3 weeks ago

The "through-and-through" universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible impeccable all-pervasiveness. Its necessity, with no possibilities; its relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights ... It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.

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Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), Ch. 12 : Absolutism and Empiricism
6 months 2 weeks ago

Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Saint-Simon, like Hegel, begins with the assertion that the social order engendered by the French Revolution proved that mankind has reached the adult state. In contrast to Hegel, however, he described this stage primarily in terms of its economy; the industrial process was the sole integrating factor in the new social order.

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P. 330
7 months 3 weeks ago

I felt less alone when I didn't know you yet: I was waiting for the other. I thought only of his strength and never of my weakness. And now here you are, Orestes, it was you. I look at you and I see that we are two orphans.

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Electra to her brother Orestes, Act 2
2 months ago

"Critical Path is a way to dig yourself out from all that misinformation."
- Buckminster Fuller

See biography for Buckminster Fuller:
https://civilsimian.com/Buckminster-Fuller

Read Buckminster Fuller's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/280/content

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form.

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(p. 180)
7 months 3 weeks ago

The concrete man has but one interest - to be right. That to him is the art of all arts, and all means are fair which help him to it.

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6 months 1 week 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
6 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.

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Letter to Christian Goldbach, April 17, 1712.
4 months 1 week ago

What then? Shall I not follow in the footsteps of my predecessors? I shall indeed use the old road, but if I find one that makes a shorter cut and is smoother to travel, I shall open the new road. Men who have made these discoveries before us are not our masters, but our guides. Truth lies open for all; it has not yet been monopolized. And there is plenty of it left even for posterity to discover.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

The man who barely abstains from violating either the person, or the estate, or the reputation of his neighbours, has surely very little positive merit. He fulfils, however, all the rules of what is peculiarly called justice, and does every thing which his equals can with propriety force him to do, or which they can punish him for not doing. We may often fulfil all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing.

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Section II, Chap. I.
2 months 1 day ago

Balance isn't good for everything. A balance that agrees to destroy SOME life is not a good balance...

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8 months 1 week ago

Practice yourself, for heaven's sake, in little things; and thence proceed to greater.

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Book I, ch. 18, 18.
5 months 3 days ago

Hype is the awkward and desperate attempt to convince journalists that what you've made is worth the misery of having to review it.

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"Hype"
7 months 2 weeks ago

The less somebody knows and understands himself the less great he is, however great may be his talent. For this reason our scientists are not great.

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p. 51e
6 months 2 weeks ago

We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.

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3 weeks 1 day ago

I don't think arbitrariness is the way to put it...ultimate generality...universality...but it's not arbitrary, just the apex generality. There's only one.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Violated, dishonored, wading in blood, dripping filth - there stands bourgeois society. This is it [in reality]. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretense to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law - but the ravening beast, the witches' sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form.

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Ch. 1
6 months 2 weeks ago

I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind, or cannot understand the darker pages of Hegel, it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Influences of various kinds conspire to increase corporate action and decrease individual action. And the change is being on all sides aided by schemers, each of whom thinks only of his pet plan and not at all of the general reorganization which his plan, joined with others such, are working out. It is said that the French Revolution devoured its own children. Here, an analogous catastrophe seems not unlikely. The numerous socialistic changes made by Act of Parliament, joined with the numerous others presently to be made, will by-and-by be all merged in State-socialism-swallowed in the vast wave which they have little by little raised."But why is this change described as 'the coming slavery'?," is a question which many will still ask. The reply is simple. All socialism involves slavery.

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4 months 1 week ago

You see that man can endure toil: Cato, on foot, led an army through African deserts. You see that thirst can be endured: he marched over sun-baked hills, dragging the remains of a beaten army and with no train of supplies, undergoing lack of water and wearing a heavy suit of armour; always the last to drink of the few springs which they chanced to find. You see that honour, and dishonour too, can be despised: for they report that on the very day when Cato was defeated at the elections, he played a game of ball. You see also that man can be free from fear of those above him in rank: for Cato attacked Caesar and Pompey simultaneously, at a time when none dared fall foul of the one without endeavouring to oblige the other. You see that death can be scorned as well as exile: Cato inflicted exile upon himself and finally death, and war all the while.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

He regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up factitious excellencies,-belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human kind,-and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful.

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(p. 40)
7 months 4 weeks ago

But such is the nature of the human mind, that it always lays hold on every mind that approaches it; and as it is wonderfully fortified by an unanimity of sentiments, so is it shocked and disturbed by any contrariety. Hence the eagerness, which most people discover in a dispute; and hence their impatience of opposition, even in the most speculative and indifferent opinions.

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Part I, Essay 8: Of Parties in General
4 months 4 days ago

It was my wish to present this great subject as an illustration of the itermingling of philosophical, mathematical, and physical thought, a study which is dear to my heart. This could be done only by building up the theory systematically from the foundations, and by restricting attention throughout to the principles. But I have not been able to satisfy these self-imposed requirements: the mathematician predominates at the expense of the philosopher.

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From the Author's Preface to First Edition
3 months 3 weeks ago

Put down the banks, and if this country could not be carried through the longest war against her most powerful enemy without ever knowing the want of a dollar, without dependence on the traitorous classes of her citizens, without bearing hard on the resources of the people, or loading the public with an indefinite burden of debt, I know nothing of my countrymen. Not by any novel project, not by any charlatanerie, but by ordinary and well-experienced means; by the total prohibition of all private paper at all times, by reasonable taxes in war aided by the necessary emissions of public paper of circulating size, this bottomed on special taxes, redeemable annually as this special tax comes in, and finally within a moderate period.

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Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1815. ME 14:356
4 months 5 days ago

We have, as a result of two thousand years of Christianity, sex on the brain. Which isn't always the best place for it.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

All achievement should be measured in human happiness.

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Ch. IV: "The Golden Rule and After", p. 90
8 months 2 days ago

... a penny saved is better than a penny earned.

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The Duty of a Husband and Wife (17 March 1539), No. 4408. LW 54:337
8 months 6 days ago

Rules necessary for definitions. Not to leave any terms at all obscure or ambiguous without definition; Not to employ in definitions any but terms perfectly known or already explained.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

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Ch. 1: Introductory
3 months 3 weeks ago

To change your mind and to follow him who sets you right is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before. Remember that to change thy opinion and to follow him who corrects thy error is as consistent with freedom as it is to persist in thy error.

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(Long translation) VIII, 16
5 months 1 week ago

There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles II. But the seamen were not gentlemen, and the gentlemen were not seamen.

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Vol. I, ch. 2
6 months 3 weeks ago

I took some pains to convince you that the Whigs, as a party in the state, were of the highest value to the public welfare, and constituted the party to which a liberal-minded and enlightened man would adhere.

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Letter to H. B. Rosser (7 March 1820), quoted in C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, Vol. II (1876), p. 263

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