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4 months 3 weeks ago

In the end, I am moved by causes and ideas that I can actually choose to support because they conform to values and principles that I believe in.

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p. 88
6 months 1 week ago

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.

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Culture
5 months 4 days ago

Ever since the first World War, when the system of liberalism began to shape into the system of authoritarianism, a widespread opinion has blames Hegelianism for the ideological of the new system.

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P. 390
4 months 3 weeks ago

I believe government, organized authority, or the State is necessary only to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only. As a promoter of individual liberty, human well-being and social harmony, which alone constitute real order, government stands condemned by all the great men of the world...I believe - indeed, I know - that whatever is fine and beautiful in the human expresses and asserts itself in spite of government, and not because of it.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

It seemed perfectly possible that, in spite of my certainty of my own genius, I might die of some illness, or perhaps even in a street accident, before I had ever glimpsed the meaning of life. My moods of happiness and self-confidence convinced me that I had a "destiny" to become a famous writer, and to be remembered as one of the most important thinkers of the century.

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p. 67
2 months 3 weeks ago

On the same subject you will obtain more complete and more abstruse information by consulting the works upon it composed by the divine Iamblichus: you will find there the extreme limit of human wisdom attained. May the mighty Sun grant me to attain to no less knowledge of himself, and to teach it publicly to all, and privately to such as are worthy to receive it: and as long as the god grants this to us, let us consult in common his well-beloved Iamblichus; out of whose abundance a few things, that have come into my mind, I have here set down. That no other person will treat of this subject more perfectly than he has done, I am well aware; not even though he should expend much additional labour in making new discoveries in the research; for in all probability he will go astray from the most correct conception of the nature of the god.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

It was under Catholic Feudalism that they were first united; a union for which their incorporation into the Roman empire had prepared them, and which was finally organized by the incomparable genius of Charlemagne.

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p. 88
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.

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Book I, Ch. 26
2 months 3 weeks ago

To recognize that some of the things our culture believes are not true imposes on us the duty of finding out which are true and which are not.

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"Western Civ," p. 22.
2 months 2 weeks ago

One of the commonplaces of modern historiography is the polemical exaltation of the civilization of the Renaissance over and against medieval civilization. This is not just the expression of a typical misunderstanding, since this mentality is the effect of one among the innumerable deceptions purposely spread in modern culture by the leaders of global subversion. The truth is that after the collapse of the ancient world, if there ever was a civilization that deserves the name of Renaissance, this was the civilization of the Middle Ages. In its objectivity, its virile spirit, its hierarchical structure, its proud antihumanistic simplicity so often permeated by the sense of the sacred, the Middle Ages represented a return to the origins.

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p.309
2 months 3 weeks ago

Other vices can be concealed and cherished in secret; anger shows itself openly and appears in the countenance, and the greater it is, the more plainly it boils forth. Do you not see how in all animals certain signs appear before they proceed to mischief, and how their entire bodies put off their usual quiet appearance and stir up their ferocity? Boars foam at the mouth and sharpen their teeth by rubbing them against trees, bulls toss their horns in the air and scatter the sand with blows of their feet

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6 months 1 week ago

When communist workmen associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need - the need for society - and what appears as a means becomes an end. You can observe this practical processing its most splendid results whenever you see French socialist workers together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring together. Company, association, and conversation, which again has society as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is on mere phase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies.

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"The Meaning of Human Requirements" p.99-100,The Marx-Engels Reader
2 months 2 days ago

I have come to believe that the motion of the Earth cannot be detected by any optical experiment.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Power is not opposed to freedom. It is precisely freedom that distinguishes power from violence or coercion.

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3 months 2 days ago

She is a woman now, and not an idle girl, not a domestic ornament or a sexual convenience anymore.

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On the maturation of women, Ch. 4 : On Old Age
3 months 3 days ago

The subject of a gestalt demonstration knows that his perception has shifted because he can make it shift back and forth repeatedly while he holds the same book or piece of paper in his hands. Aware that nothing in his environment has changed, he directs his attention increasingly not to the figure (duck or rabbit) but to the lines of the paper he is looking at. Ultimately he may even learn to see those lines without seeing either of the figures, and he may then say (what he could not legitimately have said earlier) that it is these lines that he really sees but that he sees them alternately as a duck and as a rabbit. ...As in all similar psychological experiments, the effectiveness of the demonstration depends upon its being analyzable in this way. Unless there were an external standard with respect to which a switch of vision could be demonstrated, no conclusion about alternate perceptual possibilities could be drawn. 

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p. 114 (3rd edn.)
2 months 1 week ago

And so no force however great can stretch a cord however fine into an horizontal line which is accurately straight.

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Elementary Treatise on Mechanics, The Equilibrium of Forces on a Point, 1819
6 months 2 weeks ago

Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no-one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end.

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Part Two : Metaphysical Principles of Virtue
2 months 3 weeks ago

The most profound reason... why the metropolis conduces to the urge for the most individual personal existence... appears to me to be the following: the development of modern culture is characterized by the preponderance of what one may call the "objective spirit" over the "subjective spirit."

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p. 421 as cited in: Kenneth Allan (2009) Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory: Seeing the Social World. p. 212
4 months 1 week ago

People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.

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ARTnews annual, Volume 31, Art Foundation, 1966, p. 56
6 months 1 week ago

When I was 4 years old ... I dreamt that I'd been eaten by a wolf, and to my great surprise I was in the wolf's stomach and not in heaven.

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BBC interview on "Face to Face" (1959); The Listener, Vol. 61 (1959), p. 503
6 months 1 week ago

It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.

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On Liberty, 1859
4 months 1 week ago

I started my YouTube channel to make this one video basically.

Universal Humanism

1. Survive.
2. Don't prevent another's survival.
3. Help the less fortunate.

https://youtu.be/UekDo_WVQAg

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6 months 1 week ago

The world is his, who has money to go over it.

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Wealth
6 months 1 week ago

Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind.

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Ch. 4: The Study of Mathematics
4 months 4 weeks ago

To be sure, exchange-value exerts its power in a special way in the realm of cultural goods. For in the world of commodities this realm appears to be exempted from the power of exchange, to be in an immediate relationship with the goods, and it is this appearance in turn which alone gives cultural goods their exchange-value. But they nevertheless simultaneously fall completely into the world of commodities, are produced for the market, and are aimed at the market.

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p. 279
6 months 1 week ago

This book, admirable in so many respects, power in its break and style, is even more intimidating for me in that, having formely had the good fortune to study under Michel Foucault, I retain the consciousness of an admiring and grateful disciple. Now, the disciple's consciousness, when he starts, I would not say to dispute, but to engage in dialogue with the master or, better, to articulate the interminable and silent dialogue which made him into a disciple-this disciple's consciousness is an unhappy consciousness.

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Cogito and The History of Madness (Routledge classics edition)
6 months 1 week ago

God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.

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Book II, Chapter 3, "The Shocking Alternative"
6 months 2 weeks ago

I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something purely relative, as time; an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions.

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Third letter to Samuel Clarke, February 25, 1716
2 months 1 week ago

He who fears death either fears to lose all sensation or fears new sensations. In reality, you will either feel nothing at all, and therefore nothing evil, or else, if you can feel any sensations, you will be a new creature, and so will not have ceased to have life.

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VIII, 58
6 months 1 week ago

Whatever limits us we call Fate.

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Fate
7 months 1 week ago

I consider one of the most important duties of any scientist the teaching of science to students and to the general public.

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6 months 1 week ago

You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence "democracy", and the other "tyranny".

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As quoted in Freedom: A New Analysis (1954) by Maurice William Cranston, p. 112
6 months 1 week ago

The only thing that will redeem mankind is co-operation, and the first step towards co-operation lies in the hearts of individuals.

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p. 212
2 months 1 week ago

The assumption of a Final Cause in the structure of each part of animals and plants is as inevitable as the assumption of an Efficient Cause for every event. The maxim that in organized bodies nothing is 'in vain', is as necessarily true as the maxim that nothing happens 'by chance'.

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5 months 2 days ago

Existential envy which is directed against the other person's very nature, is the strongest source of ressentiment. It is as if it whispers continually: "I can forgive everything, but not that you are- that you are what you are-that I am not what you are-indeed that I am not you." This form of envy strips the opponent of his very existence, for this existence as such is felt to be a "pressure," a "reproach," and an unbearable humiliation. In the lives of great men there are always critical periods of instability, in which they alternately envy and try to love those whose merits they cannot but esteem. Only gradually, one of these attitudes will predominate. Here lies the meaning of Goethe's reflection that "against another's great merits, there is no remedy but love."

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 52-53
6 months 1 week ago

In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded. They divide their time between labour designed to postpone the moment of dissolution for themselves and frantic struggles to hasten it for others of their kind.

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Dreams and Facts, 1919
6 months 1 week ago

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

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As quoted in The Beginning of the End (2004) by Peter Hershey, p. 109 Also, as quoted in "The Relentless Rise of Science as Fun", by Jeremy Burgess, in New Scientist, Volume 143, Issues 1932-1945, originally published 1994.
5 months 1 week ago

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

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6 months 2 days ago

A law there is, an oracle of Doom, Of old enacted by the assembled gods, That if a Daemon-such as live for ages- Defile himself with foul and sinful murder, He must for seasons thrice ten thousand roam Far from the Blest; such is the path I tread, I too a wanderer and exile from heaven.

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tr. Phillip H. De Lacy and Benedict Einarson. Cf. full quotation at Leonard p. 54-55 fr. 115, as paraphrased in Plutarch's Moralia
6 months 1 week ago

Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.

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5 months 1 week ago

As the animus is partial to argument, he can best be seen at work in disputes where both parties know they are right. Men can argue in a very womanish way, too, when they are anima-possessed and have thus been transformed into the animus of their own anima.

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Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.29
6 months 3 weeks ago

Why, what is weeping and sighing? A judgement. What is misfortune? A judgement. What are strife, disagreement, fault-finding, accusing, impiety, foolishness? They are all judgements.

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Book III, ch. 3, 18, 19.
3 months 6 days ago

If you could see the earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon.

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Salviati, p. 88
5 months 2 weeks ago

Your god is too small.

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Attributed to Bruno in episode 1 of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014). Earliest use of this phrase appears to be in Your God is Too Small (1961) by English priest John Bertram Phillips.
5 months 1 week ago

After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?

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6 months 2 weeks ago

It is difficult for the isolated individual to work himself out of the immaturity which has become almost natural for him. He has even become fond of it and for the time being is incapable of employing his own intelligence, because he has never been allowed to make the attempt. Statutes and formulas, these mechanical tools of a serviceable use, or rather misuse, of his natural faculties, are the ankle-chains of a continuous immaturity. Whoever threw it off would make an uncertain jump over the smallest trench because he is not accustomed to such free movement. Therefore there are only a few who have pursued a firm path and have succeeded in escaping from immaturity by their own cultivation of the mind.

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