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Porphyry
Porphyry
3 months 3 days ago
Every good thing is gentle and...

Every good thing is gentle and consistent, progressing in good order and not going beyond what is right.

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2, 39, 4
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 2 weeks ago
Language is a sense, like touch.

Language is a sense, like touch.

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(p. 271)
Philosophical Maxims
Plutarch
Plutarch
3 months 1 week ago
Themistocles being asked whether he would...

Themistocles being asked whether he would rather be Achilles or Homer, said, "Which would you rather be,-a conqueror in the Olympic games, or the crier that proclaims who are conquerors?"

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48 Themistocles
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
3 months 2 weeks ago
The life of God - the...

The life of God - the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things - may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things.

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§ 19
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 weeks 3 days ago
In philosophy...
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Main Content / General
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
2 months 2 days ago
The pornographic face says nothing. It...

The pornographic face says nothing. It has no expressivity or mystery.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 month 2 weeks ago
Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable...

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips... continue the list as long as desired.

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The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009) (p. 8)
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 2 weeks ago
Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor...

Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 2 weeks ago
I have been merely oppressed by...

I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.

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Letter to Gilbert Murray, March 21, 1903
Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
1 month 1 week ago
We are all such accidents. We...

We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it - the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.

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Great Jewish Short Stories, introduction to the Dell paperback edition
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 months 5 days ago
Men ... ask nothing better, it...

Men ... ask nothing better, it would seem, than to leave their destiny, their life, and all their thoughts in the hands of a few men with a gift for the exclusive manipulation of this or that technique.

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"Wave Mechanics," p. 75
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 2 weeks ago
In skating over thin ice our...

In skating over thin ice our safety is our speed.

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Prudence
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
2 months 2 days ago
Direct action, having proven effective along...

Direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual. There a hundred forces encroach upon his being, and only persistent resistance to them will finally set him free. Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism. Will it not lead to a revolution? Indeed, it will. No real social change has ever come about without a revolution. People are either not familiar with their history, or they have not yet learned that revolution is but thought carried into action.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 1 week ago
Elias truly shall first come, and...

Elias truly shall first come, and restore all things. But I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed. Likewise shall also the Son of man suffer of them.

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17:11-12 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 2 weeks ago
What has to be accepted, the...

What has to be accepted, the given, is - so one could say - forms of life.

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Pt II, p. 226 of the 1968 English edition
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 week 3 days ago
This worthy man, whose nephew is...

This worthy man, whose nephew is still minister of Eskdalemuir (and author of a book on the Jews), proved the greatest blessing to that household. My father would, in any case, have saved himself. Of the other brothers, it may be doubted whether William Brown was not the primary preserver. They all learned to he masons from him, or from one another; instead of miscellaneous laborers and hunters, became regular tradesmen, the best in all their district, the skilfullest and faithfullest, and the best-rewarded every way. Except my father, none of them attained a decisive religiousness. But they all had prudence and earnestness, love of truth, industry, and the blessings it brings.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
2 months 2 days ago
This perversion of the ethical values...

This perversion of the ethical values soon crystallized into the all-dominating slogan of the Communist Party: THE END JUSTIFIES ALL MEANS. Similarly in the past the Inquisition and the Jesuits adopted this motto and subordinated to it all morality. It avenged itself upon the Jesuits as it did upon the Russian Revolution. In the wake of this slogan followed lying, deceit, hypocrisy and treachery, murder, open and secret. It should be of utmost interest to students of social psychology that two movements as widely separated in time and ideas as Jesuitism and Bolshevism reached exactly similar results in the evolution of the principle that the end justifies all means. The historic parallel, almost entirely ignored so far, contains a most important lesson for all coming revolutions and for the whole future of mankind.

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Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
1 month 3 weeks ago
Analytic philosophers - both in the...

Analytic philosophers - both in the 'constructivist' camp and in the camp that studies 'the ordinary use of words' - are disturbingly unanimous in regarding 2-valued logic as having a privileged position: privileged, not just in the sense of corresponding to the way we do speak, but in the sense of having no serious rival for logical reasons. If the foregoing analysis is correct, this is a prejudice of the same kind as the famous prejudice in favor of a privileged status for Euclidean geometry (a prejudice that survives in the tendency to cite 'space has three dimensions' as some kind of 'necessary' truth). One can go over from a 2-valued to a 3-valued logic without totally changing the meaning of 'true' and 'false'; and not just in silly ways, like the ones usually cited (e.g. equating truth with high probability, falsity with low probability, and middlehood with 'in between' probability).

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"Three-valued logic"
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 2 weeks ago
Where popular authority is absolute and...

Where popular authority is absolute and unrestrained, the people have an infinitely greater, because a far better founded, confidence in their own power. They are themselves, in a great measure, their own instruments. They are nearer to their objects. Besides, they are less under responsibility to one of the greatest controlling powers on the earth, the sense of fame and estimation. The share of infamy that is likely to fall to the lot of each individual in public acts is small indeed; the operation of opinion being in the inverse ratio to the number of those who abuse power. Their own approbation of their own acts has to them the appearance of a public judgment in their favor. A perfect democracy is, therefore, the most shameless thing in the world. As it is the most shameless, it is also the most fearless. No man apprehends in his person that he can be made subject to punishment.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
2 months 2 days ago
The STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle,...

The STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle, has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution. If I were to sum up my whole argument in one sentence I should say: The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. These two tendencies are incompatible and mutually destructive. The State idea killed the Russian Revolution and it must have the same result in all other revolutions, unless the libertarian idea prevail.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 2 weeks ago
For in spite of language, in...

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

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"Sermons in Cats"
Philosophical Maxims
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
3 months 3 weeks ago
By Natura naturans we must understand...

By Natura naturans we must understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, or such attributes of substance as express an eternal and infinite essence, that is ... God, insofar as he is considered as a free cause. But by Natura naturata I understand whatever follows from the necessity of God's nature, or from God's attributes, that is, all the modes of God's attributes insofar as they are considered as things which are in God, and can neither be nor be conceived without God.

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Part I, Prop. XXIX, Scholium, trans: Edwin Curley, London: Penguin, 1996
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
2 months 3 weeks ago
The following general definition of an...

The following general definition of an animal: a system of different organic molecules that have combined with one another, under the impulsion of a sensation similar to an obtuse and muffled sense of touch given to them by the creator of matter as a whole, until each one of them has found the most suitable position for it shape and comfort.

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No. 51
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
3 months 4 weeks ago
The law of nature teaches me...

The law of nature teaches me to speak in my own defence: With respect to this charge of bribery I am as innocent as any man born on St. Innocents Day. I never had a bribe or reward in my eye or thought when pronouncing judgment or order. I am ready to make an oblation of myself to the King.

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(17 April 1621) Quoted by Baron John Campbell (1818), J. Murray in "The Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal of England"
Philosophical Maxims
Cisero
Cisero
4 months 1 week ago
After death the sensation...

After death the sensation is either pleasant or there is none at all. But this should be thought on from our youth up, so that we may be indifferent to death, and without this thought no one can be in a tranquil state of mind. For it is certain that we must die, and, for aught we know, this very day. Therefore, since death threatens every hour, how can he who fears it have any steadfastness of soul?

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section 74
Philosophical Maxims
Max Scheler
Max Scheler
2 months 1 week ago
The "old maid" with her repressed...

The "old maid" with her repressed cravings for tenderness, sex, and propagation, is rarely quite free of ressentiment. What we call "prudery," in contrast with true modesty, is but one of the numerous variants of sexual ressentiment. The habitual behavior of many old maids, who obsessively ferret out all sexually significant events in their surroundings in order to condemn them harshly, is nothing but sexual gratification transformed into ressentiment satisfaction. Thus the criticism accomplishes the very thing it pretends to condemn.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 61-62
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
1 month 2 weeks ago
Sanity itself is a kind of...

Sanity itself is a kind of convention.

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The Hunter's Family
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 2 weeks ago
The charming landscape which I saw...

The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title. To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food.

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Nature
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 week 3 days ago
Who would govern that can get...

Who would govern that can get along without governing? He that is fittest for it, is of all men the unwillingest unless constrained.

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Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
4 months 2 days ago
Whilst in speaking of human things,...

Whilst in speaking of human things, we say that it is necessary to know them before we can love them...the saints on the contrary say in speaking of divine things that it is necessary to love them in order to know them, and that we only enter truth through charity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
3 months 3 weeks ago
To which we may add this...

To which we may add this other Aristotelian consideration, that he who confers a benefit on any one loves him better than he is beloved by him again.

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Book II, Ch. 8. Of the Affections of Fathers
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 2 weeks ago
The capitalist cannot store labour-power in...

The capitalist cannot store labour-power in warehouses after he has bought it, as he may do with the raw material.

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Vol. II, Ch. XV, p. 285.
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
3 months 1 week ago
Making money is not without its...

Making money is not without its value, but nothing is baser than to make it by wrong-doing.

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Philosophical Maxims
kalokagathia
kalokagathia
8 months 4 days ago
Exclude those that exclude

We cannot stand by while the social contract is broken by those who chose conflict over equality. Those that want equal treatment for themselves have to treat others equally. They cannot lead with exclusion, then turn around and demand equal treatment. It is a double standard. If they are going to exclude first, then justice demands that we, the group that stands with universality, follow our duty to react and exclude those that exclude.

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Propositions / General
Zoroaster
Zoroaster
3 months 1 week ago
Choose a wife who is of...

Choose a wife who is of character, because that one is good who in the end is more respected.

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(p. 60)
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
4 months 5 days ago
By faithfulness we are collected and...

By faithfulness we are collected and wound up into unity within ourselves, whereas we had been scattered abroad in multiplicity.

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As quoted in Footprints in Time : Fulfilling God's Destiny for Your Life (2007) by Jeff O'Leary, p. 223
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 2 weeks ago
The papers were always talking about...

The papers were always talking about the debt owed to society. According to them, it had to be paid. But that doesn't speak to the imagination. What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.

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Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
4 days ago
There is no reason why poverty...

There is no reason why poverty should call us away from philosophy-no, nor even actual want. For when hastening after wisdom, we must endure even hunger. Men have endured hunger when their towns were besieged, and what other reward for their endurance did they obtain than that they did not fall under the conqueror's power? How much greater is the promise of the prize of everlasting liberty, and the assurance that we need fear neither God nor man! Even though we starve, we must reach that goal.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 2 weeks ago
To suffer is to produce knowledge.

To suffer is to produce knowledge.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 month 2 weeks ago
The genes are the master programmers,...

The genes are the master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.

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Ch. 4. The Gene machine
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
3 weeks 5 days ago
Hayek's blind spot with regard to...

Hayek's blind spot with regard to politics was clear in the early 1980s when the first Thatcher government, in an attempt to reduce inflation and bring the public finances closer to a balanced budget, was raising interest rates and cutting public spending. As he had done during the 1930s, Hayek attacked these policies as not being severe enough. It would be better, he told me in a conversation we had around this time, if Thatcher imposed a more drastic contraction on the economy so that the wage-setting power of the trade unions could be broken. He appeared unfazed by unemployment, which was already higher (more than three million people) than at any time since the 1930s, and would rise much further if his recommendations were accepted.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
3 months 3 weeks ago
Enjoin him to play so many...

Enjoin him to play so many hours every day, and look that he do it; and you shall see he will quickly be sick of it; and willing to leave it. By this means making the recreations you dislike a business to him, he will of himself with delight betake himself to those things you would have him do, especially if they be proposed as rewards for having performed the task in that play which is commanded of him.

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Sec. 129
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
4 days ago
Do you ask me whom I...

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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Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2 months 2 weeks ago
Who consciously throws himself into the...

Who consciously throws himself into the water or onto the knife?

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Part 2, Chapter ?
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
3 months 2 weeks ago
Without risks or prizes for the...

Without risks or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a type of military character which every one feels that the race should never cease to breed, for everyone is sensitive to its superiority. The duty is incumbent on mankind, of keeping military character in stock - if keeping them, if not for use, then as ends in themselves and as pure pieces of perfection, - so that Roosevelt's weaklings and mollycoddles may not end by making everything else disappear from the face of nature.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 2 weeks ago
The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes...

The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 2 weeks ago
I think that there is nothing,...

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.

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p. 485
Philosophical Maxims
Proclus
Proclus
3 months 3 days ago
Again, Amyclas the Heracleotean, one of...

Again, Amyclas the Heracleotean, one of Plato's familiars, and Menæchmus, the disciple, indeed, of Eudoxus, but conversant with Plato, and his brother Dinostratus, rendered the whole of geometry as yet more perfect. But Theudius, the Magnian, appears to have excelled, as well in mathematical disciplines, as in the rest of philosophy. For he constructed elements egregiously, and rendered many particulars more universal. Besides, Cyzicinus the Athenian, flourished at the same period, and became illustrious in other mathematical disciplines, but especially in geometry. These, therefore, resorted by turns to the Academy, and employed themselves in proposing common questions.

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Ch. IV.
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
3 months 2 weeks ago
What we really need the poet's...

What we really need the poet's and orator's help to keep alive in us is not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment. It is that more lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared.

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Robert Gould Shaw: Oration upon the Unveiling of the Shaw Monument, 31 May 1897
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
3 weeks 5 days ago
Humanists today, who claim to take...

Humanists today, who claim to take a wholly secular view of things, scoff at mysticism and religion. But the unique status of humans is hard to defend, and even to understand, when it is cut off from any idea of transcendence. In a strictly naturalistic view - one in which the world is taken on its own terms, without reference to a creator or any spiritual realm - there is no hierarchy of value with humans at the top. There are simply multifarious animals, each with their own needs. Human uniqueness is a myth inherited from religion, which humanists have recycled into science.

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An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (p. 77)
Philosophical Maxims
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