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3 months 4 days ago

Even in those cities which seem to enjoy the blessings of peace, and where the arts florish, the inhabitants are devoured by envy, cares and anxieties, which are greater plagues than any experienced in a town when it is under siege.

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4 months 4 days ago
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
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2 months 3 weeks ago

All of us, I believe, are fortunate to have been born.

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"Death" (1970), p. 7.
1 month 4 weeks ago

To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.

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1 month 5 days ago

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

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"Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy" : Rule I
1 month 3 weeks ago

The concept of freedom, as the Philosophy of Right has shown, follows the pattern of free ownership. As a result, the history of the world that Hegel looks out upon exalts and enshrines the history of the middle-class, which based itself on this pattern. There is a stark truth in Hegel's strangely certain announcement that history has reached its end. But it announces the funeral of a class, not of history.

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P. 227

Our main conclusions about the state are that a minimal state, limited, to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified, but any more extensive state will violate persons' rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right.

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Preface, p. ix
1 month 3 weeks ago

Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, and he followeth not us: and we forbad him, because he followeth not us. But Jesus said, Forbid him not: for there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name, that can lightly speak evil of me. For he that is not against us is on our part.

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Mark 9:38-40 (KJV)
2 months 2 days ago

"No human laws are of any validity if contrary to the law of nature; and such of them as are valid derive all their force and all their authority mediately or immediately from this original." Thus writes Blackstone, to whom let all honour be given for having so far outseen the ideas of his time; and, indeed, we may say of our time. A good antidote, this, for those political superstitions which so widely prevail. A good check upon that sentiment of power-worship which still misleads us by magnifying the prerogatives of constitutional governments as it once did those of monarchs. Let men learn that a legislature is not "our God upon earth," though, by the authority they ascribe to it, and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is. Let them learn rather that it is an institution serving a purely temporary purpose, whose power, when not stolen, is at the best borrowed.

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Pt. III, Ch. 19 : The Right to Ignore the State, § 2
1 month 4 weeks ago

Friendship and domestic happiness are continually praised; yet how little is there of either in the world, because it requires more cultivation of mind to keep awake affection, even in our own hearts, than the common run of people suppose. Besides, few like to be seen as they really are; and a degree of simplicity, and of undisguised confidence, which, to uninterested observers, would almost border on weakness, is the charm, nay the essence of love or friendship, all the bewitching graces of childhood again appearing.

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Letter 12
2 weeks 1 day ago

I believe Gandhi is the only person who knew about real democracy - not democracy as the right to go and buy what you want, but democracy as the responsibility to be accountable to everyone around you. Democracy begins with freedom from hunger, freedom from unemployment, freedom from fear, and freedom from hatred. To me, those are the real freedoms on the basis of which good human societies are based.

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1998
2 months 3 weeks ago

So live, my boys, as brave men; and if fortune is adverse, front its blows with brave hearts.

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Book II, Satire II, Line 135-136 (trans. E. C. Wickham)
3 months 4 weeks ago

It's my belief that the Universe possesses, in its essence, fractal properties of a very complex sort and that the pursuit of science shares those properties. It follows that any part of the Universe that remains un-understood, and any part of scientific investigation that remains unresolved, however small that might be in comparison to what is understood and resolved, contains within it all the complexity of the original. Therefore, we'll never finish. No matter how far we go, the road ahead will be as long as it was at the start, and that's the secret of the Universe.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Asked where he came from, he said, "I am a citizen of the world."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 63
3 months 1 day ago

If we cannot "practice the presence of God," it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like man who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreaming is to no longer be perfectly asleep. Bur for news of the fully waking world you must go to my betters.

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"Charity"
1 month 4 weeks ago

How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history - greater than the fall of empires - I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

It is the furious longing to give finality to the Universe, to make it conscious and personal, that has brought us to believe in God, to wish that God may exist, to create God, in a word. To create Him, yes! This saying ought not to scandalize even the most devout theist. For to believe in God is, in a certain sense, to create Him, although He first creates us. It is He who is continually creating Himself.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Can it really be that for us existence means exile, and nothingness, home?

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3 months 3 days ago

That the outer man is a picture of the inner, and the face an expression and revelation of the whole character, is a presumption likely enough in itself, and therefore a safe one to go on; borne out as it is by the fact that people are always anxious to see anyone who has made himself famous .... Photography ... offers the most complete satisfaction of our curiosity.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 29, § 377
3 months 4 weeks ago

Now any dogma, based primarily on faith and emotionalism, is a dangerous weapon to use on others, since it is almost impossible to guarantee that the weapon will never be turned on the user.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Tools arm the man. One can well say that man is capable of bringing forth a world; he lacks only the necessary apparatus, the corresponding armature of his sensory tools. The beginning is there. Thus the principle of a warship lies in the idea of the shipbuilder, who is able to incorporate this thought by making himself into a gigantic machine, as it were, through a mass of men and appropriate tools and materials. Thus the idea of a moment often required monstrous organs, monstrous masses of materials, and man is therefore a potential, if not an actual creator.

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Fragment No. 88
2 months 6 days ago

The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children.

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No. 16
1 month 2 weeks ago

So long as one can use scented candy to abate the foul breath of hypocrisy, Puritanism is triumphant.

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3 months 1 week ago

The world is but a perpetual see-saw.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Consciousness is nature's nightmare.

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1 week 1 day ago

Human rights are not just cultural or legal constructions, as fashionable western relativists are fond of claiming. They are universal values. To deny the benefits of the new regime of rights to other cultures is to patronise them in a way that is reminiscent of the colonial era. If the new regime on torture is good enough for the US, who can say that it is not good for everyone?

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1 month 2 weeks ago

If life is deprived of any meaningful closure, it will be ended in non-time.

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4 months 2 days ago

Evils draw men together.

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3 months ago

The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities - perhaps the only one - in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there.

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Ch. 1 "Science : Conjectures and Refutations"
3 months 6 days ago

This great increase of the quantity of work which, in consequence of the division of labour, the same number of people are capable of performing, is owing to three different circumstances; first, to the increase of dexterity in every particular workman; secondly, to the saving of the time which is commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another; and lastly, to the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labour, and enable one man to do the work of many.

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Chapter I
1 month 4 weeks ago

Try as I will, I don't see what might exist...

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The universities are schools of education, and schools of research. But the primary reason for their existence is not to be found either in the mere knowledge conveyed to the students or in the mere opportunities for research afforded to the members of the faculty. Both these functions could be performed at a cheaper rate, apart from these very expensive institutions. Books are cheap, and the system of apprenticeship is well understood. So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century. Yet the chief impetus to the foundation of universities came after that date, and in more recent times has even increased. The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.

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Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin. To be fair, others had had inklings of the truth, but it was Darwin who first put together a coherent and tenable account of why we exist.

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Ch. 1. Why Are People?
1 month 3 weeks ago

The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other. p. 111, first American edition

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1970
3 months 2 days ago

Scott does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape does it more effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a Source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence.

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(pp. 147-148)
3 months 1 day ago

Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.

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Eyeless in Gaza, 1936
1 month 3 weeks ago

This language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction; by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary; it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood.

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p. 103

It strikes everyone in beginning to form an acquaintance with the treasures of Indian literature, that a land so rich in intellectual products and those of the profoundest order of thought..."

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quoted in De Riencourt, Amaury The Soul of India Harper & Brothers Publishers New York 1960 p. 301
1 month 3 weeks ago

It is peculiar to "ressentiment criticism" that it does not seriously desire that its demands be fulfilled. It does not want to cure the evil. The evil is merely the pretext for the criticism.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 51
2 months 6 days ago

I am far from denying that newspapers in democratic countries lead citizens to do very ill-considered things in common; but without newspapers there would be hardly any common action at all. So they mend many more ills than they cause.

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Book Two, Chapter VI.
3 months 1 week ago

Seek first the virtues of the mind; and other things either will come, or will not be wanted.

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Book II, xxxi
3 months 3 weeks ago

He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.

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3 months 5 days ago

And why should man, added he, pretend to an exemption from the lot of all other animals? The whole earth, believe me, PHILO, is cursed and polluted. A perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures. Necessity, hunger, want, stimulate the strong and courageous: Fear, anxiety, terror, agitate the weak and infirm. The first entrance into life gives anguish to the new-born infant and to its wretched parent: Weakness, impotence, distress, attend each stage of that life: and it is at last finished in agony and horror.

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Demea to Philo, Part X
2 weeks 3 days ago

If Man be separated by no greater structural barrier from the brutes than they are from one another-then it seems to follow that if any process of physical causation can be discovered by which the genera and families of ordinary animals have been produced, that process of causation is amply sufficient to account for the origin of Man.

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Ch.2, p. 125
2 months 6 days ago

Men sometimes submit to shame, to tyranny, to conquest, but they never long suffer anarchy. There is no people so barbarous that they escape this general law of humanity.

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Second letter on Algeria (1837), Travels in Algeria p. 38

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

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