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5 months 1 week ago

Every being ought to do that which is according to its constitution; and all other things have been constituted for the sake of the superior, but the rational for the sake of one another.

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VII, 55
8 months 6 days ago

The world of immediate experience-the world in which we find ourselves living-must be comprehended, transformed, even subverted in order to become that which it really is.

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p. 123
9 months 2 weeks ago

But love for an object eternal and infinite feeds the mind with joy alone, and a joy which is free from all sorrow. This is something greatly to be desired and to be sought with all our strength.

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I, 10; translation by W. Hale White (Revised by Amelia Hutchison Stirling)
5 months 3 weeks ago

From my youth onwards, I have felt sure that all thought which thinks itself out to an issue ends in mysticism. In the stillness of the African jungle I have been able to work out this thought and give it expression.

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6 months 1 week ago

As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost.

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Orlando, in Caliban, act 2, sc. 1 (1878).
5 months 1 week ago

Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man - yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.

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IV, 48
8 months 6 days ago

Therefore every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.

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13:52 (KJV)
5 months 1 week ago

Whatever this is that I am, it is flesh and a little spirit and an intelligence. This that I am, whatever it be, is mere flesh and a little breathe and the ruling Reason, This Being of mine, whatever it really is, consists of a little flesh, a little breath, and the part which governs.

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A little flesh, a little breath, and a Reason to rule all - that is myself. (Staniforth translation) II, 2
8 months 2 weeks ago

That Vulcan gave arrows unto Apollo and Diana the fourth day after their Nativities, according to Gentile Theology, may pass for no blind apprehension of the Creation of the Sun and Moon, in the work of the fourth day.

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Opening lines of Ch. 1
5 months 1 week ago

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.

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Thomas Jefferson Letter (23 Dec 1790) to Martha Jefferson Randolph. Collected in B.L. Rayner (ed.), Sketches of the Life, Writings, and Opinions of Thomas Jefferson (1832), 192.
9 months 4 days ago

The ethical commonplaces of any period include ideas that may have been radical discoveries in a previous age. This is true of modern conceptions of liberty, equality, and democracy, and we are in the midst of ethical debates which will probably result two hundred years hence in a disseminated moral sensibility that people of our time would find very unfamiliar.

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"Ethics without Biology" (1978), p. 143.
9 months 3 weeks ago

A thing therefore never returns to nothing.

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Book I, line 248 (tr. Munro)
8 months 2 weeks ago

The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.

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Chapter V
7 months 1 week ago

Though the coming of the day is still the most inspiriting, yet day's departure, also, and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us; and in the pastures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the absence of the load.

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Toils And Pleasures.
8 months 1 week ago

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

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9 months 2 weeks ago

By the removal of the unnecessary mouths, and by extracting from the farmer the full value of the farm, a greater surplus, or what is the same thing, the price of a greater surplus, was obtained for the proprietor...

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Chapter IV, p. 450 (On Highland Clearances).
8 months 2 weeks ago

The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.

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Book One, Chapter XVI.
9 months 1 week ago

Well, as you know, I was blessed to do over a hundred events for my dear brother [Bernie Sanders]. And this is the first time I've had a chance to publicly endorse him again, but yes, indeed. I'll be in his corner that we're going to win this time. And it has to do with the Martin Luther King like criteria of assessing a candidate namely the issues of militarism, poverty, materialism, and racism, xenophobia in all of its forms that includes any kind of racism as you know against black people, brown people, yellow people, anybody, Arabs, Muslims, Jews, Palestinians, Kashmirians, Tibetans and so forth. So that there's no doubt that the my dear brother Bernie stands shoulders above any of the other candidates running in the Democratic primary when it comes to that Martin Luther King-like standards or criteria.

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Quoted in: Cornel West on Bernie, Trump, and Racism, The Intercept, Mehdi Hasan,
9 months 3 weeks ago

Whence we see spiders, flies, or ants entombed and preserved forever in amber, a more than royal tomb.

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Historia Vitæ et Mortis; Sylva Sylvarum, Cent. i. Exper. 100, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed.
3 weeks 6 days ago

Well, the other option is....total madness 🤷‍♂️

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9 months 1 week ago

I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm.

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Act 4, sc. 5
7 months 6 days ago

Hayek's theory of evolutionary rationality shows how traditions and customs (those surrounding sexual relations, for example) might be reasonable solutions to complex social problems, even when, and especially when, no clear rational grounds can be provided to the individual for obeying them. These customs have been selected by the ''invisible hand'' of social reproduction, and societies that reject them will soon enter the condition of ''maladaptation,'' which is the normal prelude to extinction.

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Hayek and conservatism, in Edward Feser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek
8 months 1 week ago

From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say individuality vanishes.

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9 months 4 weeks ago

For it still seemed to me that it is not we who sin, but some other nature sinned in us. And it gratified my pride to be beyond blame, and when I did anything wrong not to have to confess that I had done wrong. I loved to excuse my soul and to accuse something else inside me (I knew not what) but which was not I. But, assuredly, it was I, and it was my impiety that had divided me against myself. That sin then was all the more incurable because I did not deem myself a sinner.

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A. Outler, trans. (Dover: 2002), Book 5, Chapter 10, p. 77
6 months 3 weeks ago

It is the indignity of being treated as disposable that pushes people towards religious fundamentalism in order to retrieve a sense of self, of meaning, of significance. This is why globalization breeds religious fundamentalism and free markets create terrorism and extremism, not democracy.

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(p80)
8 months 4 days ago

So long as you "have" yourself, have yourself as an object, your experience of man is only as of a thing among things.

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p. 148

Use harms and even destroys beauty. The noblest function of an object is to be contemplated.

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Niebla [Mist]
9 months 3 weeks ago

For as when much superfluous matter has gathered in simple bodies, nature makes repeated efforts to remove and purge it away, thereby promoting the health of these bodies, so likewise as regards that composite body the human race, when every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove elsewhere, every region being equally crowded and over-peopled, and when human craft and wickedness have reached their highest pitch, it must needs come about that the world will purge herself in one or another of these three ways, to the end that men, becoming few and contrite, may amend their lives and live with more convenience.

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Book 1 Ch. 5 (as translated by Ninian Hill Thomson)
7 months 3 weeks ago

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.

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Ch. 32, January 13, 1944.
6 months 4 days ago

And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing over us. It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched; many men have died; all men must die,-the last exit of us all is in a Fire-Chariot of Pain. But it is to live miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated, girt in with a cold universal Laissez-faire: it is to die slowly all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, Infinite Injustice, as in the accursed iron belly of a Phalaris' Bull! This is and remains forever intolerable to all men whom God has made. Do we wonder at French Revolutions, Chartisms, Revolts of Three Days? The times, if we will consider them, are really unexampled.

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9 months 4 days ago

At one level, this movement on behalf of oppressed farm animals is emotional...Yet the movement is also the product of a deep intellectual ferment pioneered by the Princeton scholar Peter Singer...This idea popularized by Professor Singer - that we have ethical obligations that transcend our species - is one whose time appears to have come...What we're seeing now is an interesting moral moment: a grass-roots effort by members of one species to promote the welfare of others...animal rights are now firmly on the mainstream ethical agenda.

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Nicholas Kristof, "Humanity Even for Nonhumans," in The New York Times (8 April 2009).
9 months 2 weeks ago

But what all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have effected, the silent and insensible operation of foreign commerce and manufactures gradually brought about.

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Chapter IV, p. 448.
9 months 3 days ago

He lit a lamp in broad daylight and said, as he went about, "I am looking for a human."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 41. This line is frequently translated as "I am looking for an honest man."
8 months 1 week ago

God, I have said, is the fulfiller, or the reality, of the human desires for happiness, perfection, and immortality. From this it may be inferred that to deprive man of God is to tear the heart out of his breast. But I contest the premises from which religion and theology deduce the necessity and existence of God, or of immortality, which is the same thing. I maintain that desires which are fulfilled only in the imagination, or from which the existence of an imaginary being is deduced, are imaginary desires, and not the real desires of the human heart; I maintain that the limitations which the religious imagination annuls in the idea of God or immortality, are necessary determinations of the human essence, which cannot be dissociated from it, and therefore no limitations at all, except precisely in man's imagination.

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Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View
9 months 1 week ago

Undeterred by this examination, the French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led beyond the ideas of the entire old world order. The revolutionary movement which began in 1789 in the Cercle Social, which in the middle of its course had as its chief representatives Leclerc and Roux, and which finally with Babeuf's conspiracy was temporarily defeated, gave rise to the communist idea which Babeuf's friend Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1830. This idea, consistently developed, is the idea of the new world order.

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Chapter 6, 3
8 months 1 week ago

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.

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7 months 1 week ago

Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature.

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2 months 3 days ago

This thinking just seems so quaint now...it's just pure art at this point...

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10 months 3 days ago

Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.

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9 months 3 weeks 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 1 week ago

Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

When the mirror meets with an ugly woman, when a rare ink-stone finds a vulgar owner, and when a good sword is in the hands of a common general, there is utterly nothing to be done about it.

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p. 317
6 months 4 days ago

The pious soul,-which, if you reflect, will mean the ingenuous and ingenious, the gifted, intelligent and nobly-aspiring soul,-such a soul, in whatever rank of life it were born, had one path inviting it; a generous career, whereon, by human worth and valor, all earthly heights and Heaven itself were attainable. In the lowest stratum of social thraldom, nowhere was the noble soul doomed quite to choke, and die ignobly.

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9 months 1 week ago

If you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact. This is the inductive method.

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Pilgrim's Regress 22
8 months 1 week ago

The original thinking force of the universe progresses and develops itself in all possible determinations of which it is capable, just as the other original natural forces progress and assume all possible configurations. I am a particular determination of the formative force, like the plant; a particular determination of the peculiar motive force, like the animal; and in addition to this a determination of the thinking force: and the union of these three basic forces into one force, into one harmonious development, is the distinguishing characteristic of my species.

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P. Preuss, trans. (1987), p. 12

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