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3 months 2 weeks ago

The invasion... exhibits in stark terms, the choice that is before us today between maintaining a liberal government that respects the rights of individuals, or moving over to a form of centralized illiberal dictatorship, even if that... illiberal government is somehow democratically legitimated. ...That's the central issue in global politics today. ...That's basically what the... Ukraine invasion is about, and that's why... all liberal societies that care about those individual freedoms... have a very powerful interest in the outcome of that war, because Putin and Russia are at the center of an international network of illiberal forces that are seeking to overturn liberal values in virtually every part of the world, and therefore... that's all part of a larger global struggle over our fundamental liberal values.

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26:50 Question & Answer period follows
2 months 2 weeks ago

Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.

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III, 7
6 months 3 weeks ago

What strength belongs to every plant and animal in nature. The tree or the brook has no duplicity, no pretentiousness, no show. It is, with all its might and main, what it is, and makes one and the same impression and effect at all times. All the thoughts of a turtle are turtles, and of a rabbit, rabbits. But a man is broken and dissipated by the giddiness of his will; he does not throw himself into his judgments; his genius leads him one way but 't is likely his trade or politics in quite another.

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"The Natural History of Intellect", p. 46
4 months 2 weeks ago

Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.

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Eye Appeal, p. 79-80
5 months 1 day ago

Before a science can develop principles, it must possess concepts. Before a law of gravitation could be formulated, it was necessary to have the notions of "acceleration" and "weight."

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p. 43.

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold...The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes.

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Ch. 12, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
6 months 3 weeks ago

For Genet, reflective states of mind are the rule. And although they are of an unstable nature in everyone, in him...reflection is always contrary to the reflected feeling.

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p. 278
4 months 2 weeks ago

I speak as a biologist. There aren't many absolutely clear distinctions in biology. Mostly what we have is a spectrum. But the male-female divide is exceptional in biology. It really is a true binary.

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Interviewed by Judith Woods, as cited in "Richard Dawkins interview: 'I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words'", The Telegraph
2 months 3 weeks ago

The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen, in his person and property, and in their management. Try by this, as a tally, every provision of our constitution, and see if it hangs directly on the will of the people. Reduce your legislature to a convenient number for full, but orderly discussion. Let every man who fights or pays, exercise his just and equal right in their election.

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5 months 1 week ago

In the root of the word "faith" itself... there is implicit the idea of confidence, of surrender to the will of another, to a person. Confidence is placed only in persons. We trust in Providence, which we perceive as something personal and conscious, not in Fate, which is something impersonal. And thus it is in the person who tells us the truth, in the person that gives us hope, that we believe, not directly or immediately in truth itself or in hope itself.

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If there are different Notions of the science of Philosophy, it is the true Notion alone that puts us in a position to understand the writings of philosophers who have worked in the knowledge of it. For in thought, and particularly in speculative thought, comprehension means something quite different from understanding the grammatical sense of the words alone, and also from understanding them in the region of ordinary conception only. Hence we may possess a knowledge of the assertions, propositions, or of the opinions of philosophers; we may have occupied ourselves largely with the grounds of and deductions from these opinions, and the main point in all that we have done may be wanting - the comprehension of the propositions.

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First divsion, Chapter I. - The Metaphysics of the Understanding…
6 months 1 week ago

One should attend to one's enemies, for they are the first persons to detect one's errors.

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§ 5
5 months 2 weeks ago

Executions, far from being useful examples to the survivors, have, I am persuaded, a quite contrary effect, by hardening the heart they ought to terrify. Besides, the fear of an ignominious death, I believe, never deterred anyone from the commission of a crime, because in committing it the mind is roused to activity about present circumstances.

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Letter 19
2 months 3 weeks ago

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.

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Letter to Abigail Smith Adams from Paris while a Minister to France (22 February 1787), referring to Shay's Rebellion. "Jefferson's Service to the New Nation," Library of Congress
7 months 1 week ago

Show me someone who is ill and yet happy, in danger and yet happy, dying and yet happy, exiled and yet happy. Show me such a person; by the gods, how greatly I long to see a Stoic!

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Book II, ch. 19, 24.
3 months 2 weeks ago

One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going.

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Letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter
3 months 2 weeks ago

Well, since paradoxes are at hand, let us see how it might be demonstrated that in a finite continuous extension it is not impossible for infinitely many voids to be found.

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Salviati, First Day, Stillman Drake translation
6 months 3 weeks ago

It was the excess to which imaginary systems of religion had been carried, and the intolerance, persecutions, burnings, and massacres, they occasioned, that first induced certain persons to propagate infidelity; thinking, that upon the whole, that it was better not to believe at all, than to believe a multitude of things and complicated creeds, that occasioned so much mischief in the world. But those days are past, persecution has ceased, and the antidote then set up against it has no longer even the shadow of apology. We profess, and we proclaim in peace, the pure, unmixed, comfortable, and rational belief of a God, as manifested to us in the universe. We do this without any apprehension of that belief being made a cause of persecution as other beliefs have been, or of suffering persecution ourselves. To God, and not to man, are all men to account for their belief.

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A Discourse, &c. &c.

That which is good for the enemy harms you, and that which is good for you harms the enemy.

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Rule 1 from Machiavelli's Lord Fabrizio Colonna: libro settimo (Book 7) (Modern Italian uses nemico instead of nimico.)
5 months 2 weeks ago

Elias truly shall first come, and restore all things. But I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed. Likewise shall also the Son of man suffer of them.

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17:11-12 (KJV)
6 months 3 weeks ago

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 177
4 months 2 weeks ago

Universality is the highest principle....

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.

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(p. 36)
5 months 2 weeks ago

Awareness of time: assault on time . . .

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7 months 1 day ago

Sir Henry Wotton used to say that critics are like brushers of noblemen's clothes.

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No. 64
5 months 3 weeks ago

Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

All human activities are equivalent ... and ... all are on principle doomed to failure.

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Conclusion, II
5 months 1 week ago

We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language.

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Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (1987), p. 231
5 months 3 weeks ago

I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.

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Book Four, Chapter VII.
6 months 3 weeks ago

The governors of the world believe, and have always believed, that virtue can only be taught by teaching falsehood, and that any man who knew the truth would be wicked. I disbelieve this, absolutely and entirely. I believe that love of truth is the basis of all real virtue, and that virtues based upon lies can only do harm.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Should it seem to me that truth has been put to silence, and virtue trampled under foot, and that folly and vice will certainly triumph; should it happen, when all hearts were filled with hope for the human race, that the horizon should suddenly darken around them as it had never done before; should the work, well and happily begun, on which all eyes were fixed with joyous expectation, suddenly and unexpectedly be turned into a deed of shame, - yet will I not be dismayed; nor if the good cause should appear to grow and flourish, the lights of freedom and civilization be diffused, and peace and good-will amongst men be extended, shall yet my efforts be relaxed.

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Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p.123

If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13.

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B 44
5 months 2 weeks ago

Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what - it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?

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5 months 1 week ago

A man, in so far as he is an individual, may be very sharply detached from others, a sort of spiritual crustacean, and yet be very poor in differentiating content. And further, it is true on the other hand that the more personality a man has and the greater his interior riches and the more he is a society within himself, the less brusquely he is divided from his fellows.

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5 months 1 week ago

There is something between the gross specialised values of the mere practical man, and the thin specialised values of the mere scholar. Both types have missed something; and if you add together the two sets of values, you do not obtain the missing elements.

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Ch. 13: "Requisites for Social Progress", p. 279

The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.

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E 55
6 months 3 weeks ago

A process which led from the amœba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress - though whether the amœba would agree with this opinion is not known.

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Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
6 months 1 week ago

Truthfulness under oath is, by now, a matter of our civic religion, our relation to our fellow citizens rather than our relation to a nonhuman power.

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"John Searle on Realism and Relativism." Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).
7 months 2 weeks ago

Knowledge is the food of the soul; and we must take care, my friend, that the Sophist does not deceive us when he praises what he sells, like the dealers wholesale or retail who sell the food of the body; for they praise indiscriminately all their goods, without knowing what are really beneficial or hurtful.

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5 months 1 week ago

Diogenes, in his mud-covered sandals, tramps over the carpets of Aristippus. The cynic pullulated at every corner, and in the highest places. This cynic did nothing but saboter the civilisation of the time. He was the nihilist of Hellenism. He created nothing, he made nothing. His role was to undo - or rather to attempt to undo, for he did not succeed in his purpose. The cynic, a parasite of civilisation, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail. What would become of the cynic among a savage people where everyone, naturally and quite seriously, fulfils what the cynic farcically considers to be his personal role?

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Chapter XI: The Self-Satisfied Age
7 months 1 week ago

The aged are cared for until death; adults are employed in jobs that make full use of their abilities; and children are nourished, educated, and fostered;...orphans... the disabled and the diseased are all well taken care of....

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy; I mean that if you are happy you will be good.

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Part I: Man and Nature, Ch. 1: Current Perplexities, p. 10
2 months 3 weeks ago

This enterprise is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to its consummation. It shall have all my prayers, & these are the only weapons of an old man.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy.

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(p. 154)

The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.

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K 27
2 months 2 weeks ago

The Christian Scholastics... might have shown that God Himself said that He had "imprinted an active principle in the elements of matter (Gen. i; Is. lxvi).

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Ch. V Concerning the Moving Force of Matter
2 months 3 weeks ago

The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy.

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3 months 1 week ago

The Noble in the high place, the Ignoble in the low; that is, in all times and in all countries, the Almighty Maker's Law.

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3 months 1 week ago

Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.

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Ch. IV : The Convention: September 21, 1792 - October 26, 1795, Part V : The Reign of Terror: September 17, 1793 - July 28, 1794, § 4 : The Revolution Eats Its Children

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