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6 months 4 weeks ago

Industry controlled by society as a whole, and operated according to a plan, presupposes well-rounded human beings, their faculties developed in balanced fashion, able to see the system of production in its entirety.

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4 months ago

The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.

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(Hays translation) The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts. V, 16
8 months 1 week ago

When you wander, as you often delight to do, you wander indeed, and give never such satisfaction as the curious time requires. This is not caused by any natural defect, but first for want of election, when you, having a large and fruitful mind, should not so much labour what to speak as to find what to leave unspoken. Rich soils are often to be weeded.

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Letter of Expostulation to Coke, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed.

The mind, like the body, has its contagious diseases and its scurvy. …We catch everything from those with whom we come in contact; their gestures, their accent, etc.

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4 months 3 days ago

You are not free. Myriad invisible hands hold your hands and direct them. When you rise in anger, a great-grandfather froths at your mouth; when you make love, an ancestral caveman growls with lust; when you sleep, tombs open in your memory till your skull brims with ghosts.

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7 months 3 days ago

Should the believers in special creations consider it unfair thus to call upon them to describe how special creations take place, I reply that this is far less than they demand from the supporters of the Development Hypothesis. They are merely asked to point out a conceivable mode. On the other hand, they ask, not simply for a conceivable mode, but for the actual mode.

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8 months 3 days ago

It was the period of my mental progress which I have now reached that I formed the friendship which has been the honour and chief blessing of my existence, as well as the source of a great part of all that I have attempted to do, or hope to effect hereafter, for human improvement. My first introduction to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty years, consented to become my wife, was in 1830, when I was in my twenty-fifth and she in her twenty-third year.

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(p. 184)
6 months 3 weeks ago

The empiricist thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

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"Objections to Belief in Substance", p. 201
8 months 3 days ago

We inherit the warlike type; and for most of the capacities of heroism that the human race is full of we have to thank this cruel history. Dead men tell no tales, and if there were any tribes of other type than this they have left no survivors. Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won't breed it out of us. The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of wars. Let public opinion once reach a certain fighting pitch, and no ruler can withstand it. In the Boer war both governments began with bluff, but they couldn't stay there; the military tension was too much for them.

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6 months 1 week ago

Since these questions lie in the future, imagination must supply the lack of experienced feeling in attaching value to them. But values can be only imperfectly anticipated.

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4 months 3 days ago

As long as our souls remain strong, that is all that matters; as long as they don't decline. Because with the fall of certain souls in this world, the world itself will collapse. These are the pillars which support it. They are few, but enough.

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"My Friend Poet. Mount Athos.", Ch. 19, p. 215
8 months 2 days ago

Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.

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7 months 1 week ago

"The will of the nation" is one of those expressions which have been most profusely abused by the wily and the despotic of every age.

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Chapter IV.
8 months 1 week ago

There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage.

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292
8 months 3 days ago

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The real importance of Swedenborg lies in the doctrines he taught, which are the reverse of the gloom and hell-fire of other breakaway sects. He rejects the notion that Jesus died on the cross to atone for the sin of Adam, declaring that God is neither vindictive nor petty-minded, and that since he is God, he doesn't need atonement. It is remarkable that this common-sense view had never struck earlier theologians. God is Divine Goodness, and Jesus is Divine Wisdom, and Goodness has to be approached through Wisdom. Whatever one thinks about the extraordinary claims of its founder, it must be acknowledged that there is something very beautiful and healthy about the Swedenborgian religion. Its founder may have not been a great occultist, but he was a great man.

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p. 280
6 months 2 weeks ago

And he arrives at the cogito ergo sum, which St. Augustine had already anticipated... "I think therefore I am," can only mean "I think, therefore I am a thinker"; this being of "I am," which is deduced from "I think," is merely a knowing; this being is a knowledge, but not life. And the primary reality is not that I think, but that I live, for those also live who do not think. Although this living may not be a real living. God! what contradictions when we seek to join in wedlock life and reason!

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4 months 3 days ago

There can be no safer deposit on earth than the Treasury of the United States.

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Letter to Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette (1825) ME 19:281
8 months 2 days ago

The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.

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Chapter 6 (p. 47)
6 months 4 weeks ago

The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future. There are only two ways of approaching this problem on the assumption that it is a genuine problem, and it is easy to see that neither of them can lead to its solution.

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p. 49.
4 months 3 weeks ago

I here, on the very threshold, protest against it in reference to Paganism, and to all other isms by which man has ever for a length of time striven to walk in this world. They have all had a truth in them, or men would not have taken them up. Quackery and dupery do abound; in religions, above all in the more advanced decaying stages of religions, they have fearfully abounded: but quackery was never the originating influence in such things; it was not the health and life of such things, but their disease, the sure precursor of their being about to die! Let us never forget this.

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8 months 4 days ago

In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.

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"Money", 1770
5 months 4 weeks ago

It is as natural and as right for a young man to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than their lives.

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Crabbed Age and Youth.
7 months 3 weeks ago

The goal of maximizing the welfare of all may be better achieved by an ethic that accepts our inclinations and harnesses them so that, taken as a whole, the system works to everyone's advantage.

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Chapter 6, A New Understanding Of Ethics, p. 157
4 months 2 days ago

What one has to say to begin with is that, as humans, we are limited in intelligence and we really have no reliable foresight. So none of us will come up with answers to the whole great problem. What we can do is judge our behavior, our history, and our present situation by a better standard than "efficiency" or "profit," or those measures that we're still using to determine economic decisions.

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8 months 3 days ago

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

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Section 1, paragraph 19
8 months 6 days ago

Is it reasonable to assume a purposiveness in all the parts of nature and to deny it to the whole?

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Seventh Thesis
6 months 3 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
4 months 3 weeks ago

Before a man can do things there must be things he will not do.

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Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (IVP, 1980), Ch 2
7 months 3 days ago

Expect nothing more from philosophy than a voice, language and grammar of the instinct for Godliness that lies at its origin, and, essentially, is philosophy itself.

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"On Philosophy: To Dorothea," in Theory as Practice (1997), p. 421
8 months 1 week ago

Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like faculty in another. I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them.

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Section I, Chap. III.
5 months 1 week ago

Here we come to the nub of the issue: the alleged moral force of the term "natural". If any creature, by its very nature, causes terrible suffering, albeit unwittingly, is it morally wrong to change that nature? If a civilised human were to come to believe s/he had been committing acts that caused grievous pain for no good reason, then s/he would stop - and want other moral agents to prevent the recurrence of such behaviour. May we assume that the same would be true of a lion, if the lion were morally and cognitively "uplifted" so as to understand the ramifications of what she was doing? Or a house cat tormenting a mouse? Or indeed a human sociopath?

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"Reprogramming Predators", BLTC Research, 2009
7 months 3 weeks ago

What is important is that sex was not only a question of sensation and pleasure, of law and interdiction, but also of the true and the false.

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Vol. I, p. 76
3 months 3 weeks ago

I have come to believe that the motion of the Earth cannot be detected by any optical experiment.

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How I Created the Theory of Relativity, speech at Kyoto University, Japan, December 14, 1922, as cited in Physics Today, August, 1982.
9 months ago

The true discovery of America by mankind came when those first hunting bands crossed over from Siberia 25,000 years ago. This, however, never seems to count. When people speak of the "discovery of America" they invariably mean its discovery by Europeans.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

Big industry, and the limitless expansion of production which it makes possible, bring within the range of feasibility a social order in which so much is produced that every member of society will be in a position to exercise and develop all his powers and faculties in complete freedom. It thus appears that the very qualities of big industry which, in our present-day society, produce misery and crises are those which, in a different form of society, will abolish this misery and these catastrophic depressions.We see with the greatest clarity: (i) That all these evils are from now on to be ascribed solely to a social order which no longer corresponds to the requirements of the real situation; and (ii) That it is possible, through a new social order, to do away with these evils altogether.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Every noble work is at first impossible.

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From Past and Present (1843), Chapter XI : Labour
7 months 3 weeks ago

You can tell the man who rings true from the man who rings false, not by his deeds alone, but also by his desires.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Eternity is best spent under a general anesthetic - which is what is going to happen.

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Interview with Joe Rogan on The Joe Rogan Experience (2019);
7 months 2 weeks ago

In anger we should refrain both from speech and action.

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As quoted in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, "Pythagoras", Sect. 23-24, as translated in Dictionary of Quotations (1906) by Thomas Benfield Harbottle, p. 370
9 months ago

Parmenides: If the one is not, nothing is. Then, and we may add, whether the one is or is not, the one and the others in relation to themselves and to each other all in every way are and are not and appear and do not appear.

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8 months 2 days ago

Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.

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Inès reiterating to Garcin that they cannot ignore one another, Act 1, sc. 5
5 months 2 weeks ago

One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay "in kind" somewhere else in life.

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North to the Orient (1935) Ch. 19

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