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5 months 3 weeks ago

Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist-I really believe he is Antichrist-I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my 'faithful slave,' as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see I have frightened you-sit down and tell me all the news.

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Bk. I, Ch. I
4 months 6 days ago

There are two kinds of openness, the openness of indifference-promoted with the twin purposes of humbling our intellectual pride and letting us be whatever we want to be, just as long as we don't want to be knowers-and the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude, for which history and the various cultures provide a brilliant array of examples for examination.

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p. 41.
7 months 3 weeks ago

To discover the various use of things is the work of history.

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Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 1, pg. 42.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

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p. 94.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Certainly no nation ever before abandoned to the avarice and jugglings of private individuals to regulate according to their own interests, the quantum of circulating medium for the nation - to inflate, by deluges of paper, the nominal prices of property, and then to buy up that property at 1s. in the pound, having first withdrawn the floating medium which might endanger a competition in purchase. Yet this is what has been done, and will be done, unless stayed by the protecting hand of the legislature. The evil has been produced by the error of their sanction of this ruinous machinery of banks; and justice, wisdom, duty, all require that they should interpose and arrest it before the schemes of plunder and spoliation desolate the country.

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Letter to William C. Rives (1819) ME 15:232
6 months 3 weeks ago

Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

I do not believe in what is often called... 'exact terminology'... or in definitions... they do not... add to exactness... I especially dislike pretentious terminology and... pseudo-exactness concerned with it.

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2 months 4 days ago

Not totally a fan...but he's right about some things.....

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7 months 3 weeks ago

I squander untold effort making an arrangement of my thoughts that may have no value whatever.

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p. 33e
7 months 3 weeks ago

"Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst!

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7 months 4 weeks ago

I do not, therefore, need any penetrating acuteness to see what I have to do in order that my volition be morally good. Inexperienced in the course of the world, incapable of being prepared for whatever might come to pass in it, I ask myself only: can you also will that your maxim become a universal law?

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6 months 1 week ago

Spirit is never an object; nor a spiritual reality an objective one. In the so-called objective world there's no such nature, thing, or objective reality as spirit. Hence it is easy to deny the reality of spirit. God is spirit because he is not object, because he is subject.

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p. 10
4 months 3 weeks ago

In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.

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Ch. IV: "The Line of Least Resistance", p. 52
7 months 2 days ago

If you believe in the future life and, instead of preparing for it, sell it in order to buy this world, then that is folly! You do not normally sell two things for one; how can you give up an endless life for a limited number of days.

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IV. The True Nature of Prophecy and the Compelling Need of All Creation for it, p. 67.
7 months 2 weeks ago

At the end of Being and Nothingness, ... Being in-itself and Being for-itself were of Being; and this totality of beings, in which they were effected, itself was linked up to itself, relating and appearing to itself, by means of the essential project of human-reality. What was named in this way, in an allegedly neutral and undetermined way, was nothing other than the metaphysical unity of man and God, the relation of man to God, the project of becoming God as the project constituting human-reality. Atheism changes nothing in this fundamental structure.

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Chicago, 1982. (original French published in Paris, 1972, as Marges de la philosophie). p. 116
4 months 1 week ago

Thus they are deceived by the likeness of blows, and are appeased by the pretended tears of those who deprecate their wrath, and thus an unreal grief is healed by an unreal revenge.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.

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Chapter 3
4 months 3 weeks ago

The refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics.

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204
6 months 2 weeks ago

We can only learn to love by loving.

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The Bell (1958), ch. 19; 2001, p. 219.
7 months 1 week ago

Man know thyself; then thou shalt know the Universe and God.

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As quoted in Fragments of Reality: Daily Entries of Lived Life (2006) by Peter Cajander, p. 109
7 months 3 weeks ago

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing - to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from - my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.

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Psyche
6 months 3 weeks ago

It may be confidently asserted that no man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks. And the desire of rectifying these mistakes, is the noble ambition of an enlightened understanding, the impulse of feelings that Philosophy invigorates.

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A Vindication of the Rights of Men
7 months 2 weeks ago

Being asked what learning is the most necessary, he replied, "How to get rid of having anything to unlearn.

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" § 7
7 months 3 weeks ago

What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?

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p. 26
4 months 1 week ago

Yes, so it is that knowledge itself must die in order to blossom forth again in death as will; the freedom of thought, belief, and conscience, these wonderful flowers of three centuries will sink back into the lap of mother earth so that a new freedom, the freedom will, will be nourished with its most noble juices.

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p. 19
6 months 2 weeks ago

Strictly speaking, the mass, as a psychological fact, can be defined without waiting for individuals to appear in mass formation. In the presence of one individual we can decide whether he is "mass" or not. The mass is all that which sets no value on itself - good or ill - based on specific grounds, but which feels itself "just like everybody," and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else.

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Chap.I: The Coming Of The Masses
6 months 3 weeks ago

Marriage is a union between two persons - one man and one woman. A woman who has given herself up to one, can not give herself up to a second, for her whole dignity requires that she should belong only to this one.

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p. 406
6 months 3 weeks ago

The stars are scattered all over the sky like shimmering tears, there must be great pain in the eye from which they trickled.

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Act IV.
8 months 2 weeks ago

Much learning does not teach understanding.

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4 months 1 week ago

It is the fate of 'little faiths' of truth that they, true followers of Peter, whether they be Roman or the Protestant observance, cry out and sink in the sea of ideas, where the followers of Paul, believing in the Spirit, walk secure and undismayed.

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p. 32
5 months 5 days ago

Philosophy in its very act is a process of translation!

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Chapter 4, Philosophy As Writing: The Case Of Hegel, p. 81
7 months 3 weeks ago

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear.

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Success
4 months 1 week ago

We should become angels and not devils, that's why we have been created and born into the world. Therefore be and stick to what God has chosen you for.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

Of all the cultural aspects of humanity, the only one which is not broken up into national or regional splinters is science. Different nations have different languages, they may have different religions, may have different dietaries, may have different holidays, different ways of thinking, but here's only one science. 

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Interview by Richard Heffner on The Open Mind (19 June 1988); video (25:31)
6 months 2 weeks ago

O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies; To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art.

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O World, Thou Choosest Not
6 months 3 weeks 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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1 week 5 days ago

😁...I agree...but...who are the "little men"?😂

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6 months 1 week ago

In a free nation, it matters not whether individuals reason well or ill; it is sufficient that they do reason. Truth arises from the collision and from hence springs liberty, which is a security from the effects of reasoning.

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Quoted by Thomas Erskine in the trial of Thomas Paine, 1792
6 months 1 week ago

The individual begins that long effort as an Outsider; he may finish it as a saint.

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Chapter Nine, Breaking the Circuit, final sentence
8 months 3 weeks ago

Private profit is often hidden under a careful coating of great patriotism.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

The importation of gold and silver is not the principal, much less the sole benefit which a nation derives from its foreign trade.

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Chapter I, p. 479.
7 months 3 weeks ago

I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.

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p. 103
5 months 3 weeks ago

There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life.

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An Apology for Idlers.

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