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4 months 2 weeks ago

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

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Letter to M. de Menonville
3 months 3 weeks ago

Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.

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Chapter 3, Opinion, p. 28.
5 months 2 weeks ago

All religions promise a reward for excellences of the will or heart, but none for excellences of the head or understanding.

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E. Payne, trans., vol. 2, p. 230

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", pp. 267-268
2 months 1 week ago

Can the man say, Fiat lux, Let there be light; and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there is light in himself, will he accomplish this.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Truths obtained by Induction are made compact and permanent by being expressed in 'Technical Terms'.

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2 months 1 week ago

A man perfects himself by work much more than by reading.

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4 months 1 week ago

We reason deeply, when we forcibly feel.

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Letter 19
3 months 1 week ago

Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, "I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection". I have dubbed this kind of fallacy "the Argument from Personal Incredulity". Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience.

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4 months 1 week ago

It has never been in my power to study anything, - mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic.

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Letter to Victoria
3 months 1 week ago

If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so. The trick is to want the right things, then science will provide you with the most effective methods of achieving them.

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6 months 4 days ago

O saving Victim, opening wideThe gate of heaven to man below,Our foes press on from every side,Thine aid supply, Thy strength bestow.

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Verbum Supernum Prodiens (hymn for Lauds on Corpus Christi), stanza 5 (O Salutaris Hostia)
3 months 1 week ago

Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

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(p. 13)
1 month 2 weeks ago

He who steadily observes the moral precepts in which all religions concur, will never be questioned at the gates of heaven as to the dogmas in which they all differ.

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Letter to William Canby
5 months 3 days ago

When one told Plistarchus that a notorious railer spoke well of him, "I 'll lay my life," said he, "somebody hath told him I am dead, for he can speak well of no man living."

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Of Plistarchus
5 months 2 weeks ago

The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticizes it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives, the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that this higher part is coterminous and continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.

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Lecture XX, "Conclusions"
1 month 2 weeks ago

One power descends and wants to scatter, to come to a standstill, to die. The other power ascends and strives for freedom, for immortality. These two armies, the dark and the light, the armies of life and of death, collide eternally.

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2 months 1 week ago

The poor are thought to be dangerous, either morally dangerous because they are unproductive social parasites - thieves, prostitutes, drug addicts, and the like - or potentially dangerous because they are disorganized, unpredictable, and tendentially reactionary. In fact the term lumpenproletariat (or rad proletariat) has functioned for times to demonize the poor as a whole. ... The industrial reserve army is a constant threat hanging over the heads of the existing working class because, first of all, its misery serves as a terrifying example to workers of what could happen to them, and, second, the excess supply of labor it represents lowers the costs of labor and undermines workers' power against employers (by serving potentially as strike breakers, for example).

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130
4 months 1 week ago

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

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6 months 5 days ago

To no one but the Son of Heaven does it belong to order ceremonies, to fix the measures, and to determine the written characters.

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4 months 1 day ago

What appears as the positive is essentially the negative, i.e. the thing that is to be criticized.

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p. 18
4 months 1 week ago

A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...

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2 months 1 day ago

Feuerbach ... recognizes ... "even love, in itself the truest, most inward sentiment, becomes an obscure, illusory one through religiousness, since religious love loves man only for God's sake, therefore loves man only apparently, but in truth God only." Is this different with moral love? Does it love the man, this man for this man's sake, or for morality's sake, for Man's sake, and so-for homo homini Deus-for God's sake?

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Cambridge 1995, p. 56
5 months 3 weeks ago

T is so much to be a king, that he only is so by being so. The strange lustre that surrounds him conceals and shrouds him from us; our sight is there broken and dissipated, being stopped and filled by the prevailing light.

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Book III, Ch. 7. Of the Inconveniences of Greatness
3 months 2 weeks ago

Forgetting extermination is part of extermination, because it is also the extermination of memory, of history, of the social, etc. This forgetting is as essential as the event in any case unlocatable by us, inaccessible to us in its truth. This forgetting is still too dangerous, it must be effaced by an artificial memory (today, everywhere, it is artificial memories that effect the memory of man, that efface man in his own memory). This artificial memory will be the restaging of extermination-but late, much too late for it to be able to make real waves and profoundly disturb something, and especially, especially through medium that is itself cold, radiating forgetfulness, deterrence, and extermination in a still more systematic way, if that is possible, than the camps themselves.

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"Holocaust," p. 49
4 months 6 days ago

Meditation on any theme, if positive and honest, inevitably separates him who does the meditating from the opinion prevailing around him, from that which ... can be called "public" or "popular" opinion.

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p. 15
5 months 3 weeks ago

We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, which is the cause that what we believe we do not believe, and cannot disengage ourselves from what we condemn.

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Ch. 16. Of Glory, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
4 months 2 weeks ago

We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.

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As quoted in Thesaurus of Epigrams: A New Classified Collection of Witty Remarks, Bon Mots and Toasts (1942) by Edmund Fuller
5 months 2 weeks ago

Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce.

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Vol. II, Ch. XX, p. 474 (See also...David Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Ch. VII, p. 81).
3 months 4 weeks ago

Positivism ... implies the double falsehood that no interpretation is needed, and that it is not needed because the story which the positivist writer tells, such as it is, is obvious. The story he or she tells is usually a bad one, and its being obvious only means that it is familiar.

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p. 12
1 month 1 week ago

What appears to us to be an accurate definition of justice does not also appear to be so to the Gods. For we, looking to that which is most brief, direct our attention to things present, and to this momentary life, and the manner in which it subsists. But the Powers that are superior to us know the whole life of the Soul, and all its former lives.

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The Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians, translated from the Greek by Thomas Taylor, (1821) quoted by Annie Besant in Karma,
5 months 2 weeks ago

... in such a matter he would never have been guided by his first thoughts (which would probably have been right) nor even by his twenty-first (which would have at least been explicable). Beyond doubt he would have prolonged deliberation till his hundred-and-first; and they would be infallibly and invincibly wrong. This is what always happens to the deliberations of a simple man who thinks he is a subtle one.

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1 month 1 week ago

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.

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III, 11
3 months 1 week ago

What I can't understand is why you can't see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing - that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?

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" During his conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, as quoted in The Telegraph, in 2012-02-24. In "Richard Dawkins: I can't be sure God does not exist"
3 months 3 weeks ago

Popular presentation today is all too often that which puts the mob in a position to talk about something without understanding it.

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G 32
5 months 2 weeks ago

Beings who are so uniquely constituted must necessarily express themselves in other ways than ordinary men. It is impossible that with souls so differently modified, they should not carry over into the expression of their feelings and ideas the stamp of those modifications.

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First Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
3 months 4 days ago

In all ages a chief cause of the intestine disorders of states has been that the natural distribution of power and the legal distribution of power have not corresponded with each other.

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Speech in the House of Commons (28 February 1832), quoted in Speeches of the Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay, M.P. (1854), p. 91
5 months 2 weeks ago

We never have a full demonstration, although there is always an underlying reason for the truth, even if it is only perfectly understood by God, who alone penetrated the infinite series in one stroke of the mind.

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The Shorter Leibniz Texts (2006) edited by Lloyd H. Strickland, p. 111
5 months 3 weeks ago

The human being, corrupted to the root, can neither desire nor perform anything but evil.

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The Making of Martin Luther, By Richard Rex, p66
5 months 3 weeks ago

The worst evil is hardness of heart. Those who do not repent, who deliberately remain in their habits of sin, have the most to fear.

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p. 146
5 months 3 weeks ago

Cosmus, Duke of Florence, was wont to say of perfidious friends, that "We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends."

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No. 206
4 months 1 day ago

Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.

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"On What There Is", p. 4. a humorous comment on the idea "unactualized possible".
3 months 3 weeks ago

The same polarity of the male and female principle exists in nature; not only, as is obvious in animals and plants, but in the polarity of the two fundamental functions, that of receiving and penetrating. It is the polarity of earth and rain, of the river and the ocean, of night and day, of darkness and light, of matter and spirit.

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Ch. 2
3 months 3 weeks ago

To successfully adjudicate ethical problems, as opposed to 'solving' them, it is necessary that the members of the society have a sense of community. A compromise that cannot pretend to be the last word on an ethical question, that cannot pretend to derive from binding principles in an unmistakeably constraining way, can only derive its force from a shared sense of what is and is not reasonable, from loyalties to one another, and a commitment to 'muddling through' together.

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"How Not to Solve Ethical Problems"
1 month 1 week ago

The world is nothing but change. Our life is only perception.

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(Hays translation) IV, 4
4 months 2 weeks ago

A great profusion of things, which are splendid or valuable in themselves, is magnificent. The starry heaven, though it occurs so very frequently to our view, never fails to excite an idea of grandeur. This cannot be owing to the stars themselves, separately considered. The number is certainly the cause. The apparent disorder augments the grandeur, for the appearance of care is highly contrary to our idea of magnificence. Besides, the stars lie in such apparent confusion, as makes it impossible on ordinary occasions to reckon them. This gives them the advantage of a sort of infinity.

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Part II Section XIII
3 months 4 weeks ago

Emptiness simply prevents what is individual from insisting on itself.

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