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7 months 3 weeks ago

The scene should be gently open'd, and his entrance made step by step, and the dangers pointed out that attend him from several degrees, tempers, designs, and clubs of men. He should be prepared to be shocked by some, and caress'd by others; warned who are like to oppose, who to mislead, who to undermine him, and who to serve him. He should be instructed how to know and distinguish them; where he should let them see, and when dissemble the knowledge of them and their aims and workings.

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Sec. 94
4 months 1 week ago

I knew Robert Burns, and I knew my father. Yet were you to ask me which had the greater natural faculty, I might perhaps actually pause before replying. Burns had an infinitely wider education, my father a far wholesomer. Besides, the one was a man of musical utterance; the other wholly a man of action, with speech subservient thereto. Never, of all the men I have seen, has one come personally in my way in whom the endowment from nature and the arena from fortune were so utterly out of all proportion. I have said this often, and partly know it. As a man of speculation - had culture ever unfolded him - he must have gone wild and desperate as Burns; hut he was a man of conduct, and work keeps all right. What strange shapable creatures we are!

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7 months 3 weeks ago

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.

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Hymn sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument
7 months 2 weeks ago

The process of being brought up, however well it is done, cannot fail to offend.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.

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13:31-32 (KJV)
6 months 1 week ago

Faith makes us live by showing us that life, although it is dependent upon reason, has its well spring and source of power elsewhere, in something supernatural and miraculous. Cournot the mathematician, a man of singularly well-balanced and scientifically equipped mind has said that it is this tendency towards the supernatural and miraculous that gives life, and that when it is lacking, all the speculations of reason lead to nothing but affliction of the spirit. ...And in truth we wish to live.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.

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"On Violence"
4 months 1 week ago

Normal science, the puzzle-solving activity we have just examined, is a highly cumulative enterprise, eminently successful in its aim, the steady extension of the scope and precision of scientific knowledge. In all these respects it fits with great precision the most usual image of scientific work. Yet one standard product of the scientific enterprise is missing. Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.

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p. 52
6 months 2 weeks ago

Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology: why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?

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As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) by Alan Lindsay Mackay
6 months 1 week ago

He felt neither guilt nor distress at the pleasure with which he was now filled by the proximity of this young creature, and when he discovered in himself even physical symptoms of his inclination he did not take fright, but continued cheerfully and serenely to see Nick whenever the ordinary run of his duties suggested it, congratulating himself upon the newly achieved solidity and rational calm of his spiritual life.

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The Bell (1958) p. 91
7 months 2 weeks ago

The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.

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The Life of the Mind (1978), "Thinking"
4 months 3 weeks ago

Of faith and morals, one cannot speak honestly for long without hurting feelings. Therefore, most people speak dishonestly of the most important subjects. Many recent philosophers prefer not to speak of them at all. But in some situations honesty is incompatible with silence.

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5 months 1 week ago

The fact is he made a prodigious blunder in commencing the attack, and now his only chance is to be silent and let people forget the exposure. I do not believe that in the whole history of science there is a case of any man of reputation getting himself into such a contemptible position.

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About Richard Owen's view on human and ape brains, in a letter to J.D. Hooker
5 months 3 weeks ago

We are not ostriches, and cannot believe that if we refuse to look at what we do not wish to see, it will not exist. This is especially the case when what we do not wish to see is what we wish to eat. If it were really indispensable, or, if not indispensable, at least in some way useful! But it is quite unnecessary ... And this is continually being confirmed by the fact that young, kind, undepraved people - especially women and girls - without knowing how it logically follows, feel that virtue is incompatible with beefsteaks, and, as soon as they wish to be good, give up eating flesh.

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Ch. X
5 months 6 days ago

I'm thinking of using a UBI certification organization to fund CivilSimian.com rather than advertising, which is gross. It's pretty obvious these corporations will push us to the edge of suffering, but a certification pushed by the people could fight back politically.

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4 months 1 week ago

From a correct Marxian point of view ... all measures designed to restrain, to regulate and to improve capitalism were simply "petty-bourgeois" nonsense ... True socialists should not place any obstacles in the way of capitalist evolution. For only the full maturity of capitalism could bring about socialism. It is not only vain, but harmful to the interests of the proletarians to resort to such measures.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom.

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Ch. 22. Of Custom, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
4 months 2 weeks ago

We have come to see that Huxley was right when he said that "a man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes." The evidences of these greater difficulties lie all about us: in the brave and brilliant atheists who have defied the Methodist God, and have become very nervous; in the women who have emancipated themselves from the tyranny of fathers, husbands, and homes, and with the intermittent but expensive help of a psychoanalyst, are now enduring liberty as interior decorators; in the young men and women who are world-weary at twenty-two; in the multitudes who drug themselves with pleasure; in the crowds enfranchised by the blood of heroes who cannot be persuaded to take an interest in their destiny; in the millions, at last free to think without fear of priest or policeman, who have made the moving pictures and the popular newspapers what they are.

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Preface
6 months 2 weeks ago

This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument.

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p. 33
6 months 1 week ago

This they do in the service of an imaginary science; and, like the astrologers and soothsayers whom they have succeeded, cast up their eyes to the clouds, and speak in immense, unsubstantiated images and similes, in deeply misleading metaphors and allegories, and make use of hypnotic formulae with little regard for experience, or rational argument, or tests of proven reliability. Thereby they throw dust in their own eyes as well as in ours, obstruct our vision of the real world, and further confuse an already sufficiently bewildered public about the relations of morality to politics, and about the nature and methods of the natural sciences and historical studies alike.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The problem is that rural America has been a colony, certainly throughout my lifetime. I don't think anybody's paid attention to rural America since about 1945 or '50. Certainly not since 1952, when Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture said to the farmers: "Get big or get out." They've just abandoned rural America to corporations and technologies.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

In the army, capitalist development leads to the extension of obligatory military service to the reduction of the time of service and consequently to a material approach to a popular militia. But all of this takes place under the form of modern militarism in which the domination of the people by the militarist State and the class character of the State manifest themselves most clearly.

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Ch.8
3 months 3 weeks ago

The equal rights of man, and the happiness of every individual, are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government. Modern times have the signal advantage, too, of having discovered the only device by which these rights can be secured, to wit: government by the people, acting not in person, but by representatives chosen by themselves, that is to say; by every man of ripe years and sane mind, who either contributes by his purse or person to the support of his country.

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4 months 6 days ago

The shortest way to wealth is through the contempt of wealth.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

Knowledge grows, but human beings remain much the same.Belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history as a universal narrative, and an intellectually rigorous atheism would start by questioning it.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

There's something that remains barbarous in educated people, and lately I've more and more had the feeling that we are nonwondering primitives. And why is it that we no longer marvel at these technological miracles? They've become the external facts of every life. We've all been to the university, we've had introductory courses in everything, and therefore we have persuaded ourselves that if we had the time to apply ourselves to these scientific marvels, we would understand them. But of course that's an illusion. It couldn't happen. Even among people who have had careers in science. They know no more about how it all works than we do. So we are in the position of savage men who, however, have been educated into believing that they are capable of understanding everything. Not that we actually do understand, but that we have the capacity.

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"A Half Life" (1990), pp. 302-303
6 months 3 weeks ago

God, I have said, is the fulfiller, or the reality, of the human desires for happiness, perfection, and immortality. From this it may be inferred that to deprive man of God is to tear the heart out of his breast. But I contest the premises from which religion and theology deduce the necessity and existence of God, or of immortality, which is the same thing. I maintain that desires which are fulfilled only in the imagination, or from which the existence of an imaginary being is deduced, are imaginary desires, and not the real desires of the human heart; I maintain that the limitations which the religious imagination annuls in the idea of God or immortality, are necessary determinations of the human essence, which cannot be dissociated from it, and therefore no limitations at all, except precisely in man's imagination.

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Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View
8 months 4 days ago

Love and the gracious heart are a single thing...one can no more be without the otherthan the reasoning mind without its reason.

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Chapter XVI (tr. Mark Musa)
6 months 4 days ago

The task of power is to transform the always possible 'no' into a 'yes.'

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Like the body the soul can be healthy, youthful, and so on. It can undergo pain, thirst, and hunger. In this physical life, that is, in the visible world, we avoid whatever would defile or deform the body; how much more, then, ought we to avoid that which would tarnish the soul?

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8 months 1 week ago

In this one man, the whole Church has been assumed by the Word.

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p.434
7 months 1 week ago

Human beings are social animals. We were social before we were human.

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Chapter 1, The Origins Of Altruism, p. 3
6 months 1 week ago

The most important part of education - to teach the meaning of to know (in the scientific sense). The last statement in her notebook

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes.

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Ch. 9, p. 138 [2012 reprint]
5 months 3 weeks ago

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called 'sex' is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.

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Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
8 months 1 week ago

Perfect is the virtue which is according to the Mean! Rare have they long been among the people, who could practice it!

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7 months 3 weeks ago

A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.

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Ch. VI: International relations, p. 106
7 months 2 weeks ago

Indeed, it is tempting to suppose that it is self evident that things should be so arranged so as to lead to the most good.

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Chapter I, Section 5, pg. 25
6 months 2 weeks ago

Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.

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4 months 1 week ago

I do not know what postmodern is and how it differs from the premodern, nor do I feel that I ought to know.

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"Modernity on Endless Trial"
4 months 2 days ago

Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or "loyal opposition" to the culture in which it is involved.

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p. 7
5 months 2 weeks ago

Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

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Him with His Foot in His Mouth, from Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984) [Penguin Classics, 1998, ISBN 0-141-18023-4], p. 11
7 months 2 weeks ago

From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today's literature is, for instance, largely destructive.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

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Letter to his Italian friend, Philip Mazzei
7 months 1 week ago

The universe itself is God and the universal outpouring of its soul.

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As quoted in De Natura Deorum by Cicero, i. 15.

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