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3 months 1 week ago

Metaphysics has as the proper object of its enquiries three ideas only: God, freedom, and immortality.

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B 395
1 month 2 weeks ago

My own view is that philosophy at its best has always, in every period, included some philosophers who brilliantly represent the moral face of the subject and some philosophers who brilliantly represent the theoretical face, as well as some geniuses whose insights span and unite both sides of the subject. To renounce either the moral ambitions of philosophy or its theoretical ambitions is not just to kill the subject of philosophy; it is to commit intellectual and spiritual suicide.

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Science and Philosophy
3 months 1 week ago

There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future: the Establishment and the Movement. At times the resistance is reanimated, the schism runs under the world and appears in Literature, Philosophy, Church, State and social customs.

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p. 529, col. 1
3 months 1 week ago

In some places the metropolis makes do with paying a clique of feudal overlords; in others, it has fabricated a fake bourgeoisie of colonized subjects in a system of divide and rule; elsewhere, it has killed two birds with one stone: the colony is both settlement and exploitation.

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p. xlvi
2 months 4 days ago

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Now as of old the gods give men all good things, excepting only those that are baneful and injurious and useless. These, now as of old, are not gifts of the gods: men stumble into them themselves because of their own blindness and folly.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death.

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p. 277

Because the President has undisputed authority over foreign policy, President Biden... will be able to reinsert the United States into the international system. He will rejoin the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Accords, he will go to NATO and reaffirm support for... our Asian allies, for Australia, for every other country that has depended on... American power, but... it's going to be extremely difficult to return to the kind of world that we assumed existed before 2016, because America does remain fundamentally divided. That bipartisan support for the liberal international order that we thought was extremely strong is no longer...

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29:41:00
2 weeks 3 days ago

In future, nerve cell responsiveness to naturally occurring endogenous opioids can be increased via receptor enrichment in the brain too. In principle, we can modulate their lifelong "overexpression", intermittently heightened (or gently diminished) by whatever kinds of personal and environmental contingencies we judge fit. Both functionally and anatomically, our reward pathways can be made "bigger and better". But intelligent emotional self-mastery will involve re-engineering the mind-brain so we derive the most intense rewards from activities we deem most lastingly worthwhile: i.e. prioritising our higher-order desires over legacy first-order appetites. Natural selection has "encephalised" our emotions to benefit our genes. Rational agents can "re-encephalise" our emotions to benefit us.

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Utopian Neuroscience, BLTC Research, 2019
2 months 4 days ago

Thought is as much a lie as love or faith.

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2 months 1 week ago

Instinct is blind;-a consciousness without insight. Freedom, as the opposite of Instinct, is thus seeing, and clearly conscious of the grounds of its activity.

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p. 7
3 months 3 weeks ago

He who disdained not to assume us unto Himself, did not disdain to take our place and speak our words, in order that we might speak His words.

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p.421
2 months 1 week ago

There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feeling; none when they are under the influence of imagination.

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p. 460
2 months 1 week ago

The present state of France was ten times worse than a tyranny. The new constitution was said to be an experiment but the assertion was not true. It had already been tried, and had been found to be only productive of evils. They would go on from tyranny to tyranny, from oppression to oppression, till at last the whole system would terminate in the destruction of that miserable and deluded people... He sincerely hoped that no member of that House would ever barter the constitution of this country, the eternal jewel of their souls, for a wild and visionary system, which could only lead to confusion and disorder.

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Speech in the House of Commons (6 May 1791), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXIX (1817), column 397
3 weeks 3 days ago

The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of "Spiritualism" is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a séance.

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Review in the Daily News (17 October 1871), quoted in Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley F.R.S (1900) edited by Leonard Huxley, Vol. 1, p. 452
3 months 2 days ago

There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.

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3 months 1 week ago

There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.

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Chapter II, Part II, Appendix to Articles I and II.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

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A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
3 months 1 week ago

I am sorry to say that at the moment I am so busy as to be convinced that life has no meaning whatever... I do not see that we can judge what would be the result of the discovery of truth, since none has hitherto been discovered.

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Letter to Will Durant, 20 June, 1931
3 months 1 week ago

Every thing in the world is purchased by labour.

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Part II, Essay 1: Of Commerce
3 months 1 week ago

The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.

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2 weeks 3 days ago

Nietzsche would say my friends lacked ears.

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Chapter 8, Performative Reflexivity, p. 133
3 months 1 week ago

Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?

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p. 5
2 months 4 days ago

To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.

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"The Meaning of Life".
1 month 6 days ago

At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology.

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(p. 300)
4 months 1 week ago
The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence. For this pride contains within itself the most flattering estimation of the value of knowing. Deception is the most general effect of such pride, but even its most particular effects contain within themselves something of the same deceitful character.
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3 months 3 weeks ago

It is impossible for a man who secretly violates the terms of the agreement not to harm or be harmed to feel confident that he will remain undiscovered, even if he has already escaped ten thousand times; for until his death he is never sure that he will not be detected.

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4 months 1 week ago

How could one speak properly about love if you were forgotten, you God of love, source of all love in heaven and on earth; you who spared nothing but in love gave everything; you who are love, so that one who loves is what he is only by being in you.

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2 weeks 1 day ago

Hayek watched the interwar collapse with horror, as Keynes did, and shared many of Keynes's liberal values. What he failed to understand is that these values cannot be renewed by applying any formula or doctrine, or by trying to construct an ideal liberal regime in which freedom is insulated from the contingencies of politics.

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3 months 1 week ago

A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy.

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Ch. VI: Of the Infirmities and Dangers to Which Representative Government Is Liable (p. 234)
2 months 3 days ago

The class of the wholly propertyless, who are obliged to sell their labor to the bourgeoisie in order to get, in exchange, the means of subsistence for their support. This is called the class of proletarians, or the proletariat.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The Catholic faith, I now realized could be maintained without presumption. This was especially true after I had heard one or two parts of the Old Testament explained allegorically, whereas before this, when I had interpreted them literally, they had killed me spiritually.

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A. Outler, trans. (Dover: 2002), Book 5, Chapter 14, p. 81.
1 month 5 days ago

For a good cause, wrongdoing is virtuous.

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Maxim 207
2 months 5 days ago

What is Nature? An encyclopedical, systematic Index or Plan of our Spirit. Why will we content us with the mere catalogue of our Treasures? Let us contemplate them ourselves, and in all ways elaborate and use them.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality. Those who have the gift of creative expression in unusually large measure disclose the meaning of the individuality of others to those others. In participating in the work of art, they become artists in their activity. They learn to know and honor individuality in whatever form it appears. The fountains of creative activity are discovered and released. The free individuality which is the source of art is also the final source of creative development in time.

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3 months 3 days ago

The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him understand the usage of the general term.

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p. 19
3 months 3 days ago

Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 119

America is like a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair!

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In Quote: The Weekly Digest, vol. 23, no. 19 (4 May 1952) p. 16
1 month 1 day ago

What is imposed on us by birth and environment is what we are called upon to overcome.

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Part I, p. 28
3 months 1 week ago

Bold ideas, unjustified anticipations, and speculative thought, are our only means for interpreting nature: our only organon, our only instrument, for grasping her. And we must hazard them to win our prize. Those among us who are unwilling to expose their ideas to the hazard of refutation do not take part in the scientific game.

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Ch. 10 "Corroboration, or How a Theory Stands up to Tests", section 85: The Path of Science, p. 280.
3 months 1 week ago

God said, I am tired of kings, I suffer them no more; Up to my ear the morning brings The outrage of the poor.

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Boston Hymn, st. 2
3 months 1 week ago

It is too early to love. We will buy the right to do so by shedding blood.

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Act 1
3 months 1 week ago

The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.

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p. 3
2 months 1 week ago

Freedom and whores are the most cosmopolitan items under the sun. .

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Act IV
3 months 2 weeks ago

The day of your birth is one day's advance towards the grave.

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Ch. 20. Of the Force of Imagination (tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877) Cf. Dávid Baróti Szabó, Nem kímíl meg senkit halál, wr. 1786; ed. 1914
1 month 3 weeks ago

What is necessary at this stage in our evolution is not a 'return' to the psychic powers of our ancestors, but an expansion of our own potential powers, based upon the certain knowledge that such powers exist.

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p. 290
1 month 4 weeks ago

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

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