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3 months 4 weeks ago

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

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Introduction, sect. 4
5 months 1 week ago

A sound mind in a sound body, is a short but full description of a happy state in this world.

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Sec. 1
1 month 6 days ago

'Form' or 'figure' is space limited by boundaries. Space has necessarily 'three' dimensions, length, breadth, depth; and no ethers which cannot be resolved into these.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

If a woman becomes weary and at last dead from bearing, that matters not; let her only die from bearing, she is there to do it.

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Sermon Von dem ehelichen Stande (1519), p. 41 - as quoted in The Ethic of Freethought: A Selection of Essays and Lectures (1888) by Karl Pearson
4 months 3 days ago

The plebeian must expect to find himself neglected and despised in proportion as he is remiss in cultivation the objects of esteem; the lord will always be surrounded with sycophants and slaves. The lord therefore has no motive to industry and exertion; no stimulus to rouse him from the lethargic 'oblivious pool', out of which every human intellect originally arose.

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Book V, Chapter 10, "Of Hereditary Distinction"
4 months 3 days ago

What is Nature? An encyclopedical, systematic Index or Plan of our Spirit. Why will we content us with the mere catalogue of our Treasures? Let us contemplate them ourselves, and in all ways elaborate and use them.

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2 months ago

Is not my present nearer my past of yesterday than the present of Sirius?

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5 months 1 week ago

It is natural for us to seek a Standard of Taste; a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least, a decision, afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another.

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5 months 1 week ago

A whole from necessary substances is impossible. The whole, therefore, of substances is a whole of contingent things, and the world consists essentially of only contingent things.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The very proclaimers of "America first" have long before this betrayed the fundamental principles of real Americanism...the other truly great Americans who aimed to make of this country a haven of refuge, who hoped that all the disinherited and oppressed people in coming to these shores would give character, quality and meaning to the country.

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1 week 4 days ago

If you're looking for good men.....best I can do is, not terrible.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most. His very "uniqueness," "separateness" and "differentiation" make him an alien, not only in his native place, but even in his own home. Often more so than the foreign born who generally falls in with the established. In the true sense one's native land, with its back ground of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home. A certain atmosphere of "belonging," the consciousness of being "at one" with the people and environment, is more essential to one's feeling of home. This holds good in relation to one's family, the smaller local circle, as well as the larger phase of the life and activities commonly called one's country. The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings than in his native land.

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4 months 6 days ago

Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.

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Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. V, The Reconciliation
5 months 1 week ago

The man who esteems himself as he ought, and no more than he ought, seldom fails to obtain from other people all the esteem that he himself thinks due. He desires no more than is due to him, and he rests upon it with complete satisfaction.

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Section III.
5 months 1 week ago

A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.

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Part IV, Prop. LXVII
5 months 1 week ago

No difference of rank, position, or birth, is so great as the gulf that separates the countless millions who use their head only in the service of their belly, in other words, look upon it as an instrument of the will, and those very few and rare persons who have the courage to say: No! my head is too good for that; it shall be active only in its own service; it shall try to comprehend the wondrous and varied spectacle of this world and then reproduce it in some form, whether as art or as literature, that may answer to my character as an individual.

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On Genius, Parerga and Paralipomena, Chapter III
4 months 2 days ago

When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.

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4 months 6 days ago

A good man with a good conscience doesn't walk so fast.

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Scene X.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after. Variant: Good communication is just as stimulating as...

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

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F 87
5 months 1 week ago

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

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Chapter I, Part II, 775.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Universal Humanism:

1) Preserve Life (end)

Precludes those who think they get to decide who lives and who dies.

2) Avoid and limit suffering (means)

Precludes those who use absurd exceptions to turn their backs on functional rules.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves.

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p. 32
5 months 2 weeks ago

God's justice and His power are inseparable; 'tis in vain we invoke His power in an unjust cause. We are to have our souls pure and clean, at that moment at least wherein we pray to Him, and purified from all vicious passions; otherwise we ourselves present Him the rods wherewith to chastise us; instead of repairing anything we have done amiss, we double the wickedness and the offence when we offer to Him, to whom we are to sue for pardon, an affection full of irreverence and hatred. Which makes me not very apt to applaud those whom I observe to be so frequent on their knees, if the actions nearest to the prayer do not give me some evidence of amendment and reformation

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Ch. 56. Of Prayers, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
4 months 3 weeks ago

To Harmodius, descended from the ancient Harmodius, when he reviled Iphicrates [a shoemaker's son] for his mean birth, "My nobility," said he, "begins in me, but yours ends in you."

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54 Iphicrates
1 month 6 days ago

One power descends and wants to scatter, to come to a standstill, to die. The other power ascends and strives for freedom, for immortality. These two armies, the dark and the light, the armies of life and of death, collide eternally.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them.

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Bk. III, ch. 5.
1 month 3 days ago

The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.

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(Hays translation) The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts. V, 16
1 month 2 days ago

In the present situation, such an experiment would be doubly dangerous to the Russian Social Democracy. It stands on the eve of decisive battles against tsarism. It is about to enter, or has already entered, on a period of intensified creative activity, during which it will broaden (as is usual in a revolutionary period) its sphere of influence and will advance spontaneously by leaps and bounds. To attempt to bind the initiative of the party at this moment, to surround it with a network of barbed wire, is to render it incapable of accomplishing the tremendous task of the hour.

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5 months 6 days ago

For my own part, not believing in universal selfishness, I have no difficulty in admitting that Communism would even now be practicable among the elite of mankind, and may become so among the rest.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.

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p. 14
4 months 6 days ago

Strong as it looks at the outset, State-agency perpetually disappoints every one. Puny as are its first stages, private efforts daily achieve results that astound the world.

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Vol. 3, Ch. VII, Over-Legislation
5 months 6 days ago

Surplus value is exactly equal to surplus labour; the increase of the one [is] exactly measured by the diminution of necessary labour.

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Notebook III, The Chapter on Capital, p. 259.
6 months 4 days ago

Books ... hold within them the gathered wisdom of humanity, the collected knowledge of the world's thinkers, the amusement and excitement built up by the imaginations of brilliant people. Books contain humor, beauty, wit, emotion, thought, and, indeed, all of life. Life without books is empty.

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5 months 5 days ago

And we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in the night without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull rich prizes, and he did not make his choice.

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Diary entry of Saturday noon (10 February?)
5 months 1 week ago

Rascals are always sociable - more's the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others' company.

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Vol. 1, Ch. 5, § 9
4 months 1 week ago

Indeed, the drunken man while in that condition does not know the definition of drunkenness nor the scientific account of it; he has not the very least scientific knowledge of it. The sober man, on the other hand, knows the definition of drunkenness and its basis, yet he is not drunk in the very least. Again the doctor, when he is himself ill, knows the definition and causes of health and the remedies which restore it, and yet is lacking in health. Similarly there is a difference between knowing the true nature and causes and conditions of the ascetic life and actually leading such a life and forsaking the world.

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III. The Classes of Seekers, p. 47.
5 months 1 week ago

Figure to yourself the mixture of surprise and delight which has this instant been poured into my mind by the sound of my name, as uttered by you, in the speech just read to me out of the Morning Herald... By one and the same man, not only Parliamentary Reform, but Law Reform advocated. Advocated? and by what man? By one who, in the vulgar sense of profit and loss, has nothing to gain by it... Yes, only from Ireland could such self-sacrifice come; nowhere else: least of all in England, cold, selfish, priest-ridden, lawyer-ridden, lord-ridden, squire-ridden, soldier-ridden England, could any approach to it be found.

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Letter to Daniel O'Connell (15 July 1828) , quoted in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. X (1843), pp. 594-595
5 months ago

There is object proof that homosexuality is more interesting than heterosexuality. It's that one knows a considerable number of heterosexuals who would wish to become homosexuals, whereas one knows very few homosexuals who would really like to become heterosexuals.

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As quoted in Who's Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History: From World War II to the Present Day (2001) by Robert Aldrich and Gary Wotherspoon ISBN 041522974X
3 months 4 weeks ago

Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such "transcending" analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory.

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p. xliii
3 months 4 weeks ago

If the flesh came into being because of spirit, it is a wonder. But if spirit came into being because of the body, it is a wonder of wonders. Indeed, I am amazed at how this great wealth has made its home in this poverty.

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4 months 6 days ago

I suddenly dreamt that I picked up the revolver and aimed it straight at my heart - my heart, and not my head; and I had determined beforehand to fire at my head, at my right temple. After aiming at my chest I waited a second or two, and suddenly my candle, my table, and the wall in front of me began moving and heaving. I made haste to pull the trigger.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom--that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement. Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation.

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Source: Page 11
1 month 6 days ago

As I watched the seagulls, I thought: "That's the road to take; find the absolute rhythm and follow it with absolute trust."

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Ch. 21
5 months 3 weeks ago

Thus, where'er the drift of hazardSeems most unrestrained to flow,Chance herself is reined and bitted,And the curb of law doth know.

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5 months 1 week ago

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

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6 months 4 days ago

I don't say it was deliberate fraud. He was probably madly sincere, and sincerely mad.

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1 month 6 days ago

Never spend your money before you have it.

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