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7 months 1 week ago

In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.

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Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, p. 71.
8 months ago

With a few glorious and glaring exceptions, the shadow of Jim Crow was cast in its new glittering form expressed in the language of superficial diversity... The disarray of a scattered curriculum, the disenchantment of talented yet deferential faculty, and the disorientation of precious students loom large... To witness a faculty enthusiastically support a candidate for tenure then timidly defer to a rejection based on the Harvard administration's hostility to the Palestinian cause was disgusting... We all know the mendacious reasons given had nothing to do with academic standards... This kind of narcissistic academic professionalism, cowardly deference to the anti-Palestinian prejudices of the Harvard administration, and indifference to my Mother's death constitutes an intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of deep deaths...

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Quoted in Civil rights activist Cornel West resigns from Harvard, By Jackie Salo, New York Post, July 13, 2021
6 months 2 weeks ago

The spirit of militarism has already permeated all walks of life. Indeed, I am convinced that militarism is a greater danger here than anywhere else, because of the many bribes capitalism holds out to those whom it wishes to destroy.

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8 months 1 week ago

Such taxes [upon the necessaries of life], when they have grown up to a certain height, are a curse equal to the barrenness of the earth and the inclemency of the heavens; and yet it is in the richest and most industrious countries that they have been most generally imposed. No other countries could support so great a disorder.

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Chapter II, paragraph 36, p. 500.
7 months 5 days ago

If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism.

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Book II, ch. 6 (trans. Constance Garnett) Pyotr Miusov, summarizing an argument made by Ivan at a social gathering
8 months 5 days ago

The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.

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p. 486
7 months 1 day ago

The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth.

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Ch. 1, p. 82
4 months 3 days ago

The Triad has a special beauty and fairness beyond all numbers, primarily because it is the very first to make actual the potentiality of the Monad - oddness, perfection, proportionality, unification, limit.

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On the Triad
8 months 2 weeks ago

I too have sworn heedlessly and all the time, I have had this most repulsive and death-dealing habit. I'm telling your graces; from the moment I began to serve God, and saw what evil there is in forswearing oneself, I grew very afraid indeed, and out of fear I applied the brakes to this old, old, habit.

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180:10:1
6 months 1 week ago

It is precisely because we can destroy that we are under an obligation to know why we ought not to do it, and to summon those countervailing powers that curb our destructive capacity. Nonviolence becomes an ethical obligation by which we are bound precisely because we are bound to one another; it may well be an obligation against which we rail, in which ambivalent swings of the psyche make themselves known, but the obligation to preserve the social bond can be resolved upon without precisely resolving that ambivalence. The obligation not to destroy each other emerges from, and reflects, the vexed social form of our lives, and it leads us to reconsider whether self-preservation is not linked to preserving the lives of others.

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p. 148

The beginning of religion, more precisely its content, is the concept of religion itself, that God is the absolute truth, the truth of all things, and subjectively that religion alone is the absolutely true knowledge.

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4 months 2 days ago

...undefiled by pleasures, invulnerable to any pain, untouched by arrogance, unaffected by meanness, an athlete in the greatest of all contests-the struggle not to be overwhelmed by anything that happens.

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(Hays translation) III, 4
4 months 4 weeks ago

We should like to represent... the... universe, and... feel... we understood it. We... never can attain this representation: our weakness is too great. But... we desire... to conceive an infinite intelligence... which should see all, and... classify all in its time, as we classify, in our time, the little we see. ...This supreme intelligence would be only a demigod; infinite in one sense... limited in another, since it would have... imperfect recollection of the past... otherwise all recollections would be equally present... and for it there would be no time.

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8 months 4 days ago

Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.

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Ch. 9
4 months 2 weeks ago

The young are of age when they twitter like the old; they are driven through school to learn the old song, and, when they have this by heart, they are declared of age.

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Cambridge 1995, pp. 61-62
8 months 4 days ago

To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.

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From the introduction to The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon.
2 months 3 weeks ago

But also, don't obsess. Read casually, be prepared for the long path...

"No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance."
- Confucius

See biography for Confucius:
https://civilsimian.com/Confucius

Read Confucius's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/36/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism 

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6 months 3 days ago

By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.

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4 months 5 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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8 months 6 days ago

One must look into hell before one has any right to speak of heaven.

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Letter to Colette O'Niel, October 23, 1916; published in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914-1970, p. 87
4 months 2 days ago

Nothing happens to anyone that he can't endure.

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(Hays translation) Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear. , V, 18
6 months 1 week ago

Philosophy was never just ontotheology, and even when philosophers were concerned with ontotheology, they were concerned with much more than that. That is the first reason that the idea of a fundamental "crisis" in philosophy and of the "end of philosophy" is deeply mistaken. And if the questions of philosophy are indeed "unsettleable," in the sense that they will always be with us, that is a wonderful thing, not something to be regretted.

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Science and Philosophy
6 months 1 week ago

Well, what does "good" mean anyway...? As Wittgenstein suggested, "good," like "game," has a family of meanings. Prominent among them is this one: "meets the criteria or standards of assessment or evaluation."

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P. 152.
6 months 3 weeks ago

The Pope will make the king believe that three are only one, that the bread he eats is not bread...and a thousand other things of the same kind.

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No. 24. (Rica writing to Ibben)
5 months 1 week ago

Universality is the foundation for law. Individuals are treated as ends in themselves, symmetry is applied and justice emerges. Ideologically, we don't have to try to be "good". This kind of kills freedom. We just have to avoid the worst of the bad, like killing, to preserve universality and justice.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

Technically speaking, since our complex societies are highly susceptible to interferences and accidents,they certainly offer ideal opportunities for a prompt disruption of normal activities. These disruptions can, with minimum expense, have considerably destructive consequences. Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.

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Habermas (2004) in: Giovanna Borradori (2004) Philosophy in a Time of Terror: : Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. p. 34
5 months 3 weeks ago

Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.

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p. 248
4 months 2 weeks ago

He knows his own strength; he knows that he was born to carry burdens.

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8 months ago

The Democratic Party is beyond redemption at this point when it comes to seriously speaking to the needs of poor and working people... The neofascism that's escalating is predicated on the rottenness of a system in which the Democratic Party facilitates that frustration and desperation because it can't present an alternative... If America is unable to present an alternative to the Democratic Party, then we're going fascist.

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8 months 1 week ago

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

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B 832-833
8 months 1 week ago

This I think is sufficiently evident, that children generally hate to be idle. All the care then is, that their busy humour should be constantly employ'd in something of use to them; which, if you will attain, you must make what you would have them do a recreation to them, and not a business.

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Sec. 129
4 months 2 weeks ago

Great men hallow a whole people and lift up all who live in their time.

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Ireland, published in The Edinburgh Review
5 months 1 week ago

There is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more.

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Ch. 3 : Moral Constraints and the State; Why Side Constraints?, p. 32
6 months 1 day ago

A woman can earn her pardon for a good year of disobedience by a single adroit submission.

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The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the Bandbox.
7 months 1 day ago

Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. The Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine philosophically. In that respect, I am not a Jew.

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8 months 5 days ago

Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.

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Chapter 11 (p. 106)
8 months 5 days ago

If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as "spiritual life," "God," "soul," "cross," etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.

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June 15, 1844
7 months 5 days ago

There was a time when religion was kept secret from popular belief within the mystery cults like a holy fire, sharing a common sanctuary with philosophy. The legends of antiquity name the earliest philosophers as the originators of these mystery cults, from which the most enlightened among the later philosophers, notably Plato, liked to educe their divine teachings. At that time philosophers still had the courage and the right to discuss the singly great themes, the only ones worthy of philosophizing and rising above common knowledge.

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P. 7
8 months 1 week ago

There never was in the world two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains; the most universal quality is diversity.

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Book II, Ch. 37. Of the Resemblance of Children to their Fathers
8 months 2 weeks ago

No Man is wise at all Times, or is without his blind Side.

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The Alchymyst, in Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of.

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Dover 2005, p. 182
4 months 5 days ago

The wife of my God is matter; they wrestle with each other, they laugh and weep, they cry out in the nuptial bed of flesh. They spawn and are dismembered. They fill sea, land, and air with species of plants, animals, men, and spirits. This primordial pair embraces, is dismembered, and multiplies in every living creature. All the concentrated agony of the Universe bursts out in every living thing. God is imperiled in the sweet ecstasy and bitterness of flesh. But he shakes himself free, he leaps out of brains and loins, then clings to new brains and new loins until the struggle for liberation again breaks out from the beginning.

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8 months 5 days ago

As there were black swans, though civilized people had existed for three thousand years on the earth without meeting with them...The uniform experience, therefore, of the inhabitants of the known world, agreeing in a common result, without one known instance of deviation from that result, is not always sufficient to establish a general conclusion.

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7 months 1 day ago

What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?

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