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Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva
2 months 3 weeks ago
Being a planetary citizen does not...

Being a planetary citizen does not need space travel. It means being conscious that we are part of the universe and of the earth. The most fundamental law is to recognise that we share the planet with other beings, and that we have a duty to care for our common home.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 1 week ago
Either Man will abolish war, or...

Either Man will abolish war, or war will abolish Man.

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Fact and Fiction (1961), Part IV, Ch. 10: "Can War Be Abolished?", p. 276
Philosophical Maxims
Joseph de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre
1 month 1 week ago
Faith and patriotism are the two...

Faith and patriotism are the two great thaumaturges of this world. Both are divine; all their actions are prodigies. Do not go to them talking of examination, choice, or discussion; they will say that you blaspheme. They know only two words: submission and belief; with these two levers they raise the world. Even their errors are sublime. These two children of Heaven prove their origin to all eyes by creating and conserving; but if they unite, join their forces, and together take possession of a nation, they exalt it, they divinize it, and they increase its forces a hundred-fold.

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p. 88
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
3 months 3 weeks 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
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 month 1 week ago
But with respect to future debt;...

But with respect to future debt; would it not be wise and just for that nation to declare in the constitution they are forming that neither the legislature, nor the nation itself can validly contract more debt, than they may pay within their own age, or within the term of 19 years.

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Letter to James Madison (6 September 1789) ME 7:455, Papers 15:393
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 1 week ago
The interiorization of the technology of...

The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.

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(p. 21)
Philosophical Maxims
Zoroaster
Zoroaster
5 months ago
He who upholds Truth with all...

He who upholds Truth with all the might of his power, He who upholds Truth the utmost in his word and deed,He, indeed, is Thy most valued helper, O Mazda Ahura!

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Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 31, 22.
Philosophical Maxims
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
4 months 1 week ago
I bow before the authority of...

I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed upon me by my own reason. I am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its details and positive developments, any very large portion of human knowledge. The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the whole. Thence results, for science as well as for industry, the necessity of the division and association of labor. I receive and I give - such is human life. Each directs and is directed in his turn. Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months ago
I will remark again, however, as...

I will remark again, however, as a fact not unimportant to be understood, that the different sphere constitutes the grand origin of such distinction; that the Hero can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will, according to the kind of world he finds himself born into. I confess, I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men.

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Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
3 months 2 days ago
The real reason people are conservatives...

The real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things that they love, and want to preserve them from abuse and decay. They are attached to their family, their friends, their religion, and their immediate environment. They have made a lifelong distinction between the things that nourish and the things that threaten their security and peace of mind.

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Conservatism and the Conservatory,, National Review
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
6 months 1 week ago
It is only afterward that a...

It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
2 months 2 weeks ago
A global transition to a cruelty-free...

A global transition to a cruelty-free vegan diet won't just help non-human animals. The transition will also help malnourished humans who could benefit from the grain currently fed to factory-farmed animals. For factory-farming is not just cruel; it's energy-inefficient. Let's take just one example. Over the past few decades, millions of Ethiopians have died of "food shortages" while Ethiopia grew grain to sell to the West to feed cattle. Western meat-eating habits prop up the price of grain so that poor people in the developing world can't afford to buy it. In consequence, they starve by the millions.In my work, I explore futuristic, hi-tech solutions to the problem of suffering. But anybody who seriously wants to reduce human and non-human suffering alike should adopt a cruelty-free vegan lifestyle today.

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"A World Without Suffering?", Instituto Humanitas Unisinos, Jan. 2011
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
5 months 4 days 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
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 1 week ago
There are two classes of poets...

There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.

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Parnassus (1874) Preface
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
5 months 4 weeks ago
Leaving virtue without proper cultivation;...

Leaving virtue without proper cultivation; not thoroughly discussing what is learned; not being able to move towards righteousness of which a knowledge is gained; and not being able to change what is not good: these are the things which occasion me solicitude.

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Philosophical Maxims
George Berkeley
George Berkeley
4 months 2 weeks ago
Few men think; yet all have...

Few men think; yet all have opinions.

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Philonous to Hylas. The Second Dialogue. This appears in a passage first added in the third edition
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
4 months 3 weeks ago
Man know thyself; then thou shalt...

Man know thyself; then thou shalt know the Universe and God.

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As quoted in Fragments of Reality: Daily Entries of Lived Life (2006) by Peter Cajander, p. 109
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
4 months ago
Egos appear by setting themselves apart...

Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 5 days ago
Self-pity is not as sterile as...

Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
5 months 1 week ago
I doubt not but one great...

I doubt not but one great reason why many children abandon themselves wholly to silly sports, and trifle away all their time insipidly, is, because they have found their curiosity baulk'd, and their inquiries neglected. But had they been treated with more kindness and respect, and their questions answered, as they should, to their satisfaction; I doubt not but that they would have taken more pleasure in learning, and improving their knowledge, wherein there would still be newness and variety, which is what they are delighted with, than in returning over and over to the same play and play-things.

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Sec. 118
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
5 months 4 weeks ago
This is the ideal world –...

This is the ideal world, a perfect world of equality, fraternity, harmony, welfare, and justice.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
5 months 1 week ago
Heaven and Hell suppose two distinct...

Heaven and Hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad; but the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue. -- Were one to go round the world with an intention of giving a good supper to the righteous, and a sound drubbing to the wicked, he would frequently be embarrassed in his choice, and would find that the merits and the demerits of most men and women scarcely amount to the value of either.

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Essay on the Immortality of the Soul
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
5 months 1 week ago
Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers,...

Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expence of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those of the neighbourhood of the town. They are upon that the greatest of all improvements.

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Chapter XI, Part I, p. 174.
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Schmitt
Carl Schmitt
1 month 1 week ago
A science that observes the laws...

A science that observes the laws of causation, and so is value-free, threatens human freedom and man's religious, ethical, and legal responsibility. The philosophy of values raised to that challenge, in the sense that it opposed a sphere of values, as a realm of ideal valuations, to a sphere of being that was only causally understood. It was an attempt to assert the human being as a free, responsible creature, indeed not in itself, but at least, in its valuation, what one called value. That attempt was put forth as a positivistic substitute for the metaphysical.

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Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
6 months 1 week ago
It will be easy for us...

It will be easy for us once we receive the ball of yarn from Ariadne (love) and then go through all the mazes of the labyrinth (life) and kill the monster. But how many are there who plunge into life (the labyrinth) without taking that precaution?

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months ago
What is all Knowledge too but...

What is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?

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Carlyle, Essays, On History. Quote reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 419-23.
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
4 weeks 1 day ago
All government....
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Main Content / General
Gottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Leibniz
5 months 1 week ago
We never have a full demonstration,...

We never have a full demonstration, although there is always an underlying reason for the truth, even if it is only perfectly understood by God, who alone penetrated the infinite series in one stroke of the mind.

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The Shorter Leibniz Texts (2006) edited by Lloyd H. Strickland, p. 111
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 5 days ago
As long as I live I...

As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann
2 months 6 days ago
Whether or not birth control is...

Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.

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Ch. XIV: "Love in the Great Society", §4, p. 291
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
5 months 1 week ago
I would say to the readers...

I would say to the readers of the Scriptures, if they wish for a good book, read the Bhagavad-Gita...translated by Charles Wilkins. It deserves to be read with reverence even by yankees...Besides the Bhagvat-Geeta, our Shakespeare seems sometimes youthfully green...Ex oriente lux may still be the motto of scholars, for the Western world has not yet derived from the East all the light it is destined to derive thence.

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Quoted in Sushama Londhe, A Tribute to Hinduism (New Delhi: Pragun Publication, 2008) p. 26
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
5 months 1 week ago
You can hardly convince a man...

You can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grandchildren may be.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
4 months 5 days ago
People think they have taken quite...

People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.

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Introduction to 1891 edition of Karl Marx's, The Civil War in France
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 5 days ago
We suffer: the external world begins...

We suffer: the external world begins to exist . . . ; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 1 week ago
The "message" of any medium or...

The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.

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(p. 8)
Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
3 months 2 days ago
As a scholar [Allan Bloom] intends...

As a scholar [Allan Bloom] intends to enlighten us, and as a writer he has learned from Aristophanes and other models that enlightenment should also be enjoyable. To me, this is not the book of a professor, but that of a thinker who is willing to take the risks more frequently taken by writers. It is risky in a book of ideas to speak in one's own voice, but it reminds us that the sources of the truest truths are inevitably profoundly personal. ... Academics, even those describing themselves as existentialists, very seldom offer themselves publicly and frankly as individuals, as persons.

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p. 12
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 2 weeks ago
An untempted woman cannot boast of...

An untempted woman cannot boast of her chastity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 months 1 week ago
The vicomte was a nice-looking young...

The vicomte was a nice-looking young man with soft features and polished manners, who evidently considered himself a celebrity but out of politeness modestly placed himself at the disposal of the circle in which he found himself. Anna Pávlovna was obviously serving him up as a treat to her guests. As a clever maître d'hôtel serves up as a specially choice delicacy a piece of meat that no one who had seen it in the kitchen would have cared to eat, so Anna Pávlovna served up to her guests, first the vicomte and then the abbé, as peculiarly choice morsels. The group about Mortemart immediately began discussing the murder of the Duc d'Enghien. The vicomte said that the Duc d'Enghien had perished by his own magnanimity, and that there were particular reasons for Buonaparte's hatred of him.

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Bk. I, Ch. III
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
4 months 1 week ago
Nothing could be more natural than...

Nothing could be more natural than the developement of the passions, nor more striking than the views of the human heart. What delicate struggles! and uncommonly pretty turns of thought!

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Mary: A Fiction
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 1 week ago
Classics which at home are drowsily...

Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.

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Voyage to England
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
4 months 4 weeks ago
Now as of old the gods...

Now as of old the gods give men all good things, excepting only those that are baneful and injurious and useless. These, now as of old, are not gifts of the gods: men stumble into them themselves because of their own blindness and folly.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
5 months 1 week ago
Through the fortunate effect of my...

Through the fortunate effect of my frankness, I had the rarest and surest opportunity to know a man well, which is to study him at leisure in his private life and living, so to speak, with himself. For he share himself without reservation and made me feel as much at home in his house as in mine. I had almost no other abode than his own.

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Second Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
Philosophical Maxims
G. E. Moore
G. E. Moore
4 months 5 days ago
The study of Ethics would, no...

The study of Ethics would, no doubt, be far more simple, and its results far more "systematic," if, for instance, pain were an evil of exactly the same magnitude as pleasure is a good; but we have no reason whatever to assume that the Universe is such that ethical truths must display this kind of symmetry ... .

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Principia Ethica (1903), ch. VI.
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
3 months 1 week ago
And therefore just as a brigand...

And therefore just as a brigand caught in broad daylight in the act cannot persuade us that he did not lift his knife in order to rob his victim of his purse, and had no thought of killing him, we too, it would seem, cannot persuade ourselves or others that the soldiers and policemen around us are not to guard us, but only for defense against foreign foes, and to regulate traffic and fetes and reviews; we cannot persuade ourselves and others that we do not know that the men do not like dying of hunger, bereft of the right to gain their subsistence from the earth on which they live; that they do not like working underground, in the water, or in the stifling heat, for ten to fourteen hours a day, at night in factories to manufacture objects for our pleasure. One would imagine it impossible to deny what is so obvious. Yet it is denied.

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Chapter XII, Conclusion-Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
5 months 1 week ago
As the strata of the earth...

As the strata of the earth preserve in succession the living creatures of past epochs, so the shelves of libraries preserve in succession the errors of the past and their expositions, which like the former were very lively and made a great commotion in their own age but now stand petrified and stiff in a place where only the literary palaeontologist regards them.

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Vol. 2 "On Books and Writing" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
4 months 1 week ago
We too often forget that not...

We too often forget that not only is there "a soul of goodness in things evil," but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous.

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Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. I, Religion and Science; quoting from "There is some soul of goodness in things evil / Would men observingly distil it out", William Shakespeare, Henry V, act iv. sc. i
Philosophical Maxims
Max Stirner
Max Stirner
1 month 3 weeks ago
Just as the schoolmen philosophized only...

Just as the schoolmen philosophized only inside the belief of the church, ... without ever throwing a doubt upon this belief; as authors fill whole folios on the State without calling in question the fixed idea of the State itself; as our newspapers are crammed with politics because they are conjured into the fancy that man was created to be a zoon politicon,-so also subjects vegetate in subjection, virtuous people in virtue, liberals in humanity, etc., without ever putting to these fixed ideas of theirs the searching knife of criticism. Undislodgeable, like a madman's delusion, those thoughts stand on a firm footing, and he who doubts them-lays hands on the sacred!

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Cambridge 1995, p. 44
Philosophical Maxims
A. J. Ayer
A. J. Ayer
4 months 6 days ago
There is philosophy, which is about...

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.
Philosophical Maxims
Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras
4 months 4 weeks ago
And since these things are so,...

And since these things are so, we must suppose that there are contained many things and of all sorts in the things that are uniting, seeds of all things, with all sorts of shapes and colours and savours.

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Frag. B 4, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months ago
Sarcasm I now see to be,...

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it.

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Bk. II, ch. 4.
Philosophical Maxims
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