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4 months 2 weeks ago

If it were not for the founder of the school, Charles S. Pierce, who has told us that he 'learned philosophy out of Kant,' one might be tempted to deny any philosophical pedigree to a doctrine that holds not that our expectations are fulfilled and our actions successful because our ideas are true, but rather that our ideas are true because our expectations are fulfilled and our actions successful. describing the pragmatist view,

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p. 42.
2 months 4 days ago

When we try to develop and procure benefits for the world with universal love as our standard, then attentive ears and keen eyes will respond in service to one another, then limbs will be strengthened to work for one another, and those who know the Tao will untiringly instruct others. Thus the old and those who have neither wife nor children will have the support and supply to spend their old age with, and the young and weak and orphans will have the care and admonition to grow up in. When universal love is adopted as the standard, then such are the consequent benefits. It is incomprehensible, then, why people should object to universal love when they hear it.

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Book 4; Universal Love III
1 month 3 weeks ago

Look within. Within is the fountain of the good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.

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VII, 59
1 month 3 weeks ago

Politics, like religion, hold up the torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error.

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Letter to James Ogilvie
2 months 1 week ago

No man has ever been so far advanced by Fortune that she did not threaten him as greatly as she had previously indulged him.

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4 months 1 week ago

It is true that parents today are learning to enhance the physical qualities of their children. But their minds and characters they cannot mould. The antiquated system of education and our perverse social influences unfortunately do that. In view of the numerous misfit and marred children these institutions have created, I am quite content not to have contributed any of my own.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

I did not direct my life. I didn't design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That's what life is.

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As quoted in "Unpacking the Skinner Box : Revisiting B. F. Skinner through a Postformal Lens" by Dana Salter in The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology Vol. 4 (2008) edited by Joe L. Kincheloe and Raymond A. Horn, Ch. 99, p. 872
4 months 1 week ago

It was Rousseau who was largely responsible for the problem by giving currency to the idea that freedom can exist without responsibility and discipline.

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Introductory Essay, p. xx
5 months 3 weeks ago

I wanted for the moments in my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. It would be just as well to try to catch time by the tail.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The healthy man does not torture others-generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

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In Du, May 1941
5 months 3 weeks ago

I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.

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Letter to Sheldon Vanauken (14 December 1950), quoted in Sleuthing C. S. Lewis (2001) by Kathryn Ann Lindskoog, p. 393
3 months 2 weeks ago

It is therefore, the interest of all, that every one, from birth, should be well educated, physically and mentally, that society may be improved in its character, - that everyone should be beneficially employed, physically and mentally, that the greatest amount of wealth may be created, and knowledge attained, - that everyone should be placed in the midst of those external circumstances that will produce the greatest number of pleasurable sensations, through the longest life, that man may be made truly intelligent, moral and happy, and be thus prepared to enter upon the coming Millennium.

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A Development of the Principles & Plans on which to establish self-supporting Home Colonies
4 months 3 weeks ago

All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet.

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p. 72
5 months 3 weeks ago

A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.

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King Aegistheus, Act 2
6 months 3 weeks ago

The Dantean conceptions of Inferno were childish and unworthy of the Divine imagination: fire and torture. Boredom is much more subtle. The inner torture of a mind unable to escape itself in any way, condemned to fester in its own exuding mental pus for all time, is much more fitting. Oh, yes, my friend, we have been judged, and condemned, too, and this is not Heaven, but hell.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

How can one be late to the end of history? A question for today. It is serious because it obliges one to reflect again, as we have been doing since Hegel, on what happens and deserves the name of event, after history; it obliges one to wonder if the end of history is but the end of a certain concept of history.

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Injunctions of Marx
4 months 1 week ago

At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too.

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S.4
5 months 3 weeks ago

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

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Last words, to his doctor's wife (28 April 1951)-as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : A Memoir (1966) by Norman Malcolm, p. 100
2 months 2 weeks ago

A further threat to liberalism has to do with the mode of cognition that we call modern natural science. The early liberals were very closely aligned with the founders of modern natural science, people like Bacon and Descartes and Newton, who believed that there was an objective world beyond our subjective consciousnesses, that we could perceive this world through the experimental method, and then come to manipulate it. Natural science gave us technology... that made the world much more habitable, by conquering disease, by inventing things that vastly increased human productivity. So... it's closely related to the wealth, and... the safety and comfort of a modern economically developed world.

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18:49
2 months 3 weeks ago

No place in the world has had a comparable role to that of the nameless mountain or valley where mankind first attained self-consciousness. Let us be proud ... of the old patriarchs who, at the foot of Imaiis, laid the foundations of what we are and of what we shall become.

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Poliakov, L. (1974). The Aryan myth : a history of racist and nationalist ideas in Europe page 208
1 month 2 weeks ago

The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them. In this methodological uncertainty, one might suppose that there were any number of possible systems of theoretical physics all equally well justified; and this opinion is no doubt correct, theoretically. But the development of physics has shown that at any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single one has always proved itself decidedly superior to all the rest.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

"The Precession of Simulacra,"

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p. 6
4 months 2 weeks ago

And in these foure things, Opinion of Ghosts, Ignorance of second causes, Devotion towards what men fear, and Taking of things Casuall for Prognostics, consisteth the Natural seed of Religion; which by reason of the different Fancies, Judgements, and Passions of severall men, hath grown up into ceremonies so different, that those which are used by one man, are for the most part ridiculous to another.

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The First Part, Chapter 12, p. 54
5 months 3 weeks ago

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

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Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1752) Fontenelle Note: The most frequently attributed variant of this quote is: It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
1 month 3 weeks ago

We took the liberty to make some enquiries concerning the ground of their pretentions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The end of government is to make the governed and the governors happy. That government then is thebest, which in practice produces the greatest happiness to the greatest number; including those who govern, and those who obey.

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Essay Fourth, The Principles of the Former Essays Applied to Government
5 months 3 weeks ago

But there is a devil of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used for anything, and civilized people who apply them selves to everything.

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Introduction, p. 25.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Considered as the last finish of education, or of human culture, worth and acquirement, the art of speech is noble, and even divine; it is like the kindling of a Heaven's light to show us what a glorious world exists, and has perfected itself, in a man.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting - the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

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Ch. 6
6 months 3 weeks ago

People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They are far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Sincerity is the end and beginning of things; without sincerity there would be nothing. On this account, the superior man regards the attainment of sincerity as the most excellent thing.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Though experience be our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact; it must be acknowledged, that this guide is not altogether infallible, but in some cases is apt to lead us into errors.

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Section 10 : Of Miracles Pt. 1
5 months 3 weeks ago

The process is so complicated that it offers ever so many occasions for running abnormally.

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Vol. II, Ch. XXI, p. 500.
4 months 1 week ago

In fact, the real problem with the thesis of A Genealogy of Morals is that the noble and the aristocrat are just as likely to be stupid as the plebeian. I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds -- to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it -- while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate -- or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems.

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p. 188
3 months 1 week ago

Of the twenty-two civilizations that appear in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. All nations have progressed through this sequence:From bondage to spiritual faithFrom spiritual faith to great courageFrom courage to libertyFrom liberty to abundanceFrom abundance to selfishnessFrom selfishness to complacencyFrom complacency to apathyFrom apathy to dependencyFrom dependency back again into bondage.

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In Joe D. Batten and Gail Batten, The Confidence Chasm (New York: American Management Association, 1972) p. 118
4 months 2 weeks ago

Fact be vertuous, or vicious, as Fortune pleaseth.

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The Second Part, Chapter 27, p. 153
3 months 3 weeks ago

Memento mori-remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die-what makes this any different from a half hour?

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p. 209
4 months 3 weeks ago

For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

We should be clear that neither genuine religious nor genuine moral impulses will ever be expressed in terms that tie the two essentially together. If you view religion as necessary for ethics, you've reduced us to the ethical level of 4 year olds. "If you follow these commandments you'll go to heaven, if you don't' you'll burn in hell" is just a spectacular version of the carrots and sticks with which you raise your children.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts!

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Ch. 8, Humanity
5 months 3 weeks ago

The law of simplicity and naïveté applies to all fine art, for it is compatible with what is most sublime. True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself; that is, it consists in his correctly distinguishing between what is necessary and what is superfluous. On the other hand, one should never sacrifice clearness, to say nothing of grammar, for the sake of being brief. To impoverish the expression of a thought, or to obscure or spoil the meaning of a period for the sake of using fewer words shows a lamentable want of judgment.

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6 months 5 days ago

We are wont to call that human reasoning which we apply to Nature the anticipation of Nature (as being rash and premature) and that which is properly deduced from things the interpretation of Nature.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

In democratic countries, the most important private organizations are economic. Unlike secret societies, they are able to exercize their terrorism without illegality, since they do not threaten to kill their enemies, but only to starve them.

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Ch. 12: Powers and forms of governments
3 months 3 weeks ago

Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark.

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(p. 14)
5 months 4 weeks ago

God is the Immanent Cause of all things, never truly transcendent from them.

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Part I, Prop. XVIII
2 months 2 weeks ago

The social contract between all people around the world only has one requirement: Don't kill. From there it's those who don't agree, those that agree but have some reactive justification, and those that agree and don't kill.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

The method of the science not being practiced much nowadays, except what logic prescribes to all sciences generally, that fitted for the peculiar nature of metaphysics being simply ignored, it is no wonder that those who everlastingly turn the Sisyphean stone of this inquiry do not seem so far to have made much progress. Though here I neither can nor will expatiate upon so important and extensive a subject, I shall briefly shadow forth what constitutes no despicable part of this method, namely, the infection between sensuous and intellectual cognition, not only as creeping in on those incautious in the application of principles, but even producing spurious principles under the appearance of axioms.

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