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7 months 3 weeks ago

If you reject absolutely any single sensation without stopping to discriminate with respect to that which awaits confirmation between matter of opinion and that which is already present, whether in sensation or in feelings or in any immediate perception of the mind, you will throw into confusion even the rest of your sensations by your groundless belief and so you will be rejecting the standard of truth altogether. If in your ideas based upon opinion you hastily affirm as true all that awaits confirmation as well as that which does not, you will not escape error, as you will be maintaining complete ambiguity whenever it is a case of judging between right and wrong opinion.

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7 months 6 days ago

Money is human happiness in the abstract: he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes his heart entirely to money.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 26, § 320
7 months 2 weeks ago

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

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(1).
6 months 4 weeks ago

The disappearance of public executions marks therefore the decline of the spectacle; but it also marks a slackening of the hold on the body.

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Chapter One, The Spectacle of the Scaffold
7 months 6 days ago

Even the death of Friends will inspire us as much as their lives. They will leave consolation to the mourners, as the rich leave money to defray the expenses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monuments of other men are overgrown with moss; for our Friends have no place in the graveyard.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

In the last 50 years agrotoxins have spread and are pushing bees to extinction. The choices before humanity are clear, a Poison Free Future to save bees, farmers, our food and humanity. Or continue to use poisons, threatening our common future by walking blindly to extinction through the arrogance that we can substitute bees with artificial intelligence and robots... There is no substitute for the amazing biodiversity and gifts of bees. Let us together as diverse species and diverse cultures and through poison free organic food and farming, rejuvenate the biodiversity of our pollinators and restore their sacredness. We have the creative power to stop the sixth mass extinction and climate catastrophe without the need for these false technocratic solutions.

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Poisons Mean Extinction: For Bees and Humanity article for Common Dreams
3 months 5 days ago

We necessarily perceive bodies as 'without' us: the Idea of 'Externality' is one of the conditions of perception.

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6 months 1 week ago

The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction.

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Journeys to England and Ireland (1835).
5 months 2 weeks ago

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

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D 6
7 months 6 days ago

What, in unenlightened societies, colour, race, religion, or in the case of a conquered country, nationality, are to some men, sex is to all women; a peremptory exclusion from almost all honourable occupations, but either such as cannot be fulfilled by others, or such as those others do not think worthy of their acceptance.

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Ch. 4
5 months 2 weeks ago

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.

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ch. 15.
7 months 5 days ago

The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof.

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Ch. 1
7 months 5 days ago

If you say that this is absurd, that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such person know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding up before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing intrinsically absurd.

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"What Makes a Life Significant?"
6 months 3 weeks ago

Valour, however unfortunate, commands great respect even from enemies: but the Romans despise cowardice, even though it be prosperous.

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Aemilius Paulus 26 (Tr. Stewart and Long)
5 months 3 days ago

When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.

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(p. 180)
5 months 3 weeks ago

We men do nothing but lie and make ourselves important. Speech was invented for the purpose of magnifying all of our sensations and impressions - perhaps so that we could believe in them.

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Niebla [Mist]
6 months 5 days ago

People like us are unhappy in this world and in the next, I guess if we made it to heaven, we'd have to help make it thunder.

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Scene VI.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Don't let your hearts grow numb. Stay alert. It is your soul which matters.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

If those who lead you say, 'See, the Kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty. (3) And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

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(Luke 17:21)
3 months 5 days ago

When public opinion changes, it is with the rapidity of thought.

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Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey (6 January 1816) ME 14:384
7 months 2 weeks ago

For what is a child? Ignorance. What is a child? Want of instruction. For where a child has knowledge, he is no worse than we are.

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Book II, ch. 1, 16
6 months 2 weeks ago

If two right lines cut one another, they will form the angles at the vertex equal. ...This... is what the present theorem evinces, that when two right lines mutually cut each other, the vertical angles are equal. And it was first invented according to Eudemus by Thales...

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Proposition XV. Thereom VIII.
5 months 2 weeks ago

In conclusion, I wish to say that my attitude to the whole tragic question is not dictated by my Jewish antecedents. It is motivated by my abhorrence of injustice, and man's inhumanity to man. It is because of this that I have fought all my life for anarchism which alone will do away with the horrors of the capitalist régime and place all races and peoples, including the Jews, on a free and equal basis. Until then I consider it highly inconsistent for socialists and anarchists to discriminate in any shape or form against the Jews.

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8 months 3 days ago

Anything could be found in figures if the search were long enough and hard enough and if the proper pieces of information were ignored or overlooked.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Anger begins in folly, and ends in repentance.

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As quoted in Treasury of Thought: Forming an Encyclopædia of Quotations from Ancient and Modern Authors (1894) by Maturin Murray Ballou
6 months 1 day ago

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

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7 months 4 days ago

No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 24 "Oracular Philosophy and the Revolt against Reason"
7 months 1 week ago

It was in the reign of Charles II that they obtained the noble distinction of being exempted from giving their testimony on oath in a court of justice, and being believed on their bare affirmation. On this occasion the chancellor, who was a man of wit, spoke to them as follows: "Friends, Jupiter one day ordered that all the beasts of burden should repair to be shod. The asses represented that their laws would not allow them to submit to that operation. 'Very well,' said Jupiter; 'then you shall not be shod; but the first false step you make, you may depend upon being severely drubbed.'"

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6 months 1 day ago

Two enemies - the same man divided.

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3 months 2 days ago

In the case of all things which have a certain constitution, whatever harm may happen to any of them, that which is affected becomes consequently worse; but in like case, a man becomes both better... and more worthy of praise, by making the right use of these accidents.

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X, 33
3 months 3 weeks ago

[on Epicurus] His starting point is a conviction that apathy is impossible, and that pleasure - though not necessarily sensual pleasure - is the only conceivable, and quite legitimate, end of life and action. "Nature leads every organism to prefer its own good to every other good" - even the stoic finds a subtle pleasure in renunciation. "We must not avoid pleasures, but we must select them". Epicurus, then, is no epicurean, he exalts the joys of intellect rather than those of sense; he warns against pleasures that excite and disturb the soul which they should rather quite and appease. In the end he proposes to seek not pleasure in its usual sense, but ataraxia - tranquility, equaninimity, repose of mind; all of which trembles on the verge of Zeno's "Apathy"

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5 months 3 days ago

All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.

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3 months 5 days ago

We perceive by 'means' of a medium and 'by means' of impressions on the nerves: but we do not (by our senses,) perceive either the medium or the impressions on the nerves.

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7 months 4 days ago

In brief, it is my thesis that human misery is the most urgent problem of a rational public policy and that happiness is not such a problem.

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p. 485
5 months 3 weeks ago

If this superstitious fear of Spirits were taken away, and with it, Prognostiques from Dreams, false Prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which, crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted then they are for civill Obedience.

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The First Part, Chapter 2, p. 8
5 months 3 days ago

Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.

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6 months 1 day ago

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

"A large part of mankind is angry not with the sins, but with the sinners."
- Seneca the Younger

See biography for Seneca the Younger:
https://civilsimian.com/SenecatheYounger

Read Seneca the Younger's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/219/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

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8 months 6 days ago

If the genius is an artist, then he accomplishes his work as art, but neither he nor his work of art has a telos outside him.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.

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E. Jephcott, trans., p. 17.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Sociology does not 'negate' philosophy, in the sense of taking over the hidden content of philosophy and carrying it into social theory and practice, but sets itself up as a realm apart from philosophy, with a province and truth of its own. Comte is rightly held to be the inaugurator of this separation between philosophy and sociology.

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P. 375
7 months 6 days ago

One must care about a world one will not see.

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Attributed to Russell in The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations (1997), p. 450, and in Robertson's Dictionary of Quotations (1998), p. 362, but no specific source is given.
4 months 2 weeks ago

I think we have reached a stage now where we need to find solutions to economic injustice in the same place and in the same ways that we find solutions to sustainability. Sustainability on environmental grounds and justice in terms of everyone having a place in the production and consumption system - these are two aspects of the same issue. They have been artificially separated and have to be put back again in the Western way of thinking.

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1998
6 months 6 days ago

My Lords, to obtain empire is common; to govern it well has been rare indeed. To chastise the guilt of those who have been instruments of imperial sway over other nations by the high superintending justice of the sovereign state has not many striking examples among any people.

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Speech in opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings (16 February 1788), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Ninth (1899), p. 398
6 months 3 weeks ago

If I had to lay bets, my bet would be that everything is going to go to hell, but, you know, what else have we got except hope?

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"Richard Rorty Interviewed by Gideon Lewis-Kraus." The Believer, June 2003.
7 months 4 days ago

It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness and chivalry "masculine" when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them, to describe a man's sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as "feminine".

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