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Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 2 weeks ago
For my part, while I am...

For my part, while I am as convinced a Socialist as the most ardent Marxian, I do not regard Socialism as a gospel of proletarian revenge, nor even, primarily, as a means of securing economic justice. I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race.

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Ch. 7: The Case for Socialism
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
4 months 2 days ago
Feminism in the United States has...

Feminism in the United States has never emerged from the women who are most victimized by sexist oppression; women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually-women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are a silent majority. A mark of their victimization is that they accept their lot in life without visible question, without organized protest, without collective anger or rage.

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p. 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
2 months 1 week ago
There is an unquestionable relationship between...

There is an unquestionable relationship between economic development and liberal democracy, which one can observe simply by looking around the world. But the exact nature of that relationship is more complicated than it first appeared, and is not adequately explained by any of the theories presented up to this point. The logic of modern natural science and the industrialization process it fosters does not point in a single direction in the sphere of politics, as it does in the sphere of economics. Liberal democracy is compatible with industrial maturity, and is preferred by the citizens of many industrially advanced states, but there does not appear to be a necessary connection between the two. The Mechanism underlying our directional history leads equally well to a bureaucratic-authoritarian future as to a liberal one. We will therefore have to look elsewhere in trying to understand the current crisis of authoritarianism and the worldwide democratic revolution.

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p. 125
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
4 months 3 days ago
There remains the final reflection, how...

There remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly.

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Preface, p. 16 (Corrected Edition)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
3 months 4 days ago
The mediaeval university looked backwards: it...

The mediaeval university looked backwards: it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge... The modern university looks forward: it is a factory of new knowledge.

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Letter to E. Ray Lankester (11 April 1892) Huxley Papers, Imperial College: 30.448
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
3 months 2 weeks ago
What is left when honor is...

What is left when honor is lost?

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Maxim 265
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 month 2 weeks ago
Remember this- that there is a...

Remember this- that there is a proper dignity and proportion to be observed in the performance of every act of life.

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IV, 32
Philosophical Maxims
Joseph de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre
1 month 2 weeks ago
No human institution can endure unless...

No human institution can endure unless supported by the Hand which supports all; that is to say, if it is not especially consecrated to Him at its origin. The more it is penetrated with the Divine principle, the more durable it will be. How strange is the blindness of men in our age! They boast of their knowledge, and are ignorant of everything, since they are ignorant of themselves. They know not what they are, nor what they can do. An invincible pride bears them on continually to overthrow every thing which they have not made; and in order to work out new creations, they separate themselves from the source of all existence. Jean-Jacques Rousseau has, however, very well said, Little, vain man, show me thy power, and I will show thee thy weakness. It might be said, with as much truth and more profit, Little, vain man, confess to me thy weakness, and I will show thee thy strength.

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XLVI, p. 130
Philosophical Maxims
Julius Evola
Julius Evola
1 month 3 weeks ago
All too often people forget that...

All too often people forget that spirituality is essentially a way of life and that its measure does not consist of notions, theories, and ideas that have been stored in one's head. Spirituality is actually what has been successfully actualized and translated into a sense of superiority which is experienced inside by the soul, and a noble demeanor, which is expressed in the body.

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Meditations on the Peaks: Mountain Climbing as Metaphor for the Spiritual Quest
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
4 months 2 weeks ago
The idea does not belong to...

The idea does not belong to the soul; it is the soul that belongs to the idea.

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Vol. I, par. 216
Philosophical Maxims
Diogenes of Sinope
Diogenes of Sinope
5 months 1 week ago
He was seized and dragged off...

He was seized and dragged off to King Philip, and being asked who he was, replied, "A spy upon your insatiable greed."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 43. Cf. Plutarch, Moralia, 70CD.
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
5 months ago
Dear youths, I warn you cherish...

Dear youths, I warn you cherish peace divine, And in your hearts lay deep these words of mine.

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As reported by Heraclides, son of Sarapion, and Diogenes Laërtius, in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, "Pythagoras", Sect. 7, in the translation of C. D. Yonge
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 2 weeks ago
Both in thought and in feeling,...

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

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p. 167
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
4 months 3 days ago
No reason can be given for...

No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of all rationality.

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Ch. 11: "God", p. 250
Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
3 months 1 week ago
Conservatism is a philosophy of inheritance...

Conservatism is a philosophy of inheritance and stewardship; it does not squander resources but strives to enhance them and pass them on.

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Stand up for the real meaning of freedom, The Spectator
Philosophical Maxims
Antisthenes
Antisthenes
5 months 1 week ago
It's better to fight….

It is better to fight with a few good men against all the wicked, than with many wicked men against a few good men.

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§ 5
Philosophical Maxims
Ernest Renan
Ernest Renan
2 months 1 week ago
Nature has made a race….

Nature has made a race of workers; that is the Chinese race, with a marvelous dexterity of hand and hardly any feeling of honor; govern this race with justice by exacting from them through the competence of such government an ample dowry to the conquering race; the subordinate race will be satisfied; a race of workers of the earth, such is the Negro; let us be for him good and human, and everything will be in order -- a race of masters and soldiers, that is the European race.

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94
Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
4 months 2 weeks ago
The first authentic record on this...

The first authentic record on this subject (alchemy) is an edict of Diocletian, about 300 years after Christ, ordering a diligent search to be made in Egypt for all the ancient books which treated of the art of making gold and silver, that they might be consigned to the flames. This edict necessarily presumes a certain antiquity to the pursuit; and fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries.

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Quoted by H.P. Blavatsky, in Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, Vol. I, (1877) (p. 504)
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
4 months 1 day ago
From that point, my universe went...

From that point, my universe went on crumbling; new cracks appeared all the time. I could see that the pleasant securities of childhood, all of those warm little human emotions, all of those trivial aims and purposes that we allow to rule our lives, were an illusion. We were like sheep munching grass, unaware that the butcher's lorry is already on its way. I got used to living with a deep, underlying feeling of uncertainty that no one around me seemed to share. It was rather like living on death row.

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pp. 12-13
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
4 months 6 days ago
The need to devour....
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Main Content / General
William Kingdon Clifford
William Kingdon Clifford
1 month 2 weeks ago
A little reflection will show us...

A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions. ... Even the fundamental "I am," which cannot be doubted, is no guide to action until it takes to itself "I shall be," which goes beyond experience. The question is not, therefore, "May we believe what goes beyond experience?" for this is involved in the very nature of belief; but "How far and in what manner may we add to our experience in forming our beliefs?"

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Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 month 2 weeks ago
Men exist for the sake of...

Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then or bear with them.

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(Long translation) All men are made one for another: either then teach them better, or bear with them. (trans. Meric Casaubon). VIII, 59
Philosophical Maxims
Bernard Williams
Bernard Williams
4 months 2 days ago
There continue to be complex debates...

There continue to be complex debates about what Nietzsche understood truth to be. Quite certainly, he did not think, in pragmatist spirit, that beliefs are true if they serve our interests or welfare: we have just seen some of his repeated denials of this idea. The more recently fashionable view is that he was the first of the deniers, thinking that there is no such thing as truth, or that truth is what anyone thinks it is, or that it is a boring category that we can do without. This is also wrong, and more deeply so. Nietzsche did not think that the ideal of truthfulness went into retirement when its metaphysical origins were discovered, and he did not suppose, either, that truthfulness could be detached from a concern for the truth. Truthfulness as an ideal retains its power, and so far from his seeing truth as dispensable or malleable, his main question is how it can be made bearable.

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p. 16
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 months 2 weeks ago
Whenever a separation is made between...

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

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Letter to M. de Menonville
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon
3 months 3 weeks ago
In an information-rich world, the wealth...

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

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Simon, H. A. (1971) "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World" in: Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore. MD: The Johns Hopkins Press. pp. 40-41.
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
4 months 1 week ago
In philosophical anthropology, ... where the...

In philosophical anthropology, ... where the subject is man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself, as in anthropology as an individual science, with considering man as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the investigator, is himself a man and experiences this humanity in his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience any part of nature.

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p. 147
Philosophical Maxims
Lucretius
Lucretius
6 months 2 days ago
Why dost thou not retire…

Why dost thou not retire like a guest sated with the banquet of life, and with calm mind embrace, thou fool, a rest that knows no care?

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Book III, lines 938-939 (tr. Bailey)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 1 week ago
Can the man say, Fiat lux,...

Can the man say, Fiat lux, Let there be light; and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there is light in himself, will he accomplish this.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emperor Julian
Emperor Julian
1 month 3 weeks ago
So long as you are a...

So long as you are a slave to the opinions of the many you have not yet approached freedom or tasted its nectar...But I do not mean by this that we ought to be shameless before all men and to do what we ought not; but all that we refrain from and all that we do, let us not do or refrain from merely because it seems to the multitude somehow honorable or base, but because it is forbidden by reason and the god within us.

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Oration to the Uneducated Cynics
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
5 months 1 week ago
Sweet exists….

Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention, colour by convention; atoms and Void [alone] exist in reality.

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(trans. Freeman 1948), p. 92.
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
4 months 1 day 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
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 2 weeks ago
Hitch your wagon to a star....

Hitch your wagon to a star.

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Civilization
Philosophical Maxims
Niels Bohr
Niels Bohr
1 month 3 weeks ago
Isolated material particles are abstractions, their...

Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.

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"Atomic Physics and the Description of Nature"
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
4 months 1 week ago
If the subjectivist view hold true,...

If the subjectivist view hold true, thinking cannot be of any help in determining the desirability of any goal in itself. The acceptability of ideals, the criteria for our actions and beliefs, the leading principles of ethics and politics, all our ultimate decisions are made to depend upon factors other than reason. They are supposed to be matters of choice and predilection, and it has become meaningless to speak of truth in making practical, moral or esthetic decisions.

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pp. 7-8.
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
4 months 1 week ago
Verily I say unto you, All...

Verily I say unto you, All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme: But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation.

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Mark 3:28-29 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
5 months 2 weeks ago
The homosexual never thinks of himself...

The homosexual never thinks of himself when someone is branded in his presence with the name homosexual. ...His sexual tastes will doubtless lead him to enter into relationships with this suspect category, but he would like to make use of them without being likened to them. Here, too, the ban that is cast on certain men by society has destroyed all possibility of reciprocity among them. Shame isolates.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 2 weeks ago
Sunshine cannot bleach the snow...

Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know.

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"The Test", as quoted in Emerson As A Poet (1883) by Joel Benton, p. 40
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
5 months 2 weeks ago
I look forward to a future...

I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples. All these beliefs of mine put me firmly into the anti-military party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future toward which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 2 weeks ago
In different hours, a man represents...

In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, - seven or eight ancestors at least, - and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.

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Fate
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
2 months 1 week ago
It is the sidereal day, that...

It is the sidereal day, that is, the duration of the rotation of the earth, which is the constant unit of time. ...However ...many astronomers ...think that the tides act as a check on our globe, and that the rotation of the earth is becoming slower and slower. Thus would be explained the apparent acceleration of the motion of the moon...

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 months 2 weeks ago
Slavery they can have anywhere. It...

Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.

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Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
5 months ago
Eat not the brain….

Eat not the brain.

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Symbol 31
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 2 weeks ago
Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers...

Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.

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(p. 11)
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
5 months 1 week ago
And yet it will be obvious...

And yet it will be obvious that it is difficult to really know of what sort each thing is.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
6 months 2 weeks ago
The science which has to do...

The science which has to do with nature clearly concerns itself for the most part with bodies and magnitudes and their properties and movements, but also with the principles of this sort of substance, as many as they may be.

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Philosophical Maxims
Antisthenes
Antisthenes
5 months 1 week ago
The ability to hold….

When he was asked what advantage had accrued to him from philosophy, his answer was, "The ability to hold converse with myself."

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§ 4
Philosophical Maxims
Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg
1 month 2 weeks ago
One is immediately struck with the...

One is immediately struck with the obstinacy and rigid consistency with which Lenin and his comrades stuck to this slogan, a slogan which is in sharp contradiction to their otherwise outspoken centralism in politics as well as to the attitude they have assumed towards other democratic principles. Wile they showed a quite cool contempt for the Constituent Assembly, universal suffrage, freedom of press and assemblage, in short for the whole apparatus of basic democratic liberties of the people which, taken all together, constituted the "right of self-determination" inside Russia, they treated the right of self-determination of peoples as a jewel of democratic policy for the sake of which all practical considerations of real criticism had to be stilled.

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Chapter Three, "Nationalities Question"
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 2 weeks ago
The Calculus required continuity, and continuity...

The Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.

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Ch. 5: Mathematics and the Metaphysicians
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
5 months 2 weeks ago
For the trouble with lying and...

For the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.

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"Lying in Politics"
Philosophical Maxims
Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold J. Toynbee
3 months 1 day ago
So-called racial characteristics are not really...

So-called racial characteristics are not really racial at all but are due to the historical experiences of the communities in question.

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Abridgement of Vols. 1-6 by D. C. Somervell
Philosophical Maxims
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