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1 month 1 week ago

In most cases the esthetic objection to doses of morals and of economic or political propaganda in works of art will be found upon analysis to reside in the over-weighing of certain values at the expense of others until, except for those in a similar stare of one-sides enthusiasm, weariness rather than refreshment sets in.

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p. 188
1 month 2 days ago

Feminism in the United States has never emerged from the women who are most victimized by sexist oppression; women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually-women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are a silent majority. A mark of their victimization is that they accept their lot in life without visible question, without organized protest, without collective anger or rage.

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p. 1.
1 month 1 week ago

To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together.

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"The Irony of Liberalism"
1 month ago

Being precedes identity. 
Existence precedes essence. 

Contingent identity subgroups are never more important than the deterministic universal evolution. 

"Precedence Culture" builds a culture around being, before choice, rather than identity particularity that is contingent and after choice. Identity particularity can't even exist without deterministic emergence. Respect life first.

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2 weeks 3 days ago

Three days later the little princess was buried, and Prince Andrei went up the steps to where the coffin stood, to give her the farewell kiss. And there in the coffin was the same face, though with closed eyes. "Ah, what have you done to me?" it still seemed to say, and Prince Andrei felt that something gave way in his soul and that he was guilty of a sin he could neither remedy nor forget.

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Bk. IV, Ch. 9

So far as cerebral structure goes... it is clear that Man differs less from the Chimpanzee or the Orang, than these do even from the Monkeys, and that the difference between the brains of the Chimpanzee and of Man is almost insignificant, when compared with that between the Chimpanzee brain and that of a Lemur.

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Ch.2, p. 120
2 months 3 weeks ago

Peace is more important than all justice; and peace was not made for the sake of justice, but justice for the sake of peace.

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On Marriage
2 weeks 6 days ago

Nonviolence is an ideal that cannot always be fully honored in the practice. To the degree that those who practice nonviolent resistance put their body in the way of an external power, they make physical contact, presenting a force against force in the process. Nonviolence does not imply the absence of force or of aggression. It is, as it were, an ethical stylization of embodiment, replete with gestures and modes of non-action, ways of becoming an obstacle, of using the solidity of the body and its proprioceptive object field to block or derail a further exercise of violence.

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p. 22
1 month 2 weeks ago

Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.

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Speech on the Bill for the Relief of Protestant Dissenters
1 month 2 weeks ago

To reckon on anything at all, here or elsewhere, is to afford proofs that we are still burdened with chains. The reprobate aspires to paradise; this aspiration disparages, compromises him. To be free is to rid yourself forever of the notion of reward, it is to expect nothing of men or gods, it is to renounce not only this world and all worlds but salvation itself-it is to destroy even the notion of it, that chain among chains.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Want keeps pace with dignity. Destitute of the lawful means of supporting his rank, his dignity presents a motive for malversation, and his power furnishes the means.

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The Rationale of Reward, 1811

Opinion considers the opposition of what is true and false quite rigid, and, confronted with a philosophical system, it expects agreement or contradiction. And in an explanation of such a system, opinion still expects to find one or the other.

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Preface, § 2
2 months 2 weeks ago

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

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Le dîner du comte de Boulainvilliers (1767): Troisième Entretien
1 month 1 day ago

The jingoes and war speculators are filling the air with the sentimental slogan of hypocritical nationalism, "America for Americans," "America first, last, and all the time."

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see - not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.

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April 11, 1834
2 months 3 weeks ago

What I had to say was so clear and I felt it so deeply that I am amazed by the tediousness, repetitiousness, verbiage, and disorder of this writing. What would have made it lively and vehement coming from another's pen is precisely what has made it dull and slack coming from mine. The subject was myself, and I no longer found on my own interest that zeal and vigor of courage which can exalt a generous soul only for another person's cause.

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On the Subject and Form of This Writing; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters

That mysterious independent variable of political calculation, Public Opinion.

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Universities, Actual and Ideal
2 months 2 weeks ago

If a man own land, the land owns him.

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Wealth
1 month 1 week ago

Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

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8:34b-36 (KJV)
3 months 1 week ago

Corpses are more fit to be cast out than dung.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Second, in the presence of this continuity of feeling, nominalistic maxims appear futile. There is no doubt about one idea affecting another, when we can directly perceive the one generally modified and shaping itself into the other. Nor can there any longer be any difficulty about one idea resembling another, when we can pass along the continuous field of quality from one to the other and back again to the point which we had marked.

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1 month 2 days ago

We find here the final application of the doctrine of objective immortality. Throughout the perishing occasions in the life of each temporal Creature, the inward source of distaste or of refreshment, the judge arising out of the very nature of things, redeemer or goddess of mischief, is the transformation of Itself, everlasting in the Being of God. In this way, the insistent craving is justified - the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore.

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We have been Godlike in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbitlike in our unplanned breeding of ourselves.

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Man and Hunger: The Perspectives of History, entered into the Congressional Record by Senator Ernest Gruening
2 months 2 weeks ago

As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct.

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p. 486
1 month 2 weeks ago

Government was intended to suppress injustice, but its effect has been to embody and perpetuate it.

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"Summary of Principles" 2.7
3 months 2 days ago

For every one feels to what purpose he can use his own powers. Before the horns of a calf appear and sprout from his forehead, he butts with them when angry, and pushes passionately.

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Book V, lines 1033-1035 (tr. Bailey)
1 month 3 weeks ago

Abstract terms (however useful they may be in argument) should be discarded in meditation, and the mind should be fixed on the particular and the concrete, that is, on the things themselves.

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Paragraph 4
2 months 2 weeks ago

If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Saying is one thing and doing is another.

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Ch. 31
3 weeks 6 days ago

The first consequence of the principle of bounded rationality is that the intended rationality of an actor requires him to construct a simplified model of the real situation in order to deal with it. He behaves rationally with respect to this model, and such behavior is not even approximately optimal with respect to the real world. To predict his behavior we must understand the way in which this simplified model is constructed, and its construction will certainly be related to his psychological properties as a perceiving, thinking, and learning animal.

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p. 198; Cited in P. Slovic (1972, p. 2).
2 months 2 weeks ago

Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

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Poetry and Imagination
2 months 2 weeks ago

The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.

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Vol. I, ch.1, section 4.
1 month 2 days ago

There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few.

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3 months 2 days ago

For what is a child? Ignorance. What is a child? Want of instruction. For where a child has knowledge, he is no worse than we are.

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Book II, ch. 1, 16
2 months 1 week ago

We must plow through the whole of language.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 131
2 months 2 weeks ago

As a rule, begin my lectures on Scientific Method by telling my students that scientific method does not exist. ...having been ...the one and only professor of this non-existent subject within the British Commonwealth.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Men without their choice derive benefits from that association; without their choice they are subjected to duties in consequence of these benefits; and without their choice they enter into a virtual obligation as binding as any that is actual. Look through the whole of life and the whole system of duties. Much the strongest moral obligations are such as were never the results of our option. I allow, that if no supreme ruler exists, wise to form, and potent to enforce, the moral law, there is no sanction to any contract, virtual or even actual, against the will of prevalent power. On that hypothesis, let any set of men be strong enough to set their duties at defiance, and they cease to be duties any longer.

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p. 442
1 month 2 weeks ago

A gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

There is no good father who would want to resemble our Heavenly Father.

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No. 51
2 months 2 weeks ago

The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself.

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p. 14
1 month 4 days ago

Love is not consolation, it is light.

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As quoted in Simone Weil (1954) by Eric Walter Frederick Tomlin, p. 47
1 month 2 weeks ago

We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good - have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: "If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. ..." And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.

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1 month 1 day ago

I was aggressively nonpolitical. I believed that people who make a fuss about politics do so because their heads are too empty to think about more important things. So I felt nothing but impatient contempt for Osborne's Jimmy Porter and the rest of the heroes of social protest.

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p. 2
2 months 3 weeks ago

Lastly, we must also know what Baptism signifies, and why God has ordained just such external sign and ceremony for the Sacrament by which we are first received into the Christian Church. But the act or ceremony is this, that we are sunk under the water, which passes over us, and afterwards are drawn out again. These two parts, to be sunk under the water and drawn out again, signify the power and operation of Baptism, which is nothing else than putting to death the old Adam, and after that the resurrection of the new man, both of which must take place in us all our lives, so that a truly Christian life is nothing else than a daily baptism, once begun and ever to be continued.

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On Infant Baptism, Large Catechism
2 months 3 weeks ago

There is the name and the thing: the name is a voice which denotes and signifies the thing; the name is no part of the thing, nor of the substance; 'tis a foreign piece joined to the thing, and outside it. God, who is all fulness in Himself and the height of all perfection, cannot augment or add anything to Himself within; but His name may be augmented and increased by the blessing and praise we attribute to His exterior works: which praise, seeing we cannot incorporate it in Him, forasmuch as He can have no accession of good, we attribute to His name, which is the part out of Him that is nearest to us. Thus is it that to God alone glory and honour appertain; and there is nothing so remote from reason as that we should go in quest of it for ourselves; for, being indigent and necessitous within, our essence being imperfect, and having continual need of amelioration, 'tis to that we ought to employ all our endeavour.

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Ch. 16
1 month 4 days ago

How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard.

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"On What There Is"
1 month 2 weeks ago

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.

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Emphasizing his views on philosophy as something abstract and separate from normal life to Isaiah Berlin, in the early 1930s, as quoted in A.J. Ayer: A Life (1999) by Ben Rogers, p. 2.

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