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A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

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An Apology for Idlers.
2 months 3 weeks ago

It is not by change of place that we can come nearer to Him who is in every place, but by the cultivation of pure desires and virtuous habits.

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p. 433
2 months 2 weeks ago

In this life it is necessary that we be on our guard. To begin with we must be constantly aware of the fact that life here below is best described as being a type of continual warfare. This is a fact that Job, that undefeated soldier of vast experience, tells us so plainly. Yet in this matter the great majority of mankind is often deceived, for the world, like some deceitful magician, captivates their minds with seductive blandishments, and as a result most individuals behave as if there had been a cessation of hostilities.

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p.61
2 months 1 week ago

I cannot believe - and I say this with all the emphasis of which I am capable - that there can ever be any good excuse for refusing to face the evidence in favour of something unwelcome. It is not by delusion, however exalted, that mankind can prosper, but only by unswerving courage in the pursuit of truth.

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"The Pursuit of Truth" in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, 1993
1 month 1 week ago

Ministers and favorites are a sort of people who have a state prisoner in their custody, the whole management of whose understanding and actions they can easily engross.

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Book V, Ch. 5
2 months 2 weeks ago

The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being (except in name) utterly rejected.

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Aphorism 45
2 months 1 week ago

The most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.

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Author's prefaces to the First Edition.
2 months 2 weeks ago

I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.

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Book III, Ch. 11. Of Cripples
6 months 2 weeks ago

I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

We are He, since we are His body and since He was made man in order to be our Head.

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p.432
4 days ago

No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

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Humboldt's Gift (1975), p. 452
3 weeks 6 days ago

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

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The Authoritarian Personality (1950), p. 976, co-written with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford
2 months 1 week ago

In the name of national security, the Commission's hearings were held in secret, thereby continuing the policy which has marked the entire course of the case. This prompts my second question: If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security? Indeed, precisely the same question must be put here as was posed in France during the Dreyfus case: If the Government is so certain of its case, why has it conducted all its inquiries in the strictest secrecy? "

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16 Questions on the Assassination" in The Minority of One, ed. M.S. Arnoni (1964-09-06), pp. 6-8
2 months 1 week ago

It is, of course, clear that a country with a large foreign population must endeavour, through its schools, to assimilate the children of immigrants. It is, however, unfortunate that a large part of this process should be effected by means of a somewhat blatant nationalism.

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Ch. 10: Modern Homogeneity
2 weeks 5 days ago

Statistics began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state.

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Chapter 12, Political Arithmetic, p. 102.
3 months 1 week ago

To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

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1 week 4 days ago

The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens ... Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere.

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As quoted in Tolstoy (1988) by A. N. Wilson, p. 146

A book is a small cog in a much more complex, external machinery. Writing is a flow among others; it enjoys no special privilege and enters into relationships of current and counter-current, of back-wash with other flows - the flows of shit, sperm, speech, action, eroticism, money, politics, etc. Like Bloom, writing on the sand with one hand and masturbating with the other - two flows in what relationship?

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from I have Nothing to Admit
2 months 1 week ago

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

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2 months 1 day ago

If one choose the goods of the soul, he chooses the diviner [portion]; if the goods of the body, the merely mortal.

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3 months 1 week ago

The absurd ... is an experience to be lived through, a point of departure, the equivalent, in existence of Descartes' methodical doubt. Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation, and in the process of reasoning then pursues the same course. I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest. The first and only evidence that is supplied me, within the terms of the absurdist experience, is rebellion ... Rebellion is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more, otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.

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Chapter VIII, p. 81.
2 months 1 week ago

It seems that sin is geographical. From this conclusion, it is only a small step to the further conclusion that the notion of "sin" is illusory, and that the cruelty habitually practised in punishing it is unnecessary.

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A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42 (1996), p. 283

The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.

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J 70 Variant translation: The fly that does not want to be swatted is safest if it sits on the fly-swat.
1 week 6 days ago

Quite apart from assiduous efforts to restrict the use of violence as means rather than an end, the actualization of violence as a means can inadvertently become its own end, producing new violence, producing violence anew, reiterating the license, and licensing further violence. Violence does not exhaust itself in the realization of a just end; rather, it renews itself in directions that exceed both deliberate intention and instrumental schemes. In other words, by acting as if the use of violence can be a means to achieve a nonviolent end, one imagines that the practice of violence does not in the act posit violence as its own end. The technē is undermined by the praxis, and the use of violence only makes the world into a more violent place, by bringing more violence into the world.

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p. 20
2 weeks 6 days ago

The empirical research of the last fifteen years on the structure of large organizations seems to confirm the hypothesis of Herbert Simon that human cognitive limits are a basic limiting factor in determining organization structures .

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Jay R. Galbraith, "Organization design: An information processing view." Organizational Effectiveness Center and School 21 (1977). p. 21
3 weeks 3 days ago

The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime. The wholesale mechanisation of modern life has increased uniformity a thousandfold. It is everywhere present, in habits, tastes, dress, thoughts and ideas. Its most concentrated dullness is "public opinion." Few have the courage to stand out against it. He who refuses to submit is at once labelled "queer," "different," and decried as a disturbing element in the comfortable stagnancy of modern life.

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3 months 1 week ago

How could one speak properly about love if you were forgotten, you God of love, source of all love in heaven and on earth; you who spared nothing but in love gave everything; you who are love, so that one who loves is what he is only by being in you.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

I. The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities, that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.

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Chapter II, Part II, p. 892.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Above all, every relation must be considered as suspicious, which depends in any degree upon religion, as the prodigies of Livy: And no less so, everything that is to be found in the writers of natural magic or alchemy, or such authors, who seem, all of them, to have an unconquerable appetite for falsehood and fable.

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Aphorism 29
1 month 2 weeks ago

The purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race in the future years to come.

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Encyclopédie
3 weeks 3 days ago

The rather more dubious side of Nietzsche's 'evolutionism' is his glorification of the warrior -- particularly when, as an exemplification of the warrior-hero, he chooses an archetypal 'spoilt brat' like Cesare Borgia. Nietzsche's own physical weakness and consequent inability to escape the atmosphere of the study leads him to take a rather unrealistic view of the man of action.

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p. 87
2 months 1 week ago

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

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As quoted in The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1989) edited by Robert Andrews, p. 114
1 month 2 weeks ago

Truth is the cry of all, but the game of the few.

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Paragraph 368
2 months 2 weeks ago

But men must know that in this theater of man's life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

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Book II, xx, 8
1 week 4 days ago

The whole life of the upper classes is a constant inconsistency. The more delicate a man's conscience is, the more painful this contradiction is to him.

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Chapter V, Contradiction Between our Life and our Christian Conscience
1 week 2 days ago

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.

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Statement in 1965, in reference to Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963) by Buckminster Fuller
3 weeks 6 days ago

The bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named.

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p. 138
4 days ago

Tocqueville predicted that in democratic countries the public would demand larger and larger doses of excitement and increasingly stronger stimulants from its writers. He probably did not expect that public to dramatize itself so extensively, to make the world scene everybody's theatre, or, in the developed countries, to take to alcohol and drugs in order to get relief from the horrors of ceaseless intensity, the torment of thrills and distractions. A great many writers have done little more than meet the mounting demand for thrills. I think that this demand has, in the language of marketing, peaked.

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The Distracted Public
2 months 1 week ago

Luxury is the opposite of the naturally necessary.

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Notebook V, The Chapter on Capital, p. 448.
2 months 2 weeks ago

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

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Book II, vii, 5
2 months 1 week ago

The first statement of the two principles reads as follows. First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a)reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.

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Chapter II, Section 11, pg. 60
1 week 2 days ago

Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space...it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark.

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(p. 13)
2 months 1 week ago

Instead of noble men, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, round a little there and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

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Editorial, Andhra Granthalayam, vol. 1, no. 2 (1939) p. 6

It goes without saying that apartheid is offensive. It was adopted, however, as the lesser of two evils. The Afrikaners believe that black majority rule has, in almost every case, led to the collapse of the constitutional government which they brought to South Africa, and upon which their freedoms and privileges - and perhaps even their lives - depend. And it did not seem so very bad to deny to blacks a vote which they would, when in power, promptly deny to themselves.

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'A lift at last for the other Afrikaners', The Times (17 May 1983), p. 12
4 weeks ago

Christians are beginning to lose the spirit of intolerance which animated them: experience has shown the error of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and of the persecution of those Christians in France whose belief differed a little from that of the king. They have realized that zeal for the advancement of religion is different from a due attachment to it; and that in order to love it and fulfill its behests, it is not necessary to hate and persecute those who are opposed to it.

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No. 60. (Usbek writing to Ibben)
3 months 1 week ago

A son is a mirror in which the father sees himself reflected, and the father is a mirror in which the son sees himself as he will be in the future.

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1 week 2 days ago

We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology.

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p. 276
2 months 1 week ago

Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind.

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Ch. 4: The Study of Mathematics
1 month 1 week ago

We are only puppets, our strings are being pulled by unknown forces.

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Act II.

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