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2 months 2 weeks ago

I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things?

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"Address on University Education" (1876), delivered at the formal opening of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, September 12, 1876. Huxley, American Addresses (1877), p. 125.
3 months 4 days ago

If you are going to be a writer, you must be paranoid. The thing is, in the arts if you don't overreact, you fall asleep.

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5 months 1 day ago

A just system must generate its own support.

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Chapter V, Section 41, p. 261
5 months 2 days ago

Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.

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Art
1 month 2 days ago

We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know. We may believe the statement of another person, when there is reasonable ground for supposing that he knows the matter of which he speaks, and that he is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe.

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1 month 2 days ago

Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

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Think Little
5 months 3 days ago

Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

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5 months 6 days ago

But bounty and hospitality very seldom lead to extravagance; though vanity almost always does.

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Chapter III, Part V, p. 987.
5 months 2 days ago

Suso has even left a diagrammatic picture of the relations subsisting between Godhead, triune God and creatures. In this very curious and interesting drawing a chain of manifestation connects the mysterious symbol of the Divine Ground with the three Persons of the Trinity, and the Trinity in turn is connected in a descending scale with angels and human beings. These last, as the drawing vividly shows, may make one of two choices. They can either live the life of the outer man, the life of the separative selfhood; in which case they are lost (for, in the words of the Theologia Germanica, "nothing burns in hell but the self"). Or else they can identify themselves with the inner man, in which case it becomes possible for them, as Suso shows, to ascend again, through unitive knowledge, to the Trinity and even, beyond the Trinity, to the ultimate Unity of the Divine Ground.

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4 months 3 days ago

All those instances to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted Nature recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction of their youth.

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No. 1, volume v, p. 286
4 months 2 weeks ago

As Cæsar was at supper the discourse was of death,-which sort was the best. "That," said he, "which is unexpected."

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Cæsar
3 months 2 weeks ago

Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not to-morrow be demonstrated truth.

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Ch. 7: "Relativity", p. 161
1 month 3 weeks ago

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

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Article on Biography.
5 months 2 days ago

To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.

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Spinoza's Worm," p. 75
4 months 1 week ago

The power of the periodical press is second only to that of the people.

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Chapter XI.
5 months 1 week ago

When Scipio became consul and was keen on getting the province of Africa, promising that Carthage should be completely destroyed, and the senate would not agree to this because Fabius Maximus was against it, he threatened to appeal to the people, for he knew full well how pleasing such projects are to the populace.

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Book 1, Ch. 53 (as translated by LJ Walker and B Crick)
5 months 1 week ago

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

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Book II, xxi, 9
4 weeks 1 day ago

Not to feel exasperated, or defeated, or despondent because your days aren't packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human--however imperfectly--and fully embrace the pursuit that you've embarked on. (Hays translation) Flinch not, neither give up nor despair, if the achieving of every act in accordance with right principle is not always continuous with thee.

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V, 9
5 months 4 days ago

It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.

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A Letter: Being an Answer to a Friend, on the publication of The Age of Reason" (12 May 1797), published in an 1852 edition of The Age of Reason, p. 205
5 months 3 days ago

William James used to preach the "will-to-believe." For my part, I should wish to preach the "will-to-doubt." None of our beliefs are quite true; all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

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Ch. 12: Free Thought and Official Propaganda
4 weeks 1 day ago

To accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference.

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(Hays translation) VIII, 33
2 months 1 week ago

The mass political movements of the 20th century were vehicles for myths inherited from religion, and it is no accident that religion is reviving now that these movements have collapsed.

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5 months 3 days ago

We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.

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p. 491
1 month 2 weeks ago

It is true that every increase of knowledge may possibly render depravity more depraved, as well as it may increase the strength of virtue. It is in itself only power; and its value depends on its application.

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"Female Education" (review of Thomas Broadhurst, Advice to Young Ladies on the Improvement of Mind, 1808), in The Edinburgh Review, No. 30 (January 1810), p. 314

With Leibnitz the extent to which thoughts advance is the extent of the universe; where comprehension ceases, the universe ceases, and God begins: so that later it was even maintained that to be comprehended was derogatory to God, because He was thus degraded into finitude. In that procedure a beginning is made from the determinate, this and that are stated to be necessary; but since in the next place the unity of these moments is not comprehended, it is transferred to God. God is therefore, as it were, the waste channel into which all contradictions flow: Leibnitz's Théodicée is just a popular summing up such as this.

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Third division, Chapter I. - The Metaphysics of the Understanding Alternate translation: "God is, as it were, the sewer into which all contradictions flow."
5 months 2 weeks ago

And what can be more divine than the exhalations of the earth, which affect the human soul so as to enable her to predict the future ? And could the hand of time evaporate such a virtue? Do you suppose you are talking of some kind of wine or salted meat ?

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Book I, Chapter III
6 months ago

Generals are usually a conservative force who can be relied on to oppose social change.

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1 month 1 day ago

The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Satisfaction linked with dishonor or with harm to others is a prison for the seeker.

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Vahishto-Ishti Gatha; Yasna 53, 6.
5 months 3 days ago

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.

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Ch. V: "The Totalitarian Regimes", §7, p. 90
5 months 4 days ago

If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.

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"Laws", 1765
5 months 6 days ago

He is happy, whose circumstances suit his temper; but he is more excellent, who can suit his temper to any circumstances.

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§ 6.9 : Of Qualities Useful to Ourselves, Pt. 1

If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly. K 46 Variant translation: A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

The old form of trade union, which was born in the nineteenth century and aimed primarily at negotiating wages for a specific trade is no longer sufficient. First of all, as we have been arguing, the old trade unions are not able to represent the unemployed, the poor, or even the mobile and flexible post-Fordist workers with short term contracts, all of whom participate actively in social production and increase social wealth. Second, the old unions are divided according to the various products and tasks defined in the heyday of industrial production - a miners' union, a pipefitters' union, a machinists' union and so forth. Today, insofar as the conditions and the relations of labor are becoming common, these traditional divisions (or even newly defined divisions) no longer make sense and serve only as an obstacle. Finally the old unions have become purely economic, not political, organization.

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136
3 months 2 weeks ago

Power is more 'spacious' than violence. And violence becomes power if it 'gives itself more time.' Looked at from this perspective, power rests on an excess of space and time.

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5 months 3 days ago

Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction; but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. They go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful.

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p. 489
5 months 2 days ago

The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do.

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Wealth
9 months 1 week ago

In the more sophisticated versions of the critics of ideology - that developed by the Frankfurt School, for example - it is not just a question of seeing things (that is, social reality) as they 'really are," of throwing away the distorting spectacles of ideology; the main point is to see how the reality itself cannot reproduce itself without this so-called ideological mystification. The mask is not simply hiding the real state of things; the ideological distortion is written into its very essence... the moment we see it 'as it really is,' this being dissolves itself into nothingness or, more precisely, it changes into another kind of reality. That is why we must avoid simple metaphors of demasking, of throwing away the veils which are supposed to hide the naked reality.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

I care little about the sword: I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in this world, with any sword or tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of. We will let it preach, and pamphleteer, and fight, and to the uttermost bestir itself, and do, beak and claws, whatsoever is in it; very sure that it will, in the long-run, conquer nothing which does not deserve to be conquered. What is better than itself, it cannot put away, but only what is worse. In this great Duel, Nature herself is umpire, and can do no wrong: the thing which is deepest-rooted in Nature, what we call truest, that thing and not the other will be found growing at last.

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5 months 1 day ago

Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It's not local at all. I suppose if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn't notice it much more in any one food more than another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

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5 months 1 day ago

The way for a person to develop a [writing] style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the readers will most certainly go into it.

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As quoted in part 2 of Sherwood Eliot Wirt in "The Final Interview of C. S. Lewis", 1963
1 month 3 weeks ago

There is clear truth in the idea that a struggle from the lower classes of society, towards the upper regions and rewards of society, must ever continue. Strong men are born there, who ought to stand elsewhere than there.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Like monarchy, monotheism had a martial origin. "It is only on the march and it time of war," says Robertson Smith in The Prophets of Israel, "that a nomad people feels any urgent need of a central authority, and so it came about that in the first beginnings of national organization, centering in the sanctuary of the ark, Israel was thought of mainly as a host of Jehovah. the very name of Israel is martial, and means 'God (El) fighteth,' and Jehovah in the Old Testament is Iahwé Cebāôth - the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. It was on the battlefield that Jehovah's presence was most clearly realized; but in primitive nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in time of peace."

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3 months 4 weeks ago

In a single second we do away with all seconds; God himself could not do as much.

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