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2 months 1 week ago

It is clearly absurd to say that if you go on adding atoms together until they have fused into a complex molecule, that molecule will become capable of self-reproduction. It is like saying that a skyscraper is more capable of reproduction than a bungalow. And suppose life did come into being through some accidental interaction of molecules, sun and cosmic rays; why should it not be content to rest passively? Why should it have been possessed of a desire to persist and evolve?

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p. 259
3 months 3 weeks ago

The Upanishads and the Vedas haunt me. In them I have found eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken peace.

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Quoted in S. Londhe, A Tribute to Hinduism, 2008
2 weeks 5 days ago

Before a man can do things there must be things he will not do.

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Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (IVP, 1980), Ch 2
3 months 3 weeks ago

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

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Act 1
2 months 4 weeks ago

To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Of Every One-Hundred Men, Ten shouldn't even be there, Eighty are nothing but targets, Nine are real fighters... We are lucky to have them... They make the battle. Ah but the One, One of them is a Warrior... and He will bring the others back.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The greatest and noblest conceptions have no image wrought plainly for human vision, which he who wishes to satisfy the mind of the inquirer can apply to some one of his senses and by mere exhibition satisfy the mind. We must therefore endeavor by practice to acquire the power of giving and understanding a rational definition of each one of them; for immaterial things, which are the noblest and greatest, can be exhibited by reason only, and it is for their sake that all we are saying is said. But it is always easier to practice in small matters than in greater ones.

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2 months 1 week ago

I believe that the man choosing progress can find a new unity through the full development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom.

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1 week ago

Every relationship between two individuals or two groups will be characterized by the ratio of secrecy that is involved in it. Even when one of the parties does not notice the secret factor, yet the attitude of the concealer, and consequently the whole relationship, will be modified by it.

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p. 462
4 months 1 week ago

In a quarrel for earth, turn not to earth.

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First Homily, as translated by John Burnaby (1955), p. 267
2 months 1 week ago

Impulse, subjectivity and profanation, the old adversaries of materialistic alienation, now succumb to it. ... The representatives of the opposition to the authoritarian schema become witnesses to the authority of commercial success. ... In the service of success they renounce that insubordinate character which was theirs.

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p. 273
3 weeks 3 days ago

There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.

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Ch. V: "The Totalitarian Regimes", §7, p. 90
3 months 2 days ago

Useful undertakings which require sustained attention and vigorous precision in order to succeed often end up by being abandoned, for, in America, as elsewhere, the people move forward by sudden impulses and short-lived efforts.

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Chapter V
3 months 3 weeks ago

Kant was also quite aware that "the urgent need" of reason is both different from and "more than mere quest and desire for knowledge." Hence, the distinguishing of the two faculties, reason and intellect, coincides with a distinction between two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing.

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p. 14
3 months 3 weeks ago

Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one."

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2 months 3 weeks ago

In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.

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4 months ago

Metaphysics has as the proper object of its enquiries three ideas only: God, freedom, and immortality.

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B 395
1 month 6 days ago

Why expect a false theory of the world, i.e. classical physics, to yield a true account of consciousness?

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Social Media Unsorted Postings 2016
3 weeks 2 days ago

Religious minds, which are distrustful of philosophic dogmas, fall into the error - inculcated by philosophy - of supposing that Providence is limited in its action; that is does not extend to the social world or the social relations of mankind, and that God has not determined upon any plan of social organization for the regulation of those relations. If they had a PROFOUND FAITH IN THE UNIVERSALITY OF PROVIDENCE, they would be convinced that all human needs must have been foreseen and provided for, and especially that the most urgent of them all could not have been overlooked - namely, the need of a social order for the regulation of our industrial and social relations.

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The Theory of Social Organization. Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier, p. 5.
3 months 4 weeks ago

Cock-sure certainty is the source of much that is worst in our present world, and it is something of which the contemplation of history ought to cure us, not only or chiefly because there were wise men in the past, but because so much that was thought wisdom turned out to be folly - which suggests that much of our own supposed wisdom is no better. I do not mean to maintain that we should lapse into a lazy scepticism. We should hold our beliefs, and hold them strongly. Nothing great is achieved without passion, but underneath the passion there should always be that large impersonal survey which sets limits to actions that our passions inspire.

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History as an Art (1954), p. 9
4 months 1 day ago

Here then we may learn the fallacy of the remark... that any particular state is weak, though fertile, populous, and well cultivated, merely because it wants money. It appears that the want of money can never injure any state within itself: For men and commodities are the real strength of any community. It is the simple manner of living which here hurts the public, by confining the gold and silver to few hands, and preventing its universal diffusion and circulation. On the contrary, industry and refinements of all kinds incorporate it with the whole state, however small its quantity may be: They digest it into every vein, so to speak; and make it enter into every transaction and contract.

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Of Money (1752) as quoted in David Hume: Writings on Economics (1955, 1970) ed., Eugene Rotwein, p. 45.
3 months 1 week ago

Reason not with him, that will deny the principal truths!

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Get hold of yourself, be confident once more, don't forget that it is not given to just anyone to have idolized discouragement without succumbing to it.

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4 months 5 days ago

Labour not after riches first, and think thou afterwards wilt enjoy them. He who neglecteth the present moment, throweth away all that he hath. As the arrow passeth through the heart, while the warrior knew not that it was coming; so shall his life be taken away before he knoweth that he hath it.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

What is all that men have done and thought over thousands of years, compared with one moment of love. But in all Nature, too, it is what is nearest to perfection, what is most divinely beautiful! There all stairs lead from the threshold of life. From there we come, to there we go.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

I often asked myself the following question. There is no doubt that at all times for many men one of the greatest tortures of their lives has been the contact, the collision with the folly of their neighbours. And yet how is it that there has never been attempted - I think this is so - a study on this matter, an Essay on Folly? For the pages of Erasmus do not treat of this aspect of the matter.

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Chap. VIII: The Masses Intervene In Everything, And Why Their Intervention Is Solely By Violence
3 months 4 weeks ago

Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.

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Book V, Chapter XI, §13
1 week 1 day ago

What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained-though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.

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p. 96
Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.
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2 months 2 weeks ago

Every morning I shall concern myself anew about the boundary Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No And pressing forward honor reality. We cannot avoid Using power, Cannot escape the compulsion To afflict the world, So let us, cautious in diction And mighty in contradiction, Love powerfully.

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"Power and Love"
1 week 5 days ago

Do you ask me whom I have conquered? Neither the Persians, nor the far-off Medes, nor any warlike race that lies beyond the Dahae; not these, but greed, ambition, and the fear of death that has conquered the conquerors of the world.

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4 months 1 week ago

Although life is a matter of indifference, the use which you make of it is not a matter of indifference.

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Book II, ch. 6, 1.
2 months 4 weeks ago

Resolved to die in the last dike of prevarication.

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Speech on the sixth article of charge in the impeachment of Warren Hastings (7 May 1789), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Tenth (1899), p. 406
4 months 3 weeks ago

Such was the vast power which the god settled in the lost island of Atlantis; and this he afterwards directed against our land for the following reasons, as tradition tells: For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well-affectioned towards the god, whose seed they were; for they possessed true and in every way great spirits, uniting gentleness with wisdom in the various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one another.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

"I will show," said Agesilaus, "that it is not the places that grace men, but men the places."

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Of Agesilaus the Great
3 months 4 weeks ago

The conception of the necessary unit of all that is resolves itself into the poverty of the imagination, and a freer logic emancipates us from the straitwaistcoated benevolent institution which idealism palms off as the totality of being.

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p. 9
3 weeks 1 day ago

Liberalism... has a left of center meaning in the United States. It has a slightly right of center meaning in much of continental Europe.

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5 days ago

What is it that we humans depend on? We depend on our words... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character ... We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.

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Quoted in Philosophy of Science Vol. 37 (1934), p. 157, and in The Truth of Science : Physical Theories and Reality (1997) by Roger Gerhard Newton, p. 176
2 months ago

Being>identity. Existence>essence.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Science fiction is like other writing. It is just novels and short stories with machines.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

When scolded for masturbating in public, he said "I wish it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing my belly."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 46, 69
2 weeks 4 days ago

A million blockheads looking authoritatively into one man of what you call genius, or noble sense, will make nothing but nonsense out of him and his qualities, and his virtues and defects, if they look till the end of time. He understands them, sees what they are; but that they should understand him, and see with rounded outline what his limits are,-this, which would mean that they are bigger than he, is forever denied them. Their one good understanding of him is that they at last should loyally say, "We do not quite understand thee; we perceive thee to be nobler and wiser and bigger than we, and will loyally follow thee."

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood.

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(p. 211)
1 month 4 weeks ago

[Variation of the same quote:] When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high.

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Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@ Interview with Joel Bleifuss, In These Times
3 months 4 weeks ago

If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction.

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Vol. I, Ch. 23, pg. 620.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

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George Santayana, as quoted in Quotations for Our Time (1977) edited by Laurence J. Peter
2 months 2 weeks ago

Technical progress and more comfortable living permit the systematic inclusion of libidinal components into the realm of commodity production and exchange. But no matter how controlled the mobilization of instinctual energy may be (it sometimes amounts to a scientific management of libido), no matter how much it may serve as a prop for the status quo-it is also gratifying to the managed individuals, just as racing the outboard motor, pushing the power lawn mower, and speeding the automobile are fun.

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p. 75
2 months 1 week ago

When power is separated from any communicative context, it becomes naked violence.

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