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2 months 1 week ago

"We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology."
- Marshall McLuhan

See biography for Marshall McLuhan:
https://civilsimian.com/MarshallMcLuhan

Read Marshall McLuhan's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/179/content

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5 months 2 weeks ago

If you look at the graph of the growth of G.M.O.s, the growth of application of glyphosate and autism, it's literally a one-to-one correspondence. And you could make that graph for kidney failure, you could make that graph for diabetes, you could make that graph even for Alzheimer's.

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On the correlation of autism, kidney failure, diabetes and Alzheimer's with GMOs and glyphosate, as quoted in "Seeds of Doubt" by Michael Specter, The New Yorker
6 months 1 week ago

What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.

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Ch. 1
6 months 2 weeks ago

The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.

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Proposition 4
4 months 1 week ago

Man is constituted as a speculative being; he contemplates the world, and the objects around him, not with a passive indifferent eye, but as a system disposed with order and design.

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To be content with life - or to live merrily, rather - all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance; the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow.

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K 29
7 months 3 weeks ago

We are but numbers, born to consume resources.

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Book I, epistle ii, line 27
6 months 6 days ago

There is one ethical principle, either you are preserving life generally, or you aren't. Preserving life in your ends and your means determines whether you are good or evil.

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7 months 2 days ago

Hypocrisy, of course, delights in the most sublime speculations; for, never intending to go beyond speculation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent.

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7 months 2 days ago

It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you both your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

I heard what you were saying. You - you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.

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Cameo appearance as himself in Woody Allen's 1977 film Annie Hall
8 months 2 days ago

All sources of energy upon which industry depends are wasted when they are employed; and industry is expending them at a continually increasing rate. Already coal has been largely replaced by oil, and oil is being used up so fast that East and West alike conceive it necessary to their own prosperity to destroy the industry of the other. And what is true of oil is equally true of other natural resources. Every day, many square miles of forest are turned into newspaper, but there is no known process by which newspaper can be turned into forest. You will say that this need not worry us, since newspapers will be replaced by radio, but radio requires electricity, electricity requires power, and power depends upon raw materials.

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Part I: Man and Nature, Ch. 4: The Limits of Human Power, p. 30
8 months 2 days ago

All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire those things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can only be refuted by science: Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot ensure our own prosperity except by ensuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.

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"The Science to Save Us from Science," The New York Times Magazine, 3/19/1950
6 months 3 weeks ago

Keep on, then, seeking first the Kingdom and his righteousness, and all these other things will be added to you. So never be anxious about the next day, for the next day will have its own anxieties. Each day has enough of its own troubles.

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Matthew 6:33-34, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures
5 months 4 weeks ago

The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.

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5 months 1 week ago

Human rights are not just cultural or legal constructions, as fashionable western relativists are fond of claiming. They are universal values. To deny the benefits of the new regime of rights to other cultures is to patronise them in a way that is reminiscent of the colonial era. If the new regime on torture is good enough for the US, who can say that it is not good for everyone?

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5 months 4 weeks ago

The poor man is ruined as soon as he begins to ape the rich.

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Maxim 941
8 months 4 weeks ago

Science fiction offers its writers chances of embarrassment that no other form of fiction does.

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8 months 1 week ago

Faith is a living, bold trust in God's grace, so certain of God's favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it. Such confidence and knowledge of God's grace makes you happy, joyful and bold in your relationship to God and all creatures. The Holy Spirit makes this happen through faith. Because of it, you freely, willingly and joyfully do good to everyone, serve everyone, suffer all kinds of things, love and praise the God who has shown you such grace.

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An Introduction to St. Paul's Letter to the Romans fromDr. Martin Luthers Vermischte Deutsche Schriften. Johann K. Irmischer, ed. Vol. 63(Erlangen: Heyder and Zimmer, 1854), pp. 124-125. (EA 63:124-125)
6 months 2 weeks ago

And the central assertion of his philosophy is that this inner realm is the 'spiritual world' and that once man has learned to enter this realm, he realizes that it is not a mere imaginative reflection of the external world, but a world that possesses its own independent reality.

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p. 161
5 months 1 week ago

Science is not distinguished from myth by science being literally true and myth only a type of poetic analogy. While their aims are different, both are composed of symbols we use to deal with a slippery world.

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Beyond the Last Thought: Freud's cigars and the long way round to Nirvana (p. 96)
8 months 2 days ago

Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man.

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p. 486
4 months ago

What remains is the remarkable and, for many, certainly disquieting diagnosis that all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being.

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8 months 4 days ago

In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural capacities which are directed to the use of his reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual.

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Second Thesis
7 months 3 weeks ago

It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.

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p. 96
8 months 3 weeks ago

Speaking with sense we must fortify ourselves in the common sense of all, as a city is fortified by its law, and even more forcefully. For all human laws are nourished by the one divine law. For it prevails as far as it will and suffices for all and is superabundant.

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8 months 1 week ago

The unassisted hand and the understanding left to itself possess but little power. Effects are produced by the means of instruments and helps, which the understanding requires no less than the hand; and as instruments either promote or regulate the motion of the hand, so those that are applied to the mind prompt or protect the understanding.

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Aphorism 2
8 months 1 week ago

An armed insurrection ... would hinder and bring into disrepute this spiritual insurrection.

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p. 68
8 months 4 weeks ago

Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously. "No artist tolerates reality," says Nietzsche.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

We exhort the compromisers to open their hearts to truth, to free themselves of their wretched and blind circumspection, of their intellectual arrogance, and of the servile fear which dries up their souls and paralyzes their movements. Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!

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"The Reaction in Germany" (1842) Often paraphrased as, "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge"
5 months 3 weeks ago

However long Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians struggle to find multiple meanings in this text, the dominant seems to be this: Abraham's unquestioning willingness to heed gods command to sacrifice the thing he loved most is what qualified him to become the father of what are called still the Abrahamic faiths.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

When, in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob, and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow, these institutions.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

A whole dimension of human activity and passivity has been de-eroticized. The environment from which the individual could obtain pleasure-which he could cathect as gratifying almost as an extended zone of the body-has been rigidly reduced. Consequently, the "universe" of libidinous cathexis is likewise reduced. The effect is a localization and contraction of libido, the reduction of erotic to sexual experience and satisfaction.

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p. 73
8 months 1 day ago

We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.

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Lecture III, "The Reality of the Unseen"
8 months 2 days ago

Undeterred by this examination, the French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led beyond the ideas of the entire old world order. The revolutionary movement which began in 1789 in the Cercle Social, which in the middle of its course had as its chief representatives Leclerc and Roux, and which finally with Babeuf's conspiracy was temporarily defeated, gave rise to the communist idea which Babeuf's friend Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1830. This idea, consistently developed, is the idea of the new world order.

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Chapter 6, 3
8 months 5 days ago

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

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Section I, Chap. I
6 months 3 weeks ago

And because the condition of Man, (as hath been declared in the precedent Chapter) is a condition of Warre of every one against everyone; in which case every one is governed by his own Reason; and there is nothing he can make use of, that may not be a help unto him, in preserving his life against his enemyes; It followeth, that in such a condition, every man has a Right to every thing; even to one anothers body.

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The First Part, Chapter 14, p. 64
8 months 1 day ago

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

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Ch. 4
6 months 3 weeks ago

The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

To understand this for sense it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or a logician, but that he should be mad. On the proposition that the volume generated by revolving the region under 1/x from 1 to infinity has finite volume.

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Quoted in Mathematical Maxims and Minims by N. Rose
6 months 2 weeks ago

There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain, or with whatever may be the specific thinking organ; while others think with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the life. And the people who think only with the brain develop into definition-mongers; they become the professionals of thought.

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Opinion considers the opposition of what is true and false quite rigid, and, confronted with a philosophical system, it expects agreement or contradiction. And in an explanation of such a system, opinion still expects to find one or the other.

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Preface, § 2
3 weeks 2 days ago

A fun aesthetic to counter Emil's persistently suicidal thought process...☠️🤷‍♂️

"The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise."
- Emil Cioran

See biography for Emil Cioran:
https://civilsimian.com/Emil-Cioran

Read Emil Cioran's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/133/content

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4 months 1 week ago

Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.

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As quoted in The World of the Atom (1966) by Henry Abraham Boorse and Lloyd Motz, p. 741
7 months 1 week ago

Place is the greatest thing, as it contains all things.

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As quoted in Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, I, 35
6 months 2 weeks ago

How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard.

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"On What There Is"

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