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Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 week 2 days ago
For tribal man, space was the...

For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

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p. 85; "Magic that Changes Mood")
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 1 week ago
People seem not to see that...

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

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Worship
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
1 month 2 weeks ago
It is easy to see that,...

It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.

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Book Three, Chapter IX.
Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
5 days ago
The strange superstition has arisen in...

The strange superstition has arisen in the Western world that we can start all over again, remaking human nature, human society, and the possibilities of happiness; as though the knowledge and experience of our ancestors were now entirely irrelevant.

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Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
1 month 2 weeks ago
I should have loved freedom, I...

I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.

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Book Four, Chapter VII.
Philosophical Maxims
Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
1 month 3 days ago
Philosophers are adults who persist in...

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions. 

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As quoted in The Listener
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
2 months 2 weeks ago
It is an unsufferable blasphemy to...

It is an unsufferable blasphemy to reject the public ministry or to say that people can become holy without sermons and Church. This involves a destruction of the Church and rebellion against ecclesiastical order; such upheavals must be warded off and punished like all other revolts.

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In Luther, Hartmann Grisar, 1915, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, vol. 4, p. 126,
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
1 month 1 week ago
Paper, they say, does not blush,...

Paper, they say, does not blush, but I assure you it's not true and that it's blushing just as I am now, all over.

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Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
1 month 3 weeks ago
Those alone are dear to Divinity...

Those alone are dear to Divinity who are hostile to injustice.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
2 months 1 week ago
Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional,...

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
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
2 months 1 week ago
We ourselves are the entities to...

We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed.

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Macquarrie & Robinson translation
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
3 months 2 weeks ago
No one talks more passionately about...
No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any. By enlisting passion on his side he wants to stifle his reason and its doubts: thus he will acquire a good conscience and with it success among his fellow men.
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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
2 weeks ago
Seduction is the world's elementary dynamic......

Seduction is the world's elementary dynamic... All this has changed significantly for us, at least in appearance. For what has happened to good and evil? Seduction hurls them against one another, and unites them beyond meaning, in a paroxysm [sudden outbreak of emotion] of intensity and charm.

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(p. 59)
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 3 weeks ago
You can live, provided you live;...

You can live, provided you live; that is, you can live for ever, provided you live a good life.

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229H:3:2
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 1 week ago
Fine manners need the support of...

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

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Behavior
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 1 week ago
We reduce things to mere Nature...

We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may 'conquer' them.

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Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
1 month 1 week ago
We have here a question of...

We have here a question of difficulty, analogous to the question of nominalism and realism.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 1 week ago
For nature beats in perfect tune,...

For nature beats in perfect tune, And rounds with rhyme her every rune, Whether she work in land or sea, Or hide underground her alchemy. Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.

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Wood-notes, no. II, st. 7
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 2 weeks ago
I have here only made a...

I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that ties them together.

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Book III, Ch. 12. Of Physiognomy
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
2 months 1 week ago
It is not murder which is...

It is not murder which is forgiven but the killer, his person as it appears in circumstances and intentions. The trouble with the Nazi criminals was precisely that they renounced voluntarily all personal qualities, as if nobody were left to be either punished or forgiven. They protested time and again that they had never done anything out of their own initiative, that they had no intentions whatsoever, good or bad, and that they only obeyed orders.

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Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
1 week 2 days ago
Speech is a mirror of the...

Speech is a mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.

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Maxim 1073
Philosophical Maxims
John Searle
John Searle
2 weeks ago
You need to know enough philosophy...

You need to know enough philosophy so that the methods of logical analysis are available to you to be used as a tool. One of the most depressing things about educated people today is that so few of them, even among professional intellectuals, are able to follow the steps of a simple logical argument.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
3 weeks 5 days ago
The fact of the religious vision,...

The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", p. 268
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 weeks ago
There are people who believe everything...

There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face. ... It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth ... into a liar - that I call an achievement.

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E 59 Variant translation: There are people who think that everything one does with a serious face is sensible…
Philosophical Maxims
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
1 month 3 days ago
I daresay anything can be made...

I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.

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The Message to the Planet (1989) p. 322.
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 week 1 day ago
Mutation may be random, but selection...

Mutation may be random, but selection definitely is not.

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Chapter 3, "The Message from the Mountain" (p. 82)
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 4 days ago
In that very hour he became...

In that very hour he became overjoyed in the holy spirit and said: “I publicly praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have carefully hidden these things from wise and intellectual ones and have revealed them to young children. Yes, O Father, because this is the way you approved.

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Luke 10:21, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month 1 week ago
You talk of Paine with more...

You talk of Paine with more respect than he deserves: He is utterly incapable of comprehending his subject. He has not even a moderate portion of learning of any kind. He has learnd the instrumental part of literature, a style, and a method of disposing his ideas, without having ever made a previous preparation of Study or thinking-for the use of it. ... [Paine] possesses nothing more than what a man whose audacity makes him careless of logical consequences, and his total want of honour and morality makes indifferent as to political consequences, may very easily write. They indeed who seriously write upon a principle of levelling ought to be answerd by the Magistrate-and not by the Speculatist.

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Letter to William Cusac Smith (22 July 1791), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), pp. 303-304
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 2 weeks ago
To give the monopoly of the...

To give the monopoly of the home-market to the produce of domestic industry, in any particular art or manufacture, is in some measure to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, and must, in almost all cases, be either a useless or a hurtful regulation.

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Chapter II, p. 489.
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
2 months 1 week ago
In place of the bourgeois society,...

In place of the bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, shall we have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

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Section 2, paragraph 72 (last paragraph).
Philosophical Maxims
Cornel West
Cornel West
2 months 6 days ago
In these downbeat times, we need...

In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power. We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other's throats, even as we acknowledge the weighty forces of racism, patriarchy, economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse on our necks. We are at a crucial crossroad in the history of this nation--and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately. Do we have the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance, love, respect, and will to meet the challenge? Time will tell. None of us alone can save the nation or world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so.

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(p 109)
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 1 week ago
The heavens are as deep as...

The heavens are as deep as our aspirations are high.

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Quoted in Maturin M. Ballou (ed.) Pearls of Thought (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1881) p. 21
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 2 weeks ago
The commodities of Europe were almost...

The commodities of Europe were almost all new to America, and many of those of America were new to Europe. A new set of exchanges, therefore, began..and which should naturally have proved as advantageous to the new, as it certainly did to the old continent. The savage injustice of the Europeans rendered an event, which ought to have been beneficial to all, ruinous and destructive to several of those unfortunate countries.

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Chapter I, p. 481.
Philosophical Maxims
René Descartes
René Descartes
2 months 2 weeks ago
Staying as I am…

Staying as I am, one foot in one country and the other in another, I find my condition very happy, in that it is free.

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Letter to Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine, Paris, June/July 1648
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 2 weeks ago
Every tax, however, is to the...

Every tax, however, is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery but of liberty. It denotes that he is a subject to government, indeed, but that, as he has some property, he cannot himself be the property of a master.

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Chapter II, Part II, p. 927.
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 4 days ago
The sabbath was made for man,...

The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.

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Mark 2:27 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
3 weeks 3 days ago
Some will ask, what about weak...

Some will ask, what about weak natures, must they not be protected? Yes, but to be able to do that, it will be necessary to realize that education of children is not synonymous with herdlike drilling and training. If education should really mean anything at all, it must insist upon the free growth and development of the innate forces and tendencies of the child. In this way alone can we hope for the free individual and eventually also for a free community, which shall make interference and coercion of human growth impossible.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
2 months 1 week ago
Mathematics is as little a natural...

Mathematics is as little a natural science as philosophy is one of the humanities. Philosophy in its essence belongs as little in the philosophical faculty as mathematics belongs to natural science. To house philosophy and mathematics in this way today seems to be a blemish or a mistake in the catalog of the universities. Plato put over the entrance to his Academy the words: "Let no one who has not grasped the mathematical enter here!"

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p. 69,75
Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
2 months 1 week ago
There are infinitely many variations of...

There are infinitely many variations of the initial situation and therefore no doubt indefinitely many theorems of moral geometry.

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Chapter III, Section 21, pg. 126
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
2 months 1 week ago
The militarily-patriotic and the romantic-minded everywhere,...

The militarily-patriotic and the romantic-minded everywhere, and especially the professional military class, refuse to admit for a moment that war may be a transitory phenomenon in social evolution. The notion of a sheep's paradise like that revolts, they say, our higher imagination. Where then would be the steeps of life? If war had ever stopped, we should have to re-invent it, on this view, to redeem life from flat degeneration. Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. It's profits are to the vanquished as well as to the victor; and quite apart from any question of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature at its highest dynamic.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
2 months 1 week ago
I think so badly of philosophy...

I think so badly of philosophy that I don't like to talk about it. ... I do not want to say anything bad about my dear colleagues, but the profession of teacher of philosophy is a ridiculous one. We don't need a thousand of trained, and badly trained, philosophers - it is very silly. Actually most of them have nothing to say.

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As quoted in "At 90, and Still Dynamic : Revisiting Sir Karl Popper and Attending His Birthday Party" by Eugene Yue-Ching Ho, in Intellectus 23
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
2 months 2 weeks ago
Eloquence, when at its highest pitch,...

Eloquence, when at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection; but addressing itself entirely to the fancy or the affections, captivates the willing hearers, and subdues their understanding. Happily, this pitch it seldom attains. But what a Tully or a Demosthenes could scarcely effect over a Roman or Athenian audience, every Capuchin, every itinerant or stationary teacher can perform over the generality of mankind, and in a higher degree, by touching such gross and vulgar passions.

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Section 10 : Of Miracles Pt. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon
2 weeks 6 days ago
The first task of administrative theory...

The first task of administrative theory is to develop a set of concepts that will permit the description, in terms relevant to the theory, of administrative situations. These concepts, to be scientifically useful, must be operational; that is, their meanings must correspond to empirically observable facts or situations.

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p. 43.
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 week 4 days ago
If there may be doubts for...

If there may be doubts for men and for a childless woman as to the way to, fulfil the will of God, for a mother that path is firmly and clearly defined, and if she fulfils it humbly with a simple heart she stands on the highest point of perfection a human being can attain, and becomes for all a model of that complete performance of God's will which all desire. Only a mother can before her death tranquilly say to Him who sent her into this world, and Whom she has served by bearing and bringing up children whom she has loved more than herself - only she having served Him in the way appointed to her can say with tranquillity, Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace. And that is the highest perfection to which, as to the highest good, men aspire.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
3 months 1 week ago
The welfare of the people in...

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience. It would be easy, however, to destroy that good conscience by shouting to them: if you want the happiness of the people, let them speak out and tell what kind of happiness they want and what kind they don't want! But, in truth, the very ones who make use of such alibis know they are lies; they leave to their intellectuals on duty the chore of believing in them and of proving that religion, patriotism, and justice need for their survival the sacrifice of freedom.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 3 days ago
In every province...
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Main Content / General
William James
William James
2 months 1 week ago
Nothing is so fatiguing as the...

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.

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To Carl Stumpf, 1 January 1886
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 1 week ago
I do not pretend to start...

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 4 days ago
Being is continuous becoming. P. 136

Being is continuous becoming.

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P. 136
Philosophical Maxims
Montesquieu
Montesquieu
4 weeks ago
If I knew of…

If I knew of something that could serve my nation but would ruin another, I would not propose it to my prince, for I am first a man and only then a Frenchman, because I am necessarily a man, and only accidentally am I French.

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Philosophical Maxims
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