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4 months 2 weeks ago

I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.

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Interview: Tom Wolfe, TVOntario, August 1970
7 months 2 weeks ago

God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

After World War II, we hoped the world might be united for the sake of peacemaking. Now the world is being "globalized" for the sake of trade and the so-called free market - for the sake, that is, of plundering the world for cheap labor, cheap energy, and cheap materials. How nations, let alone regions and communities, are to shape and protect themselves within this "global economy" is far from clear.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.

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Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington (16 January 1787) Lipscomb & Bergh ed. 6:57 Compare letter to John Norvell (11 June 1807), below.
7 months 3 days ago

So rolling time changes the seasons of things. What was of value, becomes in turn of no worth.

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Book V, lines 1276-1277 (tr. Bailey)
5 months 2 weeks ago

The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The freest importation of salt provisions, in the same manner, could have as little effect upon the interest of the graziers of Great Britain as that of live cattle. Salt provisions are not only a very bulky commodity, but when compared with fresh meat, they are a commodity both of worse quality, and as they cost more labour and expence, of higher price. They could never, therefore, come into competition with the fresh meat, though they might with the salt provisions of the country.

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Chapter II
4 months 2 weeks ago

The error arises from the learned jurists deceiving themselves and others, by asserting that government is not what it really is, one set of men banded together to oppress another set of men, but, as shown by science, is the representation of the citizens in their collective capacity.

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Chapter VI, Attitude of Men of the Present Day to War Variant translation: Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
5 months 2 weeks ago

The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

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(p. 13)
6 months 1 week ago

Men have made an idol of luck as an excuse for their own thoughtlessness. Luck seldom measures swords with wisdom. Most things in life quick wit and sharp vision can set right.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

We plant trees, we build stone houses, we redeem the waste, we make prospective laws, we found colleges and hospitals, for remote generations.

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3 months 1 week ago

All old Poems, Homer's and the rest, are authentically Songs. I would say, in strictness, that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is not sung is properly no Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines,-to the great injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most part! What we wants to get at is the thought the man had, if he had any: why should he twist it into jingle, if he could speak it out plainly? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true passion of melody, and the very tones of him, according to Coleridge's remark, become musical by the greatness, depth and music of his thoughts, that we can give him right to rhyme and sing; that we call him a Poet, and listen to him as the Heroic of Speakers,-whose speech is Song.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

May some future student go over this ground again, and have the leisure to give his results to the world.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.

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§ 4.8
4 months 3 weeks ago

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.

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Laws of Motion, III
4 months 4 weeks ago

Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming.

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K 39 Variant translation: Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.

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Yeats studies, Issue 2, Irish University Press, 1972, p. 135
5 months 2 weeks ago

A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.

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Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (3 April 1777); as published in The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (1899), vol. 2, p. 206
2 months 3 weeks ago

It is a great pity that human beings cannot find all of their satisfaction in scientific contemplativeness.

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As quoted in Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar‎ (1991) by Kameshwar C. Wali, p. 147
5 months 2 weeks ago

Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.

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The Red Association
7 months 2 days ago

Rules for Axioms. I. Not to omit any necessary principle without asking whether it is admittied, however clear and evident it may be. II. Not to demand, in axioms, any but things that are perfectly evident in themselves.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

In order to survive, the organization must have an objective that appeals to its customers, so that they will make the contributions necessary to sustain it. Hence, organization objectives are constantly adapted to conform to the changing values of customers, or to secure new groups of customers in place of customers who have dropped away. The organization may also undertake special activities to induce acceptance of its objectives by customers - advertising, missionary work, and propaganda of all sorts.

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p. 114.
6 months 3 weeks ago

We hold, that the moral obligation of providing for old age, helpless infancy, and poverty, is far superior to that of supplying the invented wants of courtly extravagance, ambition and intrigue.

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Address and Declaration at a Select Meeting of the Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty (August 20, 1791) p. 3
4 months 1 week ago

The Institution has been devised to afford the means of receiving your children at an early age, almost as soon as they can walk. By this means many of you, mothers and families, will be able to earn a better maintenance or support for your children; you will have less care and anxiety about them, while the children will be prevented from acquiring any bad habits. and gradually prepared to learn the best.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

My trade and my art is living.

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Ch. 6 (tr. Donald M. Frame)
4 months 2 weeks ago

Life is short, but its ills make it seem long.

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Maxim 124
4 months 2 weeks ago

The media have substituted themselves for the older world.

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"Education, Language, and Media". Cycle 7, 1973, p. 232
3 months 1 week ago

I have been in my bed for five weeks, oppressed with weakness and other infirmities from which my age, seventy four years, permits me not to hope release.

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Compiled primarily from his correspondence and that of his eldest daughter, Sister Maria Celeste (1870) by Mary Allan-Olney, p. 278
4 months 3 weeks ago

There are two kinds of people, killers, and everybody else.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Any question of philosophy ... which is so obscure and uncertain, that human reason can reach no fixed determination with regard to it; if it should be treated at all; seems to lead us naturally into the style of dialogue and conversation.

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Pamphilus to Hermippus, Prologue
6 months 6 days ago

To one that promised to give him hardy cocks that would die fighting, "Prithee," said Cleomenes, "give me cocks that will kill fighting."

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61 Cleomenes
5 months 1 day ago

No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this - "devoted and obedient." This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman.

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Notes on Nursing
2 months 2 weeks ago

Either every imaginable institution is founded on a religious concept or it is only a passing phenomenon. Institutions are strong and durable to the degree that they are, so to speak, deified. Not only is human reason, or what is ignorantly called philosophy, incapable of supplying these foundations, which with equal ignorance are called superstitious, but philosophy is, on the contrary, an essentially disruptive force.

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Chapter V, p. 41
3 months 3 weeks ago

The populist rant about greedy banks that is being loudly ventilated in Congress is a distraction from the true causes of the crisis. The dire condition of America's financial markets is the result of American banks operating in a free-for-all environment that these same American legislators created. It is America's political class that, by embracing the dangerously simplistic ideology of deregulation, has responsibility for the present mess.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

We do not know nature; causes hidden in her breast might have produced everything. In your turn, observe the polyp of Trembley: does it not contain in itself the causes which bring about regeneration? Why then would it be absurd to think that there are physical causes by reason of which everything has been made, and to which the whole chain of this vast universe is so necessarily bound and held that, nothing which happens, could have failed to happen,-causes, of which we are so invincibly ignorant that we have had recourse to a God, who, as some aver, is not so much as a logical entity? Thus to destroy chance is not to prove the existence of a supreme being, since there may be some other thing which is neither chance nor God-I mean, nature. It follows that the study of nature can make only unbelievers; and the way of thinking of all its more successful investigators proves this.

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As quoted by Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine (1747) Tr. Gertrude Carman Bussey
6 months 2 weeks ago

When a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Come then, and let us celebrate in the best way we can the anniversary festival which the imperial city is keeping by sacrifices, with unusual splendour. And yet I feel how difficult it is for the human mind even to form a conception of that Sun who is not visible to the sense, if our notion of Him is to be derived from the Sun that is visible; but to express the same in language, however inadequately, is, perhaps, beyond the capability of man! To fitly explain His glory, I am very well aware, is a thing impossible; in lauding it, however, mediocrity seems the highest point to which human eloquence is able to attain.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

He that thinks diversion may not lie in hard and painful labour, forgets the early rising, hard riding, heat, cold and hunger of huntsmen, which is yet known to be the constant recreation of men of the greatest condition.

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Sec. 206
4 months 2 weeks ago

Only the truth and its expression can establish that new public opinion which will reform the ancient obsolete and pernicious order of life; and yet we not only do not express the truth we know, but often even distinctly give expression to what we ourselves regard as false. If only free men would not rely on that which has no power, and is always fettered - upon external aids; but would trust in that which is always powerful and free - the truth and its expression!

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Ch. 17
4 months 2 weeks ago

Confession of our faults is the next thing to innocence.

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Maxim 1060
6 months 1 week ago

What needs saying is worth saying twice.

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fr. 25
5 months 3 weeks ago

The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction.

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Journeys to England and Ireland (1835).
3 months 5 days ago

If it is the drive of our time, after freedom of thought is won, to pursue it to that perfection through which it changes to freedom of the will in order to realize the latter as the principle of a new era, then the final goal of education can no longer be knowledge, but the will born out of knowledge, and the spoken expression of that for which it has to strive is: the personal or free man. Truth consists in nothing other than man's revelation of himself, and thereto belongs the discovery of himself, the liberation from all that is alien, the uttermost abstraction or release from all authority, the re-won naturalness. Such thoroughly true men are not supplied by school; if they are there, they are there in spite of school.

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p. 21
5 months 2 weeks ago

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

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Ch. 3
4 months 2 weeks ago

Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.

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