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3 months 1 week ago

Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.

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Book III, Ch. 2
2 months 2 days ago

Thanks to depression - that alpinism of the indolent - we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed.

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3 months 1 week ago

The average man's opinions are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself: in science, at least, his respect for authority is on the whole beneficial.

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On Education, Especially in Early Childhood (1926), Ch. 2: The Aims of Education, p. 63
3 months 5 days ago

Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes.

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Ch. 9, p. 138 [2012 reprint]
1 month 3 weeks ago

Equally there is no rhythm when variations are not placed. There is a wealth of suggestions in the phrase "takes place". The change not only comes but it belongs; it had its definite place in a larger whole.

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p. 160
2 months 1 day ago

So long as it is not possible to produce so much that there is enough for all, with more left over for expanding the social capital and extending the forces of production - so long as this is not possible, there must always be a ruling class directing the use of society's productive forces, and a poor, oppressed class. How these classes are constituted depends on the stage of development.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

At the time of its initial publication, Public Administration helped to define this field of study and practice by introducing two major new emphases: an orientation toward human behavior and human relations in organizations, and an emphasis on the interaction between administration, politics, and policy. Without neglecting more traditional concerns with organization structure, Simon, Thompson, and Smithburg viewed administration in its behavioral and political contexts. The viewpoints they express still are at the center of public administration's concerns.

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Book abstract, 1991
3 months 5 days ago

Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.

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Book IV, Chapter 4, "Good Infection"
2 months 5 days ago

Evolution is definable as a change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.

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Pt. II, The Knowable; Ch. XV, The Law of Evolution (continued)
3 months 1 day ago

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

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§ 464
2 months 2 days ago

So it is that you come to know what a real God is. ... The God wants my life. He wants to go with me, sit at the table with me, work with me. Above all he wants to be ever-present.

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P. 291
1 month 3 days ago

The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem.

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2 months 2 days ago

I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.

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4 weeks 1 day ago

Never in the history of the world have there been so many migrants. And almost all of them are migrating from regions where nationality is weak or non-existent to the established nation states of the West. They are not migrating because they have discovered some previously dormant feeling of love or loyalty towards the nations in whose territory they seek a home. On the contrary, few of them identify their loyalties in national terms and almost none of them in terms of the nation where they settle. They are migrating in search of citizenship which is the principal gift of national jurisdictions, and the origin of the peace, law, stability and prosperity that still prevail in the West.

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3 months 1 week ago

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 19, § 233
1 month 2 weeks ago

Newton's law is nothing but the statistics of gravitation, it has no power whatever. Let us get rid of the idea of power from law altogether. Call law tabulation of facts, expression of facts, or what you will; anything rather than suppose that it either explains or compels.

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Suggestions for Thought : Selections and Commentaries (1994), edited by Michael D. Calabria and Janet A. MacRae, p. 41
3 months 5 days ago

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

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As quoted without citation in Discovering Evolutionary Ecology: Bringing Together Ecology And Evolution (2006) by Peter J. Mayhew, p. 24
3 months 1 week ago

For what is modesty but hypocritical humility, by means of which, in a world swelling with vile envy, a man seeks to beg pardon for his excellences and merits from those who have none? For whoever attributes no merit to himself because he really has none is not modest, but merely honest.

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Vol. I, Ch. III, The World As Representation: Second Aspect
3 months 4 days ago

As for Adler, I was much impressed by a personal experience. Once, in 1919, I reported to him a case which to me did not seem particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty in analyzing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, although he had not even seen the child. Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. "Because of my thousandfold experience," he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: "And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold."

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3 months 6 days ago

A nation never falls but by suicide.

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1861
3 months 3 weeks ago

God, the supreme being, is neither circumscribed by space, nor touched by time; he cannot be found in a particular direction, and his essence cannot change. The secret conversation is thus entirely spiritual; it is a direct encounter between God and the soul, abstracted from all material constraints.

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3 months 6 days ago

We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess. ... You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.

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Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
2 months 3 weeks ago

The friendship of one wise man is better than the friendship of a host of fools.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The way which the superior man pursues, reaches wide and far, and yet is secret. Common men and women, however ignorant, may intermeddle with the knowledge of it; yet in its utmost reaches, there is that which even the sage does not know. Common men and women, however much below the ordinary standard of character, can carry it into practice; yet in its utmost reaches, there is that which even the sage is not able to carry into practice. Great as heaven and earth are, men still find some things in them with which to be dissatisfied. Thus it is that, were the superior man to speak of his way in all its greatness, nothing in the world would be found able to embrace it, and were he to speak of it in its minuteness, nothing in the world would be found able to split it.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.

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p. 134
2 months 3 days ago

If there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind.

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Vol. 1, bk. 1, ch.4
2 months 3 days ago

The peoples' revolution .... will arrange its revolutionary organisation from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre, in keeping with the principle of liberty.

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3 months 6 days ago

Revolutions never go backwards.

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p. 214
4 months 3 days ago

Law could never, by determining exactly what is noblest and must just for one and all, enjoin upon them that which is best; for the differences of men and of actions and the fact that nothing, I may say, in human life is ever at rest, forbid any science whatsoever to promulgate any simple rule for everything and for all time. So, that which is persistently simple is inapplicable to things which are never simple.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.

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p. 7
3 months 1 week ago

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress of humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or even mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

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"The Emotional Factor"
3 months 6 days ago

Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.

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Ch. 12
3 months 5 days ago

Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition.

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Chapter 6 (pp. 52-53)
1 month 3 weeks ago

And yet there is nothing so badly imagined: nature seems to have provided, that the follies of men should be transient, but they by writing books render them permanent. A fool ought to content himself with having wearied those who lived with him: but he is for tormenting future generations; he is desirous that his folly should triumph over oblivion, which he ought to have enjoyed as well as his grave; he is desirous that posterity should be informed that he lived, and that it should be known for ever that he was a fool. Commonly paraphrased as "An author is a fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on boring future generations".

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No. 66. (Rica writing to * * *)
4 months 6 days ago

It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.

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3 months 5 days ago

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

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Book II, Chapter 1, "The Rival Conceptions of God"
3 months 1 week ago

At the very beginning of my fevers and sicknesses that cast me down, whilst still entire, and but little, disordered in health, I reconcile myself to Almighty God by the last Christian, offices, and find myself by so doing less oppressed and more easy, and have got, methinks, so much the better of my disease. And I have yet less need of a notary or counsellor than of a physician.

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Ch. 9
4 months 3 days ago

Socrates: The shoemaker, for example, uses a square tool, and a circular tool, and other tools for cutting?

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1 month 2 weeks ago

...Zen Buddhism, this religion of immanence.

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2 months 1 week ago

When we consider the being and substance of that universe in which we are immutably set, we shall discover that neither we ourselves nor any substance doth suffer death; for nothing is in fact diminished in its substance, but all things, wandering through infinite space, undergo change of aspect.

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Introductory Epistle
1 month 1 week ago

One of the great American tragedies is to have participated in a just war. It's been possible for politicians and movie-makers to encourage us we're always good guys. The Second World War absolutely had to be fought. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. But we never talk about the people we kill. This is never spoken of.

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Interviewed by Roger Friedman, "God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut", FoxNews.com

It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.

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A 11
2 months 2 days ago

I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

I have compassion on the multitude, because they continue with me now three days, and have nothing to eat: and I will not send them away fasting, lest they faint in the way.

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15:32 (KJV)
3 months 1 week ago

Whatever you do, crush the infamous thing, and love those who love you.

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Letter to Jean le Rond d'Alembert (28 November 1762);
2 months 3 days ago

Philosophy can bake no bread; but she can procure for us God, Freedom, Immortality. Which, then, is more practical, Philosophy or Economy?

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The first sentence of this was used by William Torrey Harris for the motto of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy

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