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2 months 3 weeks ago

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right. Variant translation: Every nation criticizes every other one - and they are all correct.

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As quoted by Wolfgang Pauli in a letter to Abraham Pais (17 August 1950) published in The Genius of Science (2000) by Abraham Pais, p. 242
2 weeks 1 day ago

In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.

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Foreword to The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom
2 months 3 weeks ago

If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as "spiritual life," "God," "soul," "cross," etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.

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June 15, 1844
1 month 1 week ago

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.

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Ch. VI: Nature, Mind and the Subject
1 month 2 weeks ago

Executions, far from being useful examples to the survivors, have, I am persuaded, a quite contrary effect, by hardening the heart they ought to terrify. Besides, the fear of an ignominious death, I believe, never deterred anyone from the commission of a crime, because in committing it the mind is roused to activity about present circumstances.

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Letter 19
1 month 1 week ago

The more the concept of reason becomes emasculated, the more easily it lends itself to ideological manipulation and to propagation of even the most blatant lies. ... Subjective reason conforms to anything.

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pp. 24-25.
3 months 2 weeks ago

So many men are deprived of grace. How can one live without grace? One has to try it and do what Christianity never did: be concerned with the damned.

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Given our anthropocentric bias, thinking of non-human vertebrates not just as equivalent in moral status to toddlers or infants, but as though they were toddlers or infants, is a useful exercise. Such reconceptualisation helps correct our lack of empathy for sentient beings whose physical appearance is different from "us". Ethically, the practice of intelligent "anthropomorphism" shouldn't be shunned as unscientific, but embraced insofar as it augments our stunted capacity for empathy. Such anthropomorphism can be a valuable corrective to our cognitive and moral limitations. This is not a plea to be sentimental, simply for impartial benevolence.

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Reprogramming Predators, BLTC Research, 2009
3 months 2 weeks ago

Hungary conquered and in chains has done more for freedom and justice than any people for twenty years. But for this lesson to get through and convince those in the West who shut their eyes and ears, it was necessary, and it can be no comfort to us, for the people of Hungary to shed so much blood which is already drying in our memories. In Europe's isolation today, we have only one way of being true to Hungary, and that is never to betray, among ourselves and everywhere, what the Hungarian heroes died for, never to condone, among ourselves and everywhere, even indirectly, those who killed them. It would indeed be difficult for us to be worthy of such sacrifices.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Ignorance is not a simple lack of knowledge but an active aversion to knowledge, the refusal to know, issuing from cowardice, pride or laziness of mind. 

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Principle attributed to Popper by Ryszard Kapiscinski in New York Times obituary, 1995.
2 months 3 weeks ago

The reader is nowhere raised into and sustained in a bigger, purer or rarer region of thought than in the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita's sanity and sublimity have impressed the minds of even soldiers and merchants.

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A Tribute to Hinduism, 2008

It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.

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Book II, Ch. 13
3 months 2 weeks ago

The military mind remains unparalleled as a vehicle of creative stupidity.

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2 months 3 days ago

The best and greatest winning is a true friend; and the greatest loss is the loss of time.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

If conquest constitutes a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them.

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The Abolition of Landed Property Letter to Robert Applegarth, 3 December 1869

If...we look at the essential characteristics of the Whig and the Tory, we may consider each of them as the representative of a great principle, essential to the welfare of nations. One is, in an especial manner, the guardian of liberty, and the other, of order. One is the moving power, and the other the steadying power of the state. One is the sail, without which society would make no progress, the other the ballast, without which there would be small safety in a tempest.

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The Earl of Chatham', The Edinburgh Review (October 1844), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review: A New Edition (1852), p. 725
2 months 3 weeks ago

Whatever limits us we call Fate.

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Fate
2 weeks 6 days ago

Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order.

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(p. 303)
6 months 3 weeks ago

The analysis achieves its end when the patient is able to recognize, in the Real of his symptom, the only support of his being. That is how we must read Freud's 'wo we war, soll ich werden:' you, the subject, must identify yourself with the place where your symptom already was; in its pathological particularity you must recognize the element which gives consistency to your being.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Creation is in fact a fault, man's famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator's example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

If a workman can conveniently spare those three halfpence, he buys a pot of porter. If he cannot, he contents himself with a pint, and, as a penny saved is a penny got, he thus gains a farthing by his temperance.

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Chapter II, Part II, Article IV, p. 951.
1 month 2 weeks ago

The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.

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pp. 145-146
1 month 1 week ago

The work of charity, of the love of God, is to endeavor to to liberate God from brute matter, to endeavor to give consciousness to everything, to spiritualize or universalize everything; it is to dream that the very rocks may find a voice and work in accordance with the spirit of this dream; it is to dream that everything that exists may become conscious, that the Word may become life.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

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An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940), Introduction, p. 15
1 day ago

To recognize a difficulty is not to solve it.

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Chapter 1, The Faces of Silence, p. 9
2 months 3 weeks ago

Is that to say we are against Free Trade? No, we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions in a single group, where they will stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletariat.

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Writing in the Chartist newspaper (1847), in Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 6, pg 290.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Is there anything we cannot contrive to call the demands of the times, and is there anything that does not acquire a certain prestige by being the demand of the times? But for decisive religious categories to become the demand for the times is eo ipso a contradiction. “The times” is too abstract a category to be able as claimant to demand the decisive religious categories that belong specifically to individuality and particularity; loud collective demands en mass for what can be shared only by the single individual in particularity, in solitariness, in silence, cannot be made.

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Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review.
2 months 2 weeks ago

You can't lead the people if you don't love the people. You can't save the people, if you don't serve the people.

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Hope on a Tightrope: Words and Wisdom (2008); also on "The Way I See It" Starbucks Coffee Cup #284
3 months ago

All seed except Mary was vitiated [by original sin].

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Weimar edition of Martin Luther's Works, English translation edited by J. Pelikan [Concordia: St. Louis], Vol. 11, WA, 39, II:107
2 months 3 weeks ago

The vessel, though her masts be firm, beneath her copper bears a worm.

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"Though All the Fates Should Prove Unkind", st. 2
2 months 2 weeks ago

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

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Journal entry (11 October 1914), p. 10e
2 months 3 weeks ago

It is not to be supposed that she was, or that any one, at the age at which I first saw her, could be, all that she afterwards became. Least of all could this be true of her, with whom self-improvement, progress in the highest and in all senses, was a law of her nature; a necessity equally from the ardour with which she sought it, and from the spontaneous tendency of faculties which could not receive an impression or an experience without making it the source or the occasion of an accession of wisdom. Up to the time when I first saw her, her rich and powerful nature had chiefly unfolded itself according to the received type of feminine genius. To her outer circle she was a beauty and a wit, with an air of natural distinction, felt by all who approached her: to the inner, a woman of deep and strong feeling, of penetrating and intuitive intelligence, and of an eminently meditative and poetic nature.

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(p. 185)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.

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Considerations by the Way
2 weeks 4 days ago

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

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An Inland Voyage (1878), Ch. III, "The Royal Sport Nautique".
3 months ago

I think these things [firearms] were invented by Satan himself, for they can't be defended against with (ordinary) weapons and fists. All human strength vanishes when confronted with firearms. A man is dead before he sees what's coming.

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3552
2 months 3 weeks ago

All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.

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Power
1 month 2 weeks ago

An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings.

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Chapter XXXI "The Philosophy of Logical Analysis"
1 month ago

A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'.

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Chapter 4, Evidence, p. 34.
2 months 3 weeks ago

A company of solemn tyrants is impervious to all seductions.

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"Tyranny", 1764
2 months 3 weeks ago

Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.

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p. 4
1 week 1 day ago

Is Man so different from any of these Apes that he must form an order by himself? Or does he differ less from them than they differ from one another, and hence must take his place in the same order with them?

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Ch.2, p. 86
2 weeks 4 days ago

The time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude, towards the nobler and showier sides of national life.

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Crabbed Age and Youth.
2 months 3 weeks ago

All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.

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"Pacifism and Philosophy", 1936
1 month 4 days ago

Human history began with an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience.

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Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem in On Disobedience and Other Essays
2 months 3 weeks ago

Thus it may be said that not only the soul, the mirror of an indestructible universe, is indestructible, but also the animal itself, though its mechanism may often perish in part and take off or put on an organic slough.

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La monadologie (77). Sometimes paraphrased as: The soul is the mirror of an indestructible universe.
2 months 3 weeks ago

If the Communists conquered the world, it would be very unpleasant for a while, but not forever. But if the human race is wiped out, that is the end.

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Television interview on March 24, 1958, as quoted in The United States in World Affairs (1959), p. 12

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