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3 months 1 week ago

As the liberal sees it, the task of the state consists solely and exclusively in guaranteeing the protection of life, health, liberty, and private property against violent attacks. Everything that goes beyond this is an evil. A government that, instead of fulfilling its task, sought to go so far as actually to infringe on personal security of life and health, freedom, and property would, of course, be altogether bad.

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Ch. 1 : The Foundations of Liberal Policy § 11. The Limits of Governmental Activity
5 months 6 days ago

Often things realised in thought are more vivid than than the same things in inattentive physical experience. But the things apprehended as mental are always subject to the condition that we come to a stop when we come to explore ever higher grades of complexity in their realised relationships. We always find tat we have thought of just this - whatever it may be - and of no more.

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Ch. 10: "Abstraction", p. 239
6 months 2 weeks ago

The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Of the evils most liable to attend on any sort of early proficiency, and which often fatally blights its promise, my father most anxiously guarded against. This was self-conceit. He kept me, with extreme vigilance, out of the way of hearing myself praised, or of being led to make self-flattering comparisons between myself and others. From his own intercourse with me I could derive none but a very humble opinion of myself; and the standard of comparison he always held up to me, was not what other people did, but what a man could and ought to do. He completely succeeded in preserving me from the sort of influences he so much dreaded. I was not at all aware that my attainments were anything unusual at my age.

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(pp. 32-33)
6 months 1 week ago

Look round and round the man you recommend, for yours will be the shame should he offend.

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Book I, epistle xviii, line 76 (translated by John Conington).
5 months 1 week ago

Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy.

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The Good Apprentice (1985), p. 247.
2 months 4 weeks ago

Even the mathematical framework helps nothing, I would first like to understand how Nature avoids the contradictions.

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(1927) Quoted in Werner Heisenberg: Die Sprache der Atome (2010) by H. Rechenberg, p. 564.
6 months 3 weeks ago

Classical political economy nearly touches the true relation of things, without, however,consciously formulating it. This it cannot so long as it sticks in its bourgeois skin.

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Vol. I, Ch. 19, pg. 594.
7 months ago

Seek first the virtues of the mind; and other things either will come, or will not be wanted.

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Book II, xxxi
6 months 2 weeks ago

The political triumph of Donald Trump is a symbol and symptom-not cause or origin-of our imperial meltdown. Trump is neither alien nor extraneous to American culture and history. In fact, he is as American as apple pie. Yet he is a sign of our spiritual bankruptcy-all spectacle and no substance, all narcissism and no empathy, all appetite and greed and no wisdom and maturity. Yet his triumph flows from the implosion of a Republican Party establishment beholden to big money, big military, and big scapegoating of vulnerable peoples of color, LGBTQ peoples, immigrants, Muslims, and women; from a Democratic Party establishment beholden to big money, big military, and the clever deployment of peoples of color, LGBTQ peoples, immigrants, Muslims, and women to hide and conceal the lies and crimes of neoliberal policies here and abroad; and from a corporate media establishment that aided and abetted Trump owing to high profits and revenues.

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2017 introduction
3 months 6 days ago

Octavia lost Marcellus, whom both his father-in-law and his uncle had begun to depend upon, and to place upon his shoulders the weight of the empire - a young man of keen intelligence and firm character, frugal and moderate in his desires to an extent which deserved especial admiration in one so young and so wealthy, strong to endure labour, averse to indulgence, and able to bear whatever burden his uncle might choose to lay, or I may say to pile upon his shoulders. Augustus had well chosen him as a foundation, for he would not have given way under any weight, however excessive.

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3 months 6 days ago

I will tell you: that perfect man, who has attained virtue, never cursed his luck, and never received the results of chance with dejection; he believed that he was citizen and soldier of the universe, accepting his tasks as if they were his orders. Whatever happened, he did not spurn it, as if it were evil and borne in upon him by hazard; he accepted it as if it were assigned to be his duty. "Whatever this may be,"he says, "it is my lot; it is rough and it is hard, but I must work diligently at the task."

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4 months 4 days ago

Some things never change...

Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
Emma Goldman believed freedom was meaningless if it did not extend to thought, speech, love, and the body itself.

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When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

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D 66
5 months 3 weeks ago

The sky was horribly dark, but one could distinctly see tattered clouds, and between them fathomless black patches. Suddenly I noticed in one of these patches a star, and began watching it intently. That was because that star had given me an idea: I decided to kill myself that night.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.

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Journal entry
3 months 2 weeks ago

One need only open the eyes to see that the conquests of industry which have enriched so many practical men would never have seen the light, if these practical men alone had existed and if they had not been preceded by unselfish devotees who died poor, who never thought of utility, and yet had a guide far other than caprice.As Mach says, these devotees have spared their successors the trouble of thinking.

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Author's Essay Prefatory to the Translation: "The Choice of Facts," p.4
3 months ago

Love for distance and order, the ability to subordinate one's individualistic and passionate element to principles, the ability to take action and work above mere personhood, a feeling of dignity devoid of vanity are features of the true warrior spirit as essential as those which refer to actual combat.

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pp. 114-115
5 months 2 weeks ago

A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him. Ch. II; Variants or variant translations of this statement have also been attributed to Bakunin: The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth. A boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished.

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3 months 1 week ago

No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it is a business of Reprobation and Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest about it! Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur-search for Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth: this is the sorest sin. The root of all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul of the man never having been open to Truth; - "living in a vain show." Such a man not only utters and produces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. The rational moral principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet paralysis of life-death.

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5 months 1 week ago

We should have with each person the relationship of one conception of the universe to another conception of the universe, and not to a part of the universe.

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p. 129
7 months 1 week ago

If teleological study of the world is philosophy, and if the Law commands such a study, then the Law commands philosophy.

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6 months 1 week ago

One who is serious all day will never have a good time, while one who is frivolous all day will never establish a household.

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Maxim no. 25.
5 months 2 weeks ago

I hope I may claim in the present work to have made it probable that the laws of arithmetic are analytic judgments and consequently a priori. Arithmetic thus becomes simply a development of logic, and every proposition of arithmetic a law of logic, albeit a derivative one. To apply arithmetic in the physical sciences is to bring logic to bear on observed facts; calculation becomes deduction.

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Gottlob Frege (1950 ). The Foundations of Arithmetic. p. 99.
3 months 6 days 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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4 months 2 weeks ago

By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

The modern world inherits the Christian view in which salvation is played out in history. In Christian myth human events follow a design known only to God; the history of humankind is an ongoing story of redemption. This is an idea that informs virtually all of western thought - not least when it is intensely hostile to religion. From Christianity onwards, human salvation would be understood (at least in the west) as involving movement through time. All modern philosophies in which history is seen as a process of human emancipation - whether through revolutionary change or incremental improvement - are garbled versions of this Christian narrative, itself a garbled version of the original message of Jesus.

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The Faith of Puppets: The Revelation of Philip K. Dick (p. 60)
6 months 3 weeks ago

Extreme pride or dejection indicates extreme ignorance of self.

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Part IV, Prop. LV
3 months 2 weeks ago

Progressives on the left have shown themselves willing to abandon liberal values in pursuit of social justice objectives. There has been a sustained intellectual attack on liberal principles over the past three decades coming out of academic pursuits like gender studies, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, that deny the universalistic premises underlying modern liberalism. The challenge is not simply one of intolerance of other views or "cancel culture" in the academy or the arts. Rather, the challenge is to basic principles that all human beings were born equal in a fundamental sense, or that a liberal society should strive to be color-blind.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.

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p. 109
3 months 6 days ago

In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? Or what old ones have they advanced? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? Who drinks out of American glasses? Or eats from American plates? Or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture?

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Referring to the lack of established culture and the established institution of slavery in the United States, in "Review of Seybert's Annals of the United States", The Edinburgh Review (1820), pp. 79-80
7 months 2 weeks ago

He could almost wish he were superstitious. He could then console himself with the thought that the casual meaningless meeting had really been directed by a knowing and purposeful Fate.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The next thing is by gentle degrees to accustom children to those things they are too much afraid of. But here great caution is to be used, that you do not make too much haste, nor attempt this cure too early, for fear lest you increase the mischief instead of remedying it.

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Sec. 115
5 months 2 weeks ago

The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Self-trust is the first secret of success.

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Success
6 months 3 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
5 months 4 days ago

The Americans have always been more open to my ideas. In fact, I could earn a living in America just by lecturing. One of my brightest audiences, incidentally, were the prisoners in a Philadelphia gaol - brighter than my students at university.

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Interview with Paul Newman in Abraxas Unbound #7
7 months 3 weeks ago
Because of the way that myth takes it for granted that miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically inspired people the ancient Greeks, for instance more closely resembles a dream than it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker.
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6 months 1 week ago

Good means not [merely] not to do wrong, but rather not to desire to do wrong.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it.

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Lectures of 1946 - 1947, as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : A Memoir (1966) by Norman Malcolm, p. 43
3 months 1 week ago

If you find many people who are hard and indifferent to you in a world that you consider to be unhospitable and cruel-as often, indeed, happens to a tender-hearted, stirring young creature-you will also find there are noble hearts who will look kindly on you, and their help will be precious to you beyond price.

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3 months 1 week ago

Misery which, through long ages, had no spokesman, no helper, will now be its own helper and speak for itself.

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7 months 3 weeks ago
Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick.
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5 months 3 weeks ago

To make an end of all things on Earth, and our Planetical System of the World, he (God) need but put out the Sun.

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7 months 3 weeks ago
Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries, a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world.
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7 months 1 week ago

When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them.

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3 months 1 week ago

Feuerbach ... recognizes ... "even love, in itself the truest, most inward sentiment, becomes an obscure, illusory one through religiousness, since religious love loves man only for God's sake, therefore loves man only apparently, but in truth God only." Is this different with moral love? Does it love the man, this man for this man's sake, or for morality's sake, for Man's sake, and so-for homo homini Deus-for God's sake?

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Cambridge 1995, p. 56
2 months 3 weeks ago

We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know. We may believe the statement of another person, when there is reasonable ground for supposing that he knows the matter of which he speaks, and that he is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

I have greater confidence in my wife and my pupils than I have in Christ.

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