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2 months 3 days ago

Why not? What is to hinder this Samson from governing? There is in him what far transcends all apprenticeships; in the man himself there exists a model of governing, something to govern by! There exists in him a heart-abhorrence of whatever is incoherent, pusillanimous, unveracious,-that is to say, chaotic, _un_governed; of the Devil, not of God. A man of this kind cannot help governing! He has the living ideal of a governor in him; and the incessant necessity of struggling to unfold the same out of him.

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5 months 2 days ago

Tomorrow we will be back on the vast ocean.

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The Routledge Dictionary of Latin Quotations: The Illiterati's Guide to Latin Maxims, Mottoes, Proverbs and Sayings
3 months 1 week ago

A man, Mr. Scrymgeour, may fall into a thousand perplexities, but if his heart be upright and his intelligence unclouded, he will issue from them all without dishonour.

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The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the House with the Green Blinds.
1 month 1 week ago

You ask if I mean to publish anything on the subject of a letter of mine to my friend Charles Thompson? Certainly not. I write nothing for publication, and last of all things should it be on the subject of religion. On the dogmas of religion as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarrelling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind. Were I to enter on that arena, I should only add an unit to the number of Bedlamites.

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Letter to Mathew Carey (11 November 1816). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12, p. 42
5 months 1 week ago

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.

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A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42 (1996), p. 281
5 months 2 days ago

The Greeks follow a wrong usage in speaking of coming into being and passing away; for nothing comes into being or passes away, but there is mingling and separation of things that are. So they would be right to call coming into being mixture, and passing away separation.

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Frag. B 17, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.
4 months 4 days ago

Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites? Shew me the tribute money.

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22:18-19 (KJV)
5 months 2 weeks ago

Since sounds have no natural connection with our ideas ... the doubtfulness and uncertainty of their signification ... has its cause more in the ideas they stand for than in any incapacity there is in one sound more than another to signify any idea.

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Book III, Ch. 9, sec. 4
4 months 4 days ago

Society is eliminating the prerogatives and privileges of feudal. aristocratic culture together with its content. The fact that the transcending truths of the fine arts, the aesthetics of life and thought, were accessible only to the few wealthy and educated was the fault of a repressive society. But this fault is not corrected by paperbacks, general education, long-playing records, and the abolition of formal dress in the theater and concert hall. The cultural privileges expressed the injustice of freedom, the contradiction between ideology and reality, the separation of intellectual from material productivity; but they also provided a protected realm in which the tabooed truths could survive in abstract integrity-remote from the society which suppressed them.

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pp. 64-65
1 month 2 days ago

As an eminent pioneer in the realm of high frequency currents... I congratulate you on the great successes of your life's work.

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[http://www.teslasociety.com/einsteinletter.jpg Einstein's letter] to Nikola Tesla for Tesla's 75th birthday (1931)
4 months 1 week ago

Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

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3 months 5 days ago

For we are social beings, who can exist and behave as autonomous agents only because we are supported in our ventures by that feeling of primal safety that the bond of society brings. We can envisage no project and no satisfaction on which the eyes of others do not shine. We are joined to those others, and even when they are strangers to us, they are also part of us. It is the indispensable need for membership that brings the national idea to our minds; and there is no rational argument that will expel it, once it is there. Without it, we are homeless; and even if our attitude to home is one of sour disaffection, home is no less necessary to our sense of who we are.

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'The First Person Plural', in Ronald Beiner (ed.), Theorizing Nationalism (1999), p. 291

Getting along with women, Knocking around with men, Having more credit than money, Thus one goes through the world.

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Claudine von Villa Bella
2 months 3 weeks ago

Scarcity is not a result of uneven endowments-that is diversity. Scarcity is having a mismatch between a culture and nature's giving. Cultures have evolved cultural diversity to mimic the biological diversity of climates and ecosystems. It's when that relationship is disrupted that you get unsustainable population growth.

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3 months 1 week ago

Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.

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6 months 1 week ago

There is more to a science fiction story than the science it contains.

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4 months 1 week ago

What is the use of all knowledge, if one does not act in accordance with it? This remark implies that knowledge is regarded as a means to action, and the latter as the real end. One could put the question the other way round and ask: How can we possibly act well without knowing what the Good is? This way of expressing it would regard knowledge as conditioning action. But both expressions are one-sided, and the truth is that both, knowledge as well as action, are in the same way inseparable elements of rational life.

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Consequences of the Difference p. 75
5 months 1 week ago

""You do not love the mind of your race, nor the body. Any kind of creature will please you if only it is begotten by your kind as they now are. It seems to me, Thick One, what you really love is no completed creature but the very seed itself: for that is all that is left".

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Oyarsa
5 months 1 week ago

Out from the heart of Nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old.

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The Problem, st. 2
5 months 2 weeks ago

If you punish him for what he sees you practise yourself, he... will be apt to interpret it the peevishness and arbitrary imperiousness of a father, who, without any ground for it, would deny his son the liberty and pleasure he takes himself.

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Sec. 71
2 months 3 weeks ago

The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.

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Science and Morals
5 months 1 week ago

The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity, when contrasted with a finer intelligence.

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p. 493
3 months 3 weeks ago

Thinking is more erotic than calculating.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Assume, provisionally at any rate, a utilitarian ethic. The abolitionist project follows naturally, in "our" parochial corner of Hilbert space at least. On its completion, if not before, we should aim to develop superintelligence to maximise the well-being of the fragment of the cosmos accessible to beneficent intervention. And when we are sure - absolutely sure - that we have done literally everything we can do to eradicate suffering elsewhere, perhaps we should forget about its very existence.

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Quantum Ethics? Suffering in the Multiverse, BLTC Research, 2008
3 months 3 weeks ago

The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.

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E 55
5 months 1 week ago

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

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Unverified attribution noted in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1993), ed. Suzy Platt, Library of Congress, p. 39;
4 months 1 week ago

The Whigs of this day have before them, in this Appeal, their constitutional ancestors: They have the doctors of the modern school. They will choose for themselves. The author of the Reflections has chosen for himself. If a new order is coming on, and all the political opinions must pass away as dreams, which our ancestors have worshipped as revelations, I say for him, that he would rather be the last (as certainly he is the least) of that race of men, than the first and greatest of those who have coined to themselves Whig principles from a French die, unknown to the impress of our fathers in the constitution.

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p. 476
4 months 3 weeks ago

Envy has been, is, and shall be, the destruction of many. What is there, that Envy hath not defamed, or Malice left undefiled? Truly, no good thing.

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3 months 1 week ago

Even a single hair casts its shadow.

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Maxim 228
3 months 1 week ago

Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life.

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(p. 33)
5 months 1 week ago

The critique of the highest values hitherto does not simply refute them or declare them invalid. It is rather a matter of displaying their origins as impositions which must affirm precisely what ought to be negated by the values established.

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p. 26
4 months 1 week ago

There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God?

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Book II, ch. 3 (trans. Constance Garnett) The Elder Zossima, speaking to a devout widow afraid of death
6 months ago

I am not my soul.

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Super I ad Corinthios, 15.2
5 months 2 days ago

Thou shouldst not become presumptuous through much treasure and wealth; for in the end it is necessary for thee to leave all.

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4 months 1 week ago

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy. Variant translation: We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

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Conclusion, p. 628
4 weeks ago

Exactly. This is all we need to promote human flourishing and avoid human suffering....

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5 months 2 weeks ago

This avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society.

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Part 2, Section 2
4 months 1 week ago

The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

There is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom. 

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Book I, Ch. 39
5 months 1 week ago

What can you ever really know of other people's souls - of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbours or memories of what you have read in books.

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Book IV, Chapter 10, "Nice People or New Men"
5 months 1 week ago

Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.

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"Confidences of a 'Psychical Researcher'", in The American Magazine, Vol. 68 (1909), p. 589
4 months 1 week ago

And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.

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2 months 3 days ago

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

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Notebooks (1830).
4 months 4 weeks ago

When Darius offered him ten thousand talents, and to divide Asia equally with him, "I would accept it," said Parmenio, "were I Alexander." "And so truly would I," said Alexander, "if I were Parmenio." But he answered Darius that the earth could not bear two suns, nor Asia two kings.

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42 Alexander
5 months 2 weeks ago

There is, nevertheless, a certain respect and a general duty of humanity that ties us, not only to beasts that have life and sense, but even to trees and plants.

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Book II, Ch. 11. Of Cruelty
4 months 1 week ago

So far as it has gone, it probably is the most pure and defecated publick good which ever has been conferred on mankind.

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p. 463 On the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791
1 month 2 weeks ago

In a superior civilization, as, for example, that of the Indo-Aryans, the being who is without a characteristic form or caste (in the original meaning of the word), not even that of servant or shudra, would emerge as a pariah. In this respect America is a society of pariahs. There is a role for pariahs. It is to be subjected to beings whose form and internal laws are precisely defined. Instead the modern pariahs seek to become dominant themselves and to exercise their dominion over the entire world.

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American "Civilization"
5 months 1 week ago

Science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories arises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or 'given' base; and if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being.

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Ch. 5 "The Problem of the Empirical Basis", Section 30: Theory and Experiment, p. 94.
3 months 1 week ago

My reason will still not understand why I pray, but I shall still pray, and my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, is every moment of it no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an unquestionable meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.

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Pt. VIII, ch. 19

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