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4 months ago

Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.

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Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"
4 months 3 weeks ago

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Many of the actions by which men have become rich are far more harmful to the community than the obscure crimes of poor men, yet they go unpunished because they do not interfere with the existing order.

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Ch. V: Government and Law
4 months 3 weeks ago

Our life is no dream, but it should and perhaps will become one.

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Fragmente I, Magische Philosophie Variant: "Our life is no dream; but it ought to become one, and perhaps will." George MacDonald, Phantastes, epigraph to Chapter XXV
5 months 4 weeks ago

It is a great art to saunter.

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April 26, 1841
6 months 5 days ago

The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure.

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2 months 1 week ago

Whatever people do in the market economy, is the execution of their own plans. In this sense every human action means planning. What those calling themselves planners advocate is not the substitution of planned action for letting things go. It is the substitution of the planner's own plan for the plans of his fellow-men. The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans. He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute pre-eminence of his own plan.

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2 months 1 week ago

What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily?

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5 months 3 weeks ago

I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being.

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Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault
5 months 4 weeks ago

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

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Plato; or, The Philosopher
4 months 4 weeks ago

Once it's been proved to you that you're descended from an ape, it's no use pulling a face; just accept it. Once they've proved to you that a single droplet of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow human beings and consequently that all so-called virtues and duties are nothing but ravings and prejudices, then accept that too, because there's nothing to be done.

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Part 1 Chapter 3 (tr. ?)
5 months 3 weeks ago

History teaches us that war is not inevitable. Once again, it is for us to choose whether we use war or some other method of settling the ordinary and unavoidable conflicts between groups of men.

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What Are You Going To Do About It? , The case for constructive peace, 1936
5 months 3 weeks ago

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.

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p. 42e
5 months 3 weeks ago

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
5 months 3 weeks ago

In the tragedies of the early seventeenth century, madness too provided the dénouement, but it did so in liberating the truth. It still opened onto language, to a renewed form of speech, that of explanation and of the real regained. The most it could ever be was the penultimate moment of tragedy. Not the closing moment, as in Andromaque, where no truth appears, other than, in Delirium, the truth of a passion that finds its fullest, most perfect expression in madness.

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Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
2 months 2 weeks ago

Rooted in freedom, bonded in the fellowship of danger, sharing everywhere a common human blood, we declare again that all men are brothers, and that mutual tolerance is the price of liberty.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

I cannot recall those years without horror, loathing, and heart-rending pain. I killed people in war, challenged men to duels with the purpose of killing them, and lost at cards; I squandered the fruits of the peasants' toil and then had them executed; I was a fornicator and a cheat. Lying, stealing, promiscuity of every kind, drunkenness, violence, murder - there was not a crime I did not commit... Thus I lived for ten years.

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Pt. I, ch. 2
3 months 1 week ago

...it won't just be the quality and quantity of consciousness in the world that will be transformed in the post-Darwinian Transition. As (post-)humanity emerges from the neurochemical Dark Ages, enriched dopaminergic function in particular may sharpen the sheer intensity and meaningfulness of every moment of conscious existence. For a generation whose lifetimes span both modes of awareness, it will be as if they had just woken up. They will feel they had hitherto been sleep-walking through life in a twilit stupor. Thereafter their former mundane and minimal existence may be recalled only as some kind of zombified trance-state whose nature they were physiologically incapable of recognising...

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The Hedonistic Imperative: Heaven on Earth?, "Eden", BLTC Research
4 months 1 week ago

Sabbath rest does not follow creation; it brings creation to completion.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

We must needs believe in the other life, in the eternal life beyond the grave. ...And we must needs believe in that other life, perhaps, in order that we may deserve it, in order that we may obtain it, for it may be that he neither deserves it nor will obtain it who does not passionately desire it above reason and, if need be, against reason.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

I am convinced that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others.

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Part I Section XIV
1 month 3 weeks ago

To know the nature of man, the most direct and wisest way undoubtedly is to know what he has always been. Since when can theories be opposed to facts? History is experimental politics; this is the best or rather the only good politics.

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p. 21
5 months 4 weeks ago

It is said (I do not know with what truth) that a certain Hindu thinker believed the earth to rest upon an elephant. When asked what the elephant rested upon, he replied that it rested upon a tortoise. When asked what the tortoise rested upon, he said, "I am tired of this. Suppose we change the subject." This illustrates the unsatisfactory character of the First-Cause argument.

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"Is There a God?", 1952
3 months 3 weeks ago

Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception...When these ratios change, men change.

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6 months 1 week ago

All those of you who rejoice in peace, now it is time to judge the truth....Undoubtedly in days gone by there were holy men as Scripture tells,For God stated that he left behind seven thousand men in safety,And there are many priests and kings who are righteous under the law,There you find so many of the prophets, and many of the people too.Tell me which of the righteous of that time claimed an altar for himself?That wicked nation perpetrated a very large number of crimes,They sacrificed to idols and may prophets were put to death,Yet not a single one of the righteous withdrew from unity.The righteous endured the unrighteous while waiting for the winnower:They all mingled in one temple but were not mingled in their hearts;They said such things against them yet they had a single altar.

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Early Christian Latin Poets, 2000, Carolinne White, Routledge, London, ISBN 0415187826 ISBN 9780415187824 p. 55.
1 month 3 weeks ago

Philological analogies are to be preserved if possible, but modified according to scientific convenience.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

By virtue of its innermost intention, and like all questions about language, structuralism escapes the classical history of ideas which already supposes structuralism's possibility, for the latter naively belongs to the province of language and propounds itself within it.Nevertheless, by virtue of an irreducible region of irreflection and spontaneity within it, by virtue of the essential shadow of the undeclared, the structuralist phenomenon will deserve examination by the historian of ideas. For better or for worse. Everything within this phenomenon that does not in itself transparently belong to the question of the sign will merit this scrutiny; as will everything within it that is methodologically effective, thereby possessing the kind of infallibil-ity now ascribed to sleepwalkers and formerly attributed to instinct, which was said to be as certain as it was blind.

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Force and Signification
4 months 1 week ago

This is a strange -- and rather alarming -- realisation. For it clearly implies that masturbation is one of our highest faculties that human beings have developed. Many animals masturbate -- but never without the presence of another animal, or some similar stimulus. A human being can masturbate in an empty room: a triumph of pure imagination.

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p. 90
1 month 3 weeks ago

As long as one does not call his own position into question but regards it as absolute, while interpreting his opponents' ideas as a mere function of the social positions they occupy, the decisive step forward has not yet been taken.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The idea that an aim can be reasonable for its own sake-on the basis of virtues that insight reveals it to have in itself-without reference to some kind of subjective gain or advantage, is utterly alien to subjective reason, even where it rises above the consideration of immediate utilitarian values and devotes itself to reflection about the social order as a whole.

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p. 4.
2 months 3 weeks ago

I have never met a man so ignorant that I could not learn something from him.

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As quoted in The Story of Civilization : The Age of Reason Begins, 1558-1648 (1935) by Will Durant, p. 605
4 months 3 weeks ago

To be is to be cornered.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.

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The Holy Family, Ch. VI (1845).
4 months 2 weeks ago

I came to set fire to the earth, and I wish it were already on fire!

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12:49 (CEV)
2 months 1 week ago

Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love, and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence. If I lived under the burning sun of the equator, it would be a pleasure to me to think that there were many human beings on the other side of the world who regarded and respected me; I could and would not live if I were alone upon the earth, and cut off from the remembrance of my fellow-creatures. It is not that a man has occasion often to fall back upon the kindness of his friends; perhaps he may never experience the necessity of doing so; but we are governed by our imaginations, and they stand there as a solid and impregnable bulwark against all the evils of life.

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Vol. I, ch. 6, "Of Friendship", p. 178
4 months 3 weeks ago

What is Nature? An encyclopedical, systematic Index or Plan of our Spirit. Why will we content us with the mere catalogue of our Treasures? Let us contemplate them ourselves, and in all ways elaborate and use them.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesce into unity. Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.

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Letter to Fanny Bowditch, 22 October 1916
4 months 5 days ago

Statistics began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state.

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Chapter 12, Political Arithmetic, p. 102.
3 months 3 weeks ago

We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

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Preface to the first edition
6 months 3 weeks ago

O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer. Return to Tipasa (1954) Variant translation: In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can.

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Preface (p. vii)
3 months 3 weeks ago

Many Britons...feel strongly about something which was once called "the alien wedge". And surely it cannot be doubted, even by those who profess allegiance to the "multicultural society", that our society, unlike America, is not of that kind, and therefore that immigration cannot be an object of merely passive contemplation on the part of the present citizenship. There is perhaps no greater sign of the strength of liberalism (a strength which issues, not from popular consensus, but from the political power of the liberal elite) than that it has made it impossible for any but the circumlocutory to argue that the English, the Scots and the Welsh have a prior claim to the benefits of the civilization that their ancestors created, which entitles them to reserve its benefits for themselves.

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The Meaning of Conservatism: Third Edition (2001), p. 62
4 months 2 weeks ago

Whoever blasphemes against the Father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the Son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation.

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(p. 362)
Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has hitherto always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed: - history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!
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5 months 3 weeks ago

If you want to deserve Hell, you need only stay in bed. The world is iniquity; if you accept it, you are an accomplice, if you change it you are an executioner.

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Act 3, sc. 6
1 month 3 weeks ago

Why so many laws? Because there is no legislator. What have these so-called legislators done in six years? Nothing, for to destroy is not to make.

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