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2 months 2 weeks ago

"The Precession of Simulacra,"

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p. 6
1 month 1 week ago

My father's education was altogether of the worst and most limited. I believe he was never more than three months at any school. What he learned there showed what he might have learned. A solid knowledge of arithmetic, a fine antique handwriting - these, with other limited practical etceteras, were all the things he ever heard mentioned as excellent. He had no room to strive for more.

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5 months 1 week ago

Moderation, in the pursuit of honors or riches, is the only security against disappointment and vexation. A wise man, therefore, will prefer the simplicity of rustic life to the magnificence of courts.

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4 months 1 week ago

For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

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§ 43, this has often been quoted as simply: The meaning of a word is its use in the language.
3 months 1 week ago

Be it well understood, I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not. Freedom is not an activity pursued by an entity that, apart from and previous to such pursuit, is already possessed of a fixed being. To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity, not to have subscribed to a determined being, to be able to be other than what one was, to be unable to install oneself once and for all in any given being. The only attribute of the fixed, stable being in the free being is this constitutive instability.

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"Man has no nature"

Constantly and, if it be possible, on the occasion of every impression on the soul, apply to it the principles of Physic, of Ethic, and of Dialectic.

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VIII, 13
2 months 2 weeks ago

The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realise that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life and about why we're here. We have the opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors ever. That is such an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to understand.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

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"Variations on a Philosopher" in Themes and Variations, 1950
4 months 1 week ago

The need of black conservatives to gain the respect of their white peers deeply shapes certain elements of their conservatism. In this regard, they simply want what most people want, to be judged by the quality of their skills, not by the color of their skin. But the black conservatives overlook the fact that affirmative action policies were political responses to the pervasive refusal of most white Americans to judge black Americans on that basis.

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(p52)
4 months 2 weeks ago

Christianity taught only what the whole of Asia knew already long before and even better.

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quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture. New Delhi: Pragun Publication.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Another thing wherein they shew their love of dominion, is, their desire to have things to be theirs: They would have propriety and possession, pleasing themselves with the power which that seems to give, and the right that they thereby have, to dispose of them as they please. He that has not observ's these two humours working very betimes in children, has taken little notice of their actions: And he who thinks that these two roots of almost all the injustice and contention that so disturb human life, are not early to be weeded out, and contrary habits introduc'd, neglects the proper season to lay the foundations of a good and worthy man.

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Sec. 105
3 months 2 weeks ago

It may be confidently asserted that no man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks. And the desire of rectifying these mistakes, is the noble ambition of an enlightened understanding, the impulse of feelings that Philosophy invigorates.

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A Vindication of the Rights of Men
4 months 3 weeks ago

To an atheist all writings tend to atheism: he corrupts the most innocent matter with his own venom.

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Ch. 12
2 weeks 4 days ago

Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains. In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire them, and to effect this, they have perverted the best religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purposes. With the lawyers it is a new thing. They have, in the mother country, been generally the primest supporters of the free principles of their constitution. But there, too, they have changed.

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Letter to Horatio G. Spafford
1 month 1 week ago

All work, even cotton spinning, is noble; work is alone noble ... A life of ease is not for any man, nor for any god.

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Bk. III, ch. 4.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Farewell to the monsters, farewell to the saints. Farewell to pride. All that is left is men.

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Act 10, sc. 4
3 months 1 week ago

God ... desires His creature to be able to oppose Him. He has given that creature freedom. ... When man turns away from evil with that whole measure of power with which he is able to rebel against God, then he has truly turned to God.

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p. 44
1 month 3 days ago

Practice humility at first with man and only then before God. He who despises man, has also no respect for God.

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3 months 1 week ago

The remembrance of forbidden fruit is the earliest thing in the memory of each of us, as it is in that of mankind.

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Chapter I: Moral Obligation
5 months 6 days ago

One who liberates his country by killing a tyrant is to be praised and rewarded.

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Trans. J.G. Dawson (Oxford, 1959), 44, 2 in O’Donovan, pp. 329-30
1 month 1 week ago

What is objective must be common to many minds and consequently transmissible from one to the other, and as this transmission can only come about by... discourse... we are even forced to conclude: no discourse no objectivity.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defences only of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really free.

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p. 493
3 months 1 week ago

Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble, it must remain rare, if common, it must become mean.

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Ch. IV: The Aristocratic Ideal
4 months 2 weeks ago

It seems to me now that mathematics is capable of an artistic excellence as great as that of any music, perhaps greater; not because the pleasure it gives (although very pure) is comparable, either in intensity or in the number of people who feel it, to that of music, but because it gives in absolute perfection that combination, characteristic of great art, of godlike freedom, with the sense of inevitable destiny; because, in fact, it constructs an ideal world where everything is perfect and yet true.

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Letter to Gilbert Murray, April 3, 1902
1 week 1 day ago

The moral decline we are compelled to witness and the suffering it engenders are so oppressive that one cannot ignore them even for a moment. No matter how deeply one immerses oneself in work, a haunting feeling of inescapable tragedy persists. Still, there are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments, one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable: life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only being.

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Letter to Queen Mother Elisabeth of Belgium (9 January 1939), asking for her help in getting an elderly cousin of his out of Germany and into Belgium. Quoted in Einstein on Peace edited by Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden (1960), p. 282
3 months 2 weeks ago

When any work seems to have required immense force and labor to affect it, the idea is grand. Stonehenge, neither for disposition nor ornament, has anything admirable; but those huge rude masses of stone, set on end, and piled each on other, turn the mind on the immense force necessary for such a work. Nay, the rudeness of the work increases this cause of grandeur, as it excludes the idea of art and contrivance; for dexterity produces another sort of effect, which is different enough from this.

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Part II Section XII
4 months 2 weeks ago

I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.

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June 27, 1839
3 months 2 weeks ago

Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.

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1 month 1 week ago

The history of utopias is no less fascinating than the history of metallurgy or of chemical engineering.

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New Preface, p. vi
4 months 2 weeks ago

I resolved from the beginning of my quest that I would not be misled by sentiment and desire into beliefs for which there was no good evidence.

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Fact and Fiction (1961), Part I, Ch. 6: "The Pursuit of Truth", p. 37
3 months 1 week ago

The same, without such opinion, DESPAIRE.

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The First Part, Chapter 6, p. 25
2 months 3 days ago

History warns us, however, that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions; and, as matters now stand, it is hardly rash to anticipate that, in another twenty years, the new generation, educated under the influences of the present day, will be in danger of accepting the main doctrines of the 'Origin of Species' with as little reflection, and it may be with as little justification, as so many of our contemporaries, twenty years ago, rejected them. Against any such a consummation let us all devoutly pray; for the scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

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The Coming of Age of The Origin of Species (1880); Collected Essays, vol. 2
2 months 4 weeks ago

The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are concerned, is notorious. From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one's own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard - every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals which they serve.

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1 week 1 day ago

The only progress I can see is progress in the organization. The ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one, it seems, can benefit by the experiences of others. Being both a father and teacher, I know we can teach our children nothing. We can transmit to them neither our knowledge of life nor of mathematics. Each must learn its lesson anew.

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1 month 1 week ago

He who outrages benevolence is called a ruffian: he who outrages righteousness is called a villain. I have heard of the cutting off of the villain Chow, but I have not heard of the putting of a ruler to death.

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1B:8, In relation to righteousness and the overthrow of the tyrannous King Zhou of Shang, as translated by Sir Robert Kennaway Douglas, China (1904), p. 8
4 months 3 weeks ago

War is sweet to them that know it not.

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Though Erasmus quoted this proverb in Latin at the start of his essay Bellum [War], and it is sometimes attributed to him, it originates with the Greek poet Pindar
4 months 2 weeks ago

There has been a general trend in recent times toward a Unitarian mythology and the worship of one God. This is the tendency which it is customary to regard as spiritual progress. On what grounds? Chiefly, so far as one can see, because we in the Twentieth Century West are officially the worshippers of a single divinity. A movement whose consummation is Us must be progressive. Quod erat demonstrandum.

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"One and Many," p. 16
5 months 2 weeks ago

The similarity between Christ and Socrates consists essentially in their dissimilarity. Just as philosophy begins with doubt, so also a life that may be called human begins with irony.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

There were many special laws affecting the several kings inscribed about the temples, but the most important was the following: They were not to take up arms against one another, and they were all to come to the rescue if any one in any of their cities attempted to overthrow the royal house; like their ancestors, they were to deliberate in common about war and other matters, giving the supremacy to the descendants of Atlas. And the king was not to have the power of life and death over any of his kinsmen unless he had the assent of the majority of the ten.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

It is amusing to hear the modern Christian telling you how mild and rationalistic Christianity really is and ignoring the fact that all its mildness and rationalism is due to the teaching of men who in their own day were persecuted by all orthodox Christians.

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"Sources of Intolerance"
3 months 4 days ago

If one only wished to be Sad, this could be horrible for the rest of civilisation; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.

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As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts : Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors, Both Ancient and Modern (1891) edited by Tryon Edwards.
4 months 2 weeks ago

All those to whom I looked up, were of opinion that the pleasure of sympathy with human beings, and the feelings which made the good of others, and especially of mankind on a large scale, the object of existence, were the greatest and surest sources of happiness. Of the truth of this I was convinced, but to know that a feeling would make me happy if I had it, did not give me the feeling.

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(p. 138)
5 months 2 days ago

For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things that children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true. This terror, therefore, and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of daylight, but by the aspect and law of nature.

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Book II, lines 55-61 (tr. Rouse)
4 months 2 weeks ago

Though you give no countenance to the complaints of the querulous, yet take care to curb the insolence and ill nature of the injurious. When you observe it yourself, reprove it before the injur'd party: but if the complaint be of something really worth your notice, and prevention another time, then reprove the offender by himself alone, out of sight of him who complain'd and make him go and ask pardon, and make reparation; which ooming thus, as it were from himself, will be the more cheerfully performed, and more kindly receiv'd, the love strenghten'd between them, and a custom of civility grow familiar amongst your children.

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Sec. 109
5 months 1 week ago

There is nothing more visible than what is secret, and nothing more manifest than what is minute. Therefore the superior man is watchful over himself, when he is alone.

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