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2 months 3 weeks ago

The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of things; what Nature meant, what musical idea Nature has wrapped up in these often rough embodiments. Something she did mean. To the seeing eye that something were discernible. Are they base, miserable things? You can laugh over them, you can weep over them; you can in some way or other genially relate yourself to them; - you can, at lowest, hold your peace about them, turn away your own and others' face from them, till the hour come for practically exterminating and extinguishing them!

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4 months 3 weeks ago

If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.

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19:21 (KJV)
4 months 3 days ago

If people would but understand that they are not the sons of some fatherland or other, nor of Governments, but are sons of God, and can therefore neither be slaves nor enemies one to another - those insane, unnecessary, worn-out, pernicious organizations called Governments, and all the sufferings, violations, humiliations and crimes which they occasion, would cease.

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Patriotism and Government
6 months 3 days ago

How significant is the enormous heightening, under mescalin, of the perception of color! ... Man's highly developed color sense is a biological luxury-inestimably precious to him as an intellectual and spiritual being, but unnecessary to his survival as an animal. ... Mescalin raises all colors to a higher power and makes the percipient aware of innumerable fine shades of difference, to which, at ordinary times, he is completely blind. It would seem that, for Mind at Large, the so-called secondary characters of things are primary.

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describing his experiment with mescaline, pp. 26-27

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

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E 65
6 months 2 days ago

And we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in the night without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull rich prizes, and he did not make his choice.

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Diary entry of Saturday noon (10 February?)
4 months 1 day ago

Whom Fortune wishes to destroy she first makes mad.

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Maxim 911
2 months 4 weeks ago

Some economists also use the terms Fordism and pos-Fordism to mark the shift from an economy characterized by the stable-long-term employment typical of factory workers to one marked by flexible, mobile, and precarious labor relations: flexible because workers have to adapt to different tasks, mobile because workers have to move frequently between jobs, and precarious because no contracts guarantee stable, long-term employment. Whereas economic modernization, which developed Fordist labor relations, centered on the conomies of scale and larga systems of production and exchange, economic postmodernization, with its post-Fordist labor relations, develops smaller-scale, flexible systems.

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112
4 months 2 weeks ago

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."

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The Concept of Nature (1919), Chapter VII, p.143.
2 months 2 weeks ago

At sunset of the third day, near the village of Igendja, we moved along an island set in the middle of the wide river. On a sandback to our left, four hippopotamuses and their young plodded along in our same direction. Just then, in my great tiredness and discouragement, the phrase "Reverence for Life" struck me like a flash. As far as I knew, it was a phrase I had never heard nor ever read. I realized at once that it carried within itself the solution to the problem that had been torturing me. Now I knew that a system of values which concerns itself only with our relationship to other people is incomplete and therefore lacking in power for good. Only by means of reverence for life can we establish a spiritual and humane relationship with both people and all living creatures within our reach. Only in this fashion can we avoid harming others, and, within the limits of our capacity, go to their aid whenever they need us.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

Genes do indirectly control the manufacture of bodies, and the influence is strictly one way: acquired characteristics are not inherited. No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch.

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Ch. 3. Immortal Coils
6 months 3 weeks ago

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

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The good is the idea, or unity of the conception of the will with the particular will. Abstract right, well-being, the subjectivity of consciousness, and the contingency of external reality, are in their independent and separate existences superseded in this unity, although in their real essence they are contained in it and preserved. This unity is realized freedom, the absolute final cause of the world. Addition.-Every stage is properly the idea, but the earlier steps contain the idea only in more abstract form. The I, as person, is already the idea, although in its most abstract guise. The good is the idea more completely determined; it is the unity of the conception of will with the particular will. It is not something abstractly right, but has a real content, whose substance constitutes both right and well-being.

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right translated by SW Dyde Queen's University Canada 1896 p. 123
6 months 4 days ago

I dislike Communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.

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Unarmed Victory (1963), p. 14
6 months 6 days ago

Religion should be .... successively freed from all statutes based on history, and one purely moral religion rule over all, in order that God might be all in all. The veil must fall. The leading-string of sacred tradition with all its appendices becomes by degrees useless, and at last a fetter ... The humiliating difference between laymen and clergymen must disappear, and equality spring from true liberty. All this, however, must not be expected from an exterior revolution, which acts violently, and depends upon fortune In the principle of pure moral religion, which is a sort of divine revelation constantly taking place in the soul of man, must be sought the ground for a passage to the new order of things, which will be accomplished by slow and successive reforms.

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As quoted in German Thought, From The Seven Years' War To Goethe's Death : Six Lectures (1880) by Karl Hillebrand, p. 208
5 months 1 week 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.
4 months 3 weeks ago

The eyes see only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

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Robertson Davies as quoted in The White Bedouin‎ (2007) by George Potter, p. 241
5 months 4 days ago

. ... the prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.

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Part 3, Chapter 5
5 months 4 weeks ago

The logical picture of the facts is the thought.

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(3) Original German: Das logische Bild der Tatsachen ist der Gedanke.
4 months 4 weeks ago

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

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6 months 2 days ago

To each according to his threat advantage does not count as a principle of justice.

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Chapter III, Section 24, pg. 141
5 months ago

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. Closing lines of the preface

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6 months 2 days ago

Either the USSR was not the country of socialism, in which case socialism didn't exist anywhere and doubtless, wasn't possible: or else, socialism was that, this abominable monster, this police state, the power of beasts of prey.

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p. 184
5 months 2 weeks ago

There are two sides to every question.

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As quoted in Lives of Eminent Philosophers, by Diogenes Laërtius, Book IX, Sec. 51
6 months 4 days ago

The same law that shapes the earth-star shapes the snow-star. As surely as the petals of a flower are fixed, each of these countless snow-stars comes whirling to earth...these glorious spangles, the sweeping of heaven's floor.

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January 5, 1856
6 months 2 weeks ago

O pitiable minds of men, O blind intelligences! In what gloom of life, in how great perils is passed all your poor span of time! not to see that all nature barks for is this, that pain be removed away out of the body, and that the mind, kept away from care and fear, enjoy a feeling of delight!

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Book II, lines 14-19 (tr. Rouse)
6 months 4 days ago

The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

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As quoted in the Communist Manifesto (1848) p. 7
5 months 4 weeks ago

To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak. That is, it creates a vision of the world that puts into the limelight the social misery that is usually hidden or concealed by the dominant viewpoints of a society. "Intellectual" in that sense simply means those who are willing to reflect critically upon themselves as well as upon the larger society and to ascertain whether there is some possibility of amelioration and betterment.

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"Chekhov, Coltrane, and Democracy: Interview by David Lionel Smith." in The Cornel West Reader. Basic Books. 2000. p. 551. ISBN 978-0-465-09110-2.
4 months 1 day ago

For him who loves labor, there is always something to do.

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Maxim 219
5 months 4 days ago

The objects of a financier are, then, to secure an ample revenue; to impose it with judgment and equality; to employ it economically; and, when necessity obliges him to make use of credit, to secure its foundations in that instance, and for ever, by the clearness and candour of his proceedings, the exactness of his calculations, and the solidity of his funds.

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2 months 3 days 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
2 months 2 weeks ago

Mucius might have accomplished something more successful in that camp, but never anything more brave.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

There is no work so mean, but it would amply serve me to furnish me with sustenance.

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iv. 35
4 months 3 weeks ago

We are sorely deficient in talking with each other and listening to each other. We lack mobility, criticism and self-criticism. We incline to doctrinism. What makes it worse is that so many people do not really want to think. They want only slogans and obedience. They ask no questions and they give no answers, except by repeating drilled-in phrases. They can only assert and obey, neither probe nor apprehend. Thus they cannot be convinced, either. How shall we talk with people who will not go where others probe and think, where men seek independence in insight and conviction?

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6 months 2 days ago

It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.

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6 months 6 days ago

The use of the intellect in the sciences whose primitive concepts as well as axioms are given by sensuous intuition is only logical, that is, by it we only subordinate cognitions to one another according to their relative universality conformably to the principle of contradiction, phenomena to more general phenomena, and consequences of pure intuition to intuitive axioms. But in pure philosophy, such as metaphysics, in which the use of the intellect in respect to principles is real, that is to say, where the primary concept of things and relations and the very axioms are given originally by the pure intellect itself, and not being intuitions do not enjoy immunity from error, the method precedes the whole science, and whatever is attempted before its precepts are thoroughly discussed and firmly established is looked upon as rashly conceived and to be rejected among vain instances of mental playfulness.

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2 months ago

A cucumber is bitter. Throw it away. There are briars in the road. Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, "And why were such things made in the world?"

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VIII. 50, trans. George Long
3 months 2 weeks ago

I have learned by some experience, by many examples, and by the writings of countless others before me, also occupied in the search, that certain environments, certain modes of life, certain rules of conduct are more conducive to inner and outer harmony than others. There are, in fact, certain roads that one may follow. Simplification of life is one of them.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

I am not bothered by the fact that I am not understood. I am bothered when I do not know others.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

If the only alternative to fascism we produce is a corporate-driven, milquetoast, neoliberal Democratic Party, fascism will come to America. Let us be very clear. It's like a Weimar America.

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Speaking to Chris Hedges on The Real News Network, Cornel West's presidential candidacy is 'for the least of these'. June 16, 2023.
5 months 4 weeks ago

There is nothing outside the text," which Derrida opponents have characterized to mean that nothing exists but language.

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Il n'y a pas de hors-texte. Of Grammatology (1967). G. Spivak translated this as "
5 months 3 weeks ago

The resolute one who moved by the principles of Thy FaithExtends the prosperity of order to his neighbors And works the land the evil now hold desolate, Earns through Righteousness, the Blessed Recompense Thy Good Mind has promised in Thy Kingdom of Heaven.

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Spenta Mainyu Gatha; Yasna 50, 3.
6 months 4 days ago

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

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Ch. 2: Dreams and Facts
4 months 4 weeks ago

Labor is a commodity, like any other, and its price is therefore determined by exactly the same laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of big industry or of free competition - as we shall see, the two come to the same thing - the price of a commodity is, on the average, always equal to its cost of production. Hence, the price of labor is also equal to the cost of production of labor. But, the costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life.

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5 months 3 days ago

The stars are scattered all over the sky like shimmering tears, there must be great pain in the eye from which they trickled.

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Act IV.

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