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Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 3 weeks ago
He who gives himself entirely to...

He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
4 months 5 days ago
Again, we should notice the force,...

Again, we should notice the force, effect, and consequences of inventions, which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world; first in literature, then in warfare, and lastly in navigation: and innumerable changes have been thence derived, so that no empire, sect, or star, appears to have exercised a greater power and influence on human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.

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Aphorism 129
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
3 months 3 weeks ago
The doctrine that there is as...

The doctrine that there is as much science in a subject as... mathematics in it, or as much... measurement or 'precision' in it, rests upon... misunderstanding.

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Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
4 months 1 week ago
"For I am holy." When I...

"For I am holy." When I hear these words I recognize the voice of the Saviour. But shall I take away my own? Certainly when He speaks thus He speaks in inseparable union with His body. But can I say, "I am holy"? If I mean a holiness that I have not received, I should be proud and a liar; but if I mean a holiness that I have received - as it is written: "Be ye holy because I the Lord your God am holy" (Lev. 19:2) - then let the body of Christ say these words. And let this one man, who cries from the ends of the earth, say with his Head and united with his Head: "I am holy." … That is not foolish pride, but an expression of gratitude. If you were to say that you are holy of yourselves, that would be pride; but if, as one of Christ's faithful and as a member of Christ, you say that you are not holy, you are ungrateful.

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p.428
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
2 months 1 week ago
What nationalist educators often fail to...

What nationalist educators often fail to recognize is that merely being taught by teachers who are black has not and will not solve the problem if the teachers have been socialized to internalize racist thinking.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
3 months 3 weeks ago
Everyone is the other, and no...

Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Da-sein, is the nobody to whom every Da-sein has always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another.

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Stambaugh translation
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
4 months 4 days ago
Omnipotence and foreknowledge of God, I...

Omnipotence and foreknowledge of God, I repeat, utterly destroy the doctrine of 'free-will' ... doubtless it gives the greatest possible offense to common sense or natural reason, that God, Who is proclaimed as being full of mercy and goodness, and so on, should of His own mere will abandon, harden and damn men, as though He delighted in the sins and great eternal torments of such poor wretches. It seems an iniquitous, cruel, intolerable thought to think of God; and it is this that has been such a stumbling block to so many great men down through the ages. And who would not stumble at it? I have stumbled at it myself more than once, down to the deepest pit of despair, so that I wished I had never been made a man.

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(That was before I knew how health-giving that despair was, and how close to grace p. 217)
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
2 months 2 weeks ago
Religion in its humility restores man...

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

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Ch. 4
Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
1 month 5 days ago
Human intuitions are systematically biased. Evolutionary...

Human intuitions are systematically biased. Evolutionary psychology explains how our moral intuitions and the rationalisations they spawn have been shaped by millennia of natural selection to maximise the inclusive fitness of our genes, not to track the welfare of other sentient beings impartially conceived. Many human cultures have found nothing intuitively wrong with aggressive warfare, slavery, wife-beating, infanticide or female genital mutilation. Ultimately, folk morality is a doomed enterprise as hopeless as folk physics. A mature posthuman ethics, I'd argue, must be committed to the well-being of all sentient life; and mature posthuman technology offers the means to deliver that commitment.

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"Post-Darwinian Ethics?", H+ Magazine, May 2009
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 3 weeks ago
The fact that labour is external...

The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.

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Estranged Labour, p. 30.
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 1 week ago
Farewell to the monsters...
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Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 3 weeks ago
Ideas do not exist….

Ideas do not exist separately from language.

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Notebook I, The Chapter on Money, p. 83.
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
4 months 3 weeks ago
The orators

The orators and the despots have the least power in their cities since they do nothing that they wish to do, practically speaking, though they do whatever they think to be best.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 3 weeks ago
If anything is certain, it is...

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist

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Marx quoted and translated by Engels (in an 1882 letter to Eduard Bernstein) about the peculiar Marxism which arose in France 1882.
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 3 weeks ago
These principles it is necessary strictly...

These principles it is necessary strictly to attend to, because they will serve much to explain the whole course both of government and real property, wherever the German nations obtained a settlement; the whole of their government depending for the most part upon two principles in our nature,-ambition, that makes one man desirous, at any hazard or expense, of taking the lead amongst others; and admiration, which makes others equally desirous of following him from the mere pleasure of admiration, and a sort of secondary ambition, one of the most universal passions among men. These two principles, strong both of them in our nature, create a voluntary inequality and dependence.

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An Essay towards an Abridgment of English History (1757-c. 1763), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI (1856), p. 282
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
4 months 3 weeks ago
Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and...

Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.

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Philosophical Maxims
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann
3 weeks 2 days ago
With exceptions so rare they are...

With exceptions so rare they are regarded as miracles of nature, successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular-not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.

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p. 27
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 3 weeks ago
The universal hypocrisy has so entered...

The universal hypocrisy has so entered into the flesh and blood of all classes of our modern society, it has reached such a pitch that nothing in that way can rouse indignation. Hypocrisy in the Greek means "acting," and acting-playing a part-is always possible. Chapter XII, Conclusion-Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand Variant Translation: Hypocrisy with good reason means the same as acting, and anybody can pretend - act a part.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
2 months 1 week ago
Since every effort in our educational...

Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 3 weeks ago
This world is but canvas to...

This world is but canvas to our imaginations.

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Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
2 months 3 weeks ago
The whole nature of man presupposes...

The whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned into woman from the start, just as it is prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light, air, salt, carbohydrates etc.

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"Two Essays in Analytical Psychology" In CW 7: P. 188
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 3 weeks ago
Falsehood and delusion are allowed in...

Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever: But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an œconomy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure that he may speak it the longer.

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Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
2 months 4 days ago
The physicist who states a law...

The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction.

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"What is Mathematical Truth?"
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 months 6 days ago
It is hardly to be believed...

It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.

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A 11
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
3 months 3 weeks ago
So long as antimilitarists propose no...

So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.

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The Moral Equivalent of War
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
4 months 4 days ago
Superstition, idolatry, and hypocrisy have ample...

Superstition, idolatry, and hypocrisy have ample wages, but truth goes a-begging.

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53
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 3 weeks ago
Modern physics... reduces matter to a...

Modern physics... reduces matter to a set of events which proceed outward from a centre. If there is something further in the centre itself, we cannot know about it, and it is irrelevant to physics.

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An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics, 1927
Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
1 month 4 weeks ago
When the world presents as a...

When the world presents as a force field of violence, the task of nonviolence is to find ways of living and acting in that world such that violence is checked or ameliorated, or its direction turned, precisely at moments when it seems to saturate that world and offer no way out.

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p. 10
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
2 months 3 weeks ago
So long as it is not...

So long as it is not possible to produce so much that there is enough for all, with more left over for expanding the social capital and extending the forces of production - so long as this is not possible, there must always be a ruling class directing the use of society's productive forces, and a poor, oppressed class. How these classes are constituted depends on the stage of development.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
3 months 3 weeks ago
Absurdity destroys the and of the...

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
Philosophical Maxims
Allan Bloom
Allan Bloom
1 week ago
In the new order a Locke...

In the new order a Locke was free-with almost no danger of being interfered with-to think his sublime thoughts, to seek the first causes of all things, to understand the nature of things. He could talk with his friends and teach the young. And there was money enough. The academies and universities satisfied Socrates' demand to be fed in the prytaneum.

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Commerce and Culture, p. 289.
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
3 months 3 weeks ago
The goal to be reached is...

The goal to be reached is the mind's insight into what knowing is. Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary, ... because by nothing less could that all-pervading mind ever manage to become conscious of what itself is - for that reason, the individual mind, in the nature of the case, cannot expect by less toil to grasp what its own substance contains.

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Preface (J. B. Baillie translation), § 29
Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
3 months 2 weeks ago
Once a word….

Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.

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Book I, epistle xviii, line 71
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
3 months 3 weeks ago
I disbelieve in specialization and... experts....

I disbelieve in specialization and... experts. ...[P]aying too much respect to the specialist ...[is] destroying the commonwealth of learning, the rationalist tradition, and science ...

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Philosophical Maxims
Lucretius
Lucretius
4 months 1 week ago
The living force….

The living force of his soul gained the day: on he passed far beyond the flaming walls of the world and traversed throughout in mind and spirit the immeasurable universe.

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Book I, lines 72-74 (tr. H. A. J. Munro); of Epicurus.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 3 weeks ago
When the intensity of emotional conviction...

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.

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Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
Philosophical Maxims
Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith
1 week 4 days ago
Macaulay is like a book in...

Macaulay is like a book in breeches...He has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.

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Vol. I, ch. 11, p. 415
Philosophical Maxims
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
2 months 3 weeks ago
The peoples' revolution .... will arrange...

The peoples' revolution .... will arrange its revolutionary organisation from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre, in keeping with the principle of liberty.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 months 6 days ago
With prophecies the commentator is often...

With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.

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H 23
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 4 days ago
Fashion is the science of appearances,...

Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.

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Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
4 months 5 days ago
War is sweet….

War is sweet to them that know it not.

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Though Erasmus quoted this proverb in Latin at the start of his essay Bellum [War], and it is sometimes attributed to him, it originates with the Greek poet Pindar
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Fourier
Charles Fourier
3 weeks 1 day ago
There is no idea more novel,...

There is no idea more novel, more surprising, than that of associating three hundred families of different degrees of fortune, knowledge and capacity.

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The Theory of Social Organization. Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier, p. 5.
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 4 days ago
The world is but a perpetual...

The world is but a perpetual see-saw.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 3 weeks ago
To understand the actual world as...

To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.

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Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
1 month 2 weeks ago
Hayek's theory of evolutionary rationality shows...

Hayek's theory of evolutionary rationality shows how traditions and customs (those surrounding sexual relations, for example) might be reasonable solutions to complex social problems, even when, and especially when, no clear rational grounds can be provided to the individual for obeying them. These customs have been selected by the ''invisible hand'' of social reproduction, and societies that reject them will soon enter the condition of ''maladaptation,'' which is the normal prelude to extinction.

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Hayek and conservatism, in Edward Feser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
2 months 2 weeks ago
The possibility of peace, on whose...

The possibility of peace, on whose behalf many are working, might perhaps become actual because the technical advances in offensive weapons make the prospect of a European war so disastrous, and because, if the nations were at grips again, even the victorious aggressor would be ruined. But there still remains open the possibility of a new war which, more dreadful than any that have preceded it would make an end of contemporary Europeans.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 3 weeks ago
Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed...

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 2 weeks ago
I will destroy this house, and...

I will destroy this house, and no one will be able to build it....

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Philosophical Maxims
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
3 months 3 days ago
Heroic love is the property of...

Heroic love is the property of those superior natures who are called insane not because they do not know, but because they over-know.

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As quoted in The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), by Miguel de Unamuno, as translated by J. E. Crawford
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
1 month 2 weeks ago
Hence it may be concluded that...

Hence it may be concluded that the happiest state of society is that in which supreme power resides in the whole body of a well-informed people. This is an imaginary, perhaps an unattainable, state of things. Yet, in some measure, we may approximate to it; and he alone deserves the name of a great statesman, whose principle it is to extend the power of the people in proportion to the extent of their knowledge, and to give them every facility for obtaining such a degree of knowledge as may render it safe to trust them with absolute power. In the mean time, it is dangerous to praise or condemn constitutions in the abstract; since, from the despotism of St. Petersburg to the democracy of Washington, there is scarcely a form of government which might not, at least in some hypothetical case, be the best possible.

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pp. 161-162
Philosophical Maxims
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