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8 months 2 weeks ago

If you suspect that my interest in the Bible is going to inspire me with sudden enthusiasm for Judaism and make me a convert of mountain‐moving fervor and that I shall suddenly grow long earlocks and learn Hebrew and go about denouncing the heathen — you little know the effect of the Bible on me. Properly read, it is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

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From speech at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, 1992-04-15.
7 months 2 weeks ago

A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,- congestion of the brain, apoplexy, and strangulation.

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"The Natural History of Intellect", p. 30
2 months 5 days ago

"In theory there is nothing to hinder our following what we are taught; but in life there are many things to draw us aside."
- Epictetus

See biography for Epictetus:
https://civilsimian.com/Epictetus

Read Epictetus's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/46/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

After childhood, the senses specialize via the channels of dominant technologies and social weaponries.

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Letter to The Listener October 1971, Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 443
5 months 1 day ago

Biopiracy is biological theft; illegal collection of indigenous plants by corporations who patent them for their own use.

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On biopiracy, from the booklet "No Patents on Seeds: A Handbook For Activists"
5 months 2 weeks ago

For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: 'I have to go to work - as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I'm going to do what I was born for - the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?' 

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(Farquharson translation)(Hays translation) At dawn of day, when you dislike being called, have this thought ready: "I am called to man's labour; why then do I make a difficulty if I am going out to do what I was born to do and what I was brought into the
4 months 1 week ago

That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.

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Bk. III, ch. 4.
8 months 5 days ago

The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.

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Lecture II, What Pragmatism Means
6 months 5 days ago

For the truth is that our doctrines are usually only the justification a posteriori of our conduct, or else they are our way of trying to explain that conduct to ourselves.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

He is a despicable sage whose wisdom does not profit himself.

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Maxim 629
5 months 2 weeks ago

Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played over its own nerves.

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(p. 68)
7 months 2 weeks ago

Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should never be established in it.

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Chapter II, p. 505.
7 months 2 weeks ago

Give all to love; Obey thy heart; Friends, kindred, days, Estate, good fame, Plans, credit, and the muse; Nothing refuse.

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Give All to Love, st. 1
6 months 2 weeks ago

The comprehension of God taken as a participation in his sacred life, an allegedly direct comprehension, is impossible, because participation is a denial of the divine, and because nothing is more direct than the face to face, which is straightforwardness itself.

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Totality and Infinity
6 months ago

Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society; in short, to the very conditions confronting us to-day.... The rulers of the earth have realized long ago what potent poison inheres in the Christian religion. That is the reason they foster it; that is why they leave nothing undone to instill it into the blood of the people. They know only too well that the subtleness of the Christian teachings is a more powerful protection against rebellion and discontent than the club or the gun.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Now the maximum of perfection is called ideal, by Plato, Idea - for instance, his Idea of a Republic - and is the principle of all that is contained under the general notion of any perfection, inasmuch as the lesser grades are not thought determinable but by limiting the maximum. But God, the Ideal of perfection, and hence the principle of cognition, is also, as existing really, the principle of the creation of all perfection.

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6 months 1 day ago

Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons?

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p. 17
6 months 3 weeks ago

What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.

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Chapter V. Cf Suetonius, Lives of the Twelve Caesars: "Tiberius," Ch 70
6 months 1 week ago

The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another, for the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product. ... The proletarian liberates himself by abolishing competition, private property, and all class differences.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The priests of the different religious sects, who dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of day-light; and scowl on it the fatal harbinger announcing the subversion of the duperies on which they live. In this the Presbyterian clergy take the lead. the tocsin is sounded in all their pulpits, and the first alarm denounced is against the particular creed of Doctr. Cooper; and as impudently denounced as if they really knew what it is.

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Letter to José Correia da Serra
7 months 3 weeks ago

The prejudices of the second species, since they impose upon the intellect by the sensual conditions restricting the mind if it wishes in certain cases to attain to what is intellectual, lurk more deeply. One of them is that which affects knowledge of quantity, the other that affecting knowledge of qualities generally. The former is: every actual multiplicity can be given numerically, and hence, every infinite quantity; the latter, whatever is impossible contradicts itself. In either of them the concept of time, it is true, does not enter into the very notion of the predicate, nor is it attributed as a qualification to the subject. But yet it serves as a means for forming an idea of the predicate, and thus, being a condition, affects the intellectual concept of the subject to the extent that the latter is only attained by its aid.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

He is not rich, that enjoyeth not his own goods.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

To live without duties is obscene.

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Aristocracy
5 months 6 days ago

It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government, that, having become instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or to retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history.

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Speech in the House of Commons
8 months 3 days ago

The dominion of bad men is hurtful chiefly to themselves who rule, for they destroy their own souls by greater license in wickedness; while those who are put under them in service are not hurt except by their own iniquity. For to the just all the evils imposed on them by unjust rulers are not the punishment of crime, but the test of virtue. Therefore the good man, although he is a slave, is free; but the bad man, even if he reigns, is a slave, and that not of one man, but, what is far more grievous, of as many masters as he has vices; of which vices when the divine Scripture treats, it says, For of whom any man is overcome, to the same he is also the bond-slave.

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IV, 3 Variant translation: The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but — what is worse — the slave of as many masters as he has vices.
6 months 1 week ago

Whenever a nation is converted to Christianity, its Christianity, in practice, must be largely converted to paganism.

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p. 35
3 months 2 weeks ago

It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it, and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams. ... what has no meaning admits no explanation.

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Letter to General Alexander Smyth, on the book of Revelation (or The Apocalypse of St. John the Divine)
4 months 3 weeks ago

The idea of politics as a conservation in which the collision of opinions is moderated and accommodated, in which what is sought is not truth but peace, has been almost entirely lost, and supplanted by a legalist paradigm in which all political claims and conflicts are modelled in the jargon of rights.

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'Oakeshott as a Liberal' (p.80)
7 months 2 weeks ago

Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in.

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As quoted in The Americans by Daniel Boorstin. See Truth from the "Zog Bog" by Gyeorgos Ceres Hatonn, 1993, 224 p.
5 months 1 week ago

They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener.

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Ch. 4, The Sea Chest.
4 months 3 days ago

In us there is the Light of Nature, and that Light is God.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.

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Considerations by the Way
7 months 3 weeks ago

The more one presupposes that his own power will suffice him to realize what he desires the more practical is that desire. When I treat a man contemptuously, I can inspire him with no practical desire to appreciate my grounds of truth. When I treat any one as worthless, I can inspire him with no desire to do right.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 15
7 months 2 weeks ago

Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.

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Lecture VI, Pragmatism's Conception of Truth
11 months 3 weeks ago

In his seminar on The Ethic of Psychoanalysis, Lacan speaks of the role of the Chorus in classical tragedy: we, the spectators, came to the theatre worried, full of everyday problems, unable to adjust without reserve to the problems of the play, that is to feel the required fears and compassions - but not problem, there is a chorus, who feels the sorrow and the compassion instead of us - or, more precisely, we feel the required emotions through the medium of the chorus: 'You are then relieved of all worries, even if you do not feel anything, the Chorus will do so in your place.'

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Editor Preface In this book, originating in the year 1848, the requirement for being a Christian is forced up by the pseudonymous author to the supreme ideality. Yet the requirement should indeed be stated, presented, and heard. From the Christian point of view, there ought to be no scaling down of the requirement, nor suppression of it-instead of a personal admission and confession. The requirement should be heard-and I understand what is said as spoken to me alone-so that I might learn not only to resort to grace but to resort to it in relation to the use of grace.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The eighteenth century, which distrusted itself in nothing, as a matter of course, hesitated in nothing.

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VIII
7 months 2 weeks ago

I wiped away the weeds and foam, And fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.

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Each and All, st. 3
7 months 2 weeks ago

Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.

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Lectures VI and VII, "The Sick Soul"

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