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7 months 1 week ago

He that is not with me is against me: and he that gathereth not with me scattereth.

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Luke 11:23 (KJV)
7 months 2 weeks ago

The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor - hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition.

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5 months 4 days ago

Government spending cannot create additional jobs. If the government provides the funds required by taxing the citizens or by borrowing from the public, it abolishes on the one hand as many jobs as it creates on the other. If government spending is financed by borrowing from the commercial banks, it means credit expansion and inflation. If in the course of such an inflation the rise in commodity prices exceeds the rise in nominal wage rates, unemployment will drop. But what makes unemployment shrink is precisely the fact that real wage rates are falling.

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8 months 6 days ago

When Eudæmonidas heard a philosopher arguing that only a wise man can be a good general, "This is a wonderful speech," said he; "but he that saith it never heard the sound of trumpets."

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62 Eudæmonidas
6 months 3 weeks ago

When the world fails us, when we ourselves become worldless in the social sense, the body suffers and shows its precarity; that mode of demonstrating precarity is itself, or carries with it, a political demand and even an expression of outrage. To be a body differentially exposed to harm or to death is precisely to exhibit a form of precarity, but also to suffer a form of inequality that is unjust. So, the situation of many populations who are increasingly subject to unlivable precarity raises for us the question of global obligations. If we ask why any of us should care about those who suffer at a distance from us, the answer is not to be found in paternalistic justifications, but in the fact that we inhabit the world together in relations of interdependency. Our fates are, as it were, given over to one another.

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p. 50
8 months 2 weeks ago

But the man is a humbug - a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull.

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Part of a diary entry dated "Wednesday-Wednesday 9-16 July", 1924, regarding Thomas Babington Macaulay
4 months 2 weeks ago

My prayer is not the whimpering of a beggar nor a confession of love. Nor is it the petty reckoning of a small tradesman: Give me and I shall give you. My prayer is the report of a soldier to his general: This is what I did today, this is how I fought to save the entire battle in my own sector, these are the obstacles I encountered, this is how I plan to fight tomorrow.

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6 months 1 week ago

Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.

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The Sealed Treasure (1960), p. 62
5 months 1 week ago

There is no science apart from the general. It may even be said that the very object of the exact sciences is to spare us these direct verifications.

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Ch. I. (1905) Tr. George Bruce Halstead
6 months 1 week ago

Once you had read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology.

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Humboldt's Gift (1975) [Penguin Classics, 1996, ISBN 0-140-18944-0], p. 5
8 months 3 weeks ago

To which we may add this other Aristotelian consideration, that he who confers a benefit on any one loves him better than he is beloved by him again.

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Book II, Ch. 8. Of the Affections of Fathers
7 months 2 days ago

The Outsider is always unhappy, but he is an agent that ensures the happiness for millions of 'Insiders'.

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Chapter Seven, The Great Synthesis…
7 months 2 weeks ago

He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama. 

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p. 178, first American edition
1 month 5 days ago

Well...I hope we can do better than this....

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8 months 3 weeks ago

Being of opinion that the doctrine and history of so extraordinary a sect as the Quakers were very well deserving the curiosity of every thinking man, I resolved to make myself acquainted with them, and for that purpose made a visit to one of the most eminent of that sect in England, who, after having been in trade for thirty years, had the wisdom to prescribe limits to his fortune, and to his desires, and withdrew to a small but pleasant retirement in the country, not many miles from London. Here it was that I made him my visit. His house was small, but neatly built, and with no other ornaments but those of decency and convenience.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The naturalists, you know, distribute the history of nature into three kingdoms or departments: zoology, botany, mineralogy. Ideology, or mind, however, occupies so much space in the field of science, that we might perhaps erect it into a fourth kingdom or department. But inasmuch as it makes a part of the animal construction only, it would be more proper to subdivide zoology into physical and moral.

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Thomas Jefferson, Letter (24 Mar 1824) to Mr. Woodward. Collected in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Correspondence (1854), 339.
8 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"
4 months 2 weeks ago

To preserve the freedom of the human mind then and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will, and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement. The generation which is going off the stage has deserved well of mankind for the struggles it has made, and for having arrested the course of despotism which had overwhelmed the world for thousands and thousands of years. If there seems to be danger that the ground they have gained will be lost again, that danger comes from the generation your contemporary. But that the enthusiasm which characterizes youth should lift its parricide hands against freedom and science would be such a monstrous phenomenon as I cannot place among possible things in this age and country.

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Letter to William Green Mumford
7 months 2 weeks ago

There is rarely a creative man who does not have to pay a high price for the divine spark of his greatest gifts...the human element is frequently bled for the benefit of the creative element and to such an extent that it even brings out the bad qualities, as for instance, ruthless, naive egoism (so-called "auto-eroticism"), vanity, all kinds of vices-and all this in order to bring to the human I at least some life-strength, since otherwise it would perish of sheer inanition.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Scientific Method... is even less existent than some other non-existent subjects.

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8 months 1 week ago

The essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation. ... But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat.

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p. 168.
6 months 3 weeks ago

The discourse of truth is quite simply impossible. It eludes itself. Everything eludes itself, everything scoffs at its own truth, seduction renders everything elusive. The fury to unveil the truth, to get at the naked truth, the one which haunts all discourses of interpretation, the obscene rage to uncover the secret, is proportionate to the impossibility of ever achieving this. ...But this rage, this fury, only bears witness to the eternity of seduction and to the impossibility of mastering it.

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(p. 73)
7 months 1 week ago

The novel, the novel proper that is, is about people's treatment of each other, and so it is about human values.

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Ch. 10, p. 138
7 months 3 weeks ago

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

But how many are the final causes of union, the most beautiful, which this deity contains within himself? The Sun, that is, Apollo, is "Leader of the Muses;" and inasmuch as he completes our life with good order, he produces in the world Æsculapius; for even before the world was, he had the latter by his side. But were one to discuss the numerous other qualities belonging to this god, he would never arrive to the end of them.

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5 months 1 week ago

Middle age begins with marriage; for then work and responsibility replace carefree play, passion surrenders to the limitations of social order, and poetry yields to prose.

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Ch. 3 : On Middle Age
7 months 2 weeks ago

Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

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Quotation and Originality
5 months 4 days ago

I will tell you: that perfect man, who has attained virtue, never cursed his luck, and never received the results of chance with dejection; he believed that he was citizen and soldier of the universe, accepting his tasks as if they were his orders. Whatever happened, he did not spurn it, as if it were evil and borne in upon him by hazard; he accepted it as if it were assigned to be his duty. "Whatever this may be,"he says, "it is my lot; it is rough and it is hard, but I must work diligently at the task."

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The various philosophies of life presented themselves as a conquest of materialism, or in any case, they readily claimed it. That does not change anything: their valuations, revaluations, and explanations of disvalue have been emptied into the over-all secularization stream, where they have only hastened the tendency to unlearn, which is a neutralizing process, after all.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

What is peddled about nowadays as philosophy, especially that of N.S. [National Socialism], but has nothing to do with the inner truth and greatness of that movement [namely the encounter between global technology and modern humanity] is nothing but fishing in that troubled sea of values and totalities.

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Introduction to Metaphysics (1953) - a publication of lectures of 1935.
7 months 2 weeks ago

I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a little country churchyard, than in the tombs of the Capulets.

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Letter to Matthew Smith
8 months 3 weeks ago

Let me have none of your Popish stuff! Get away with you, good morning.

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Last words (June 1809), as quoted in The Fortnightly, vol. 25; vol. 31, p. 398
9 months 1 week ago

Virtue (or the man of virtue) is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

The capitalist cannot store labour-power in warehouses after he has bought it, as he may do with the raw material.

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Vol. II, Ch. XV, p. 285.
8 months 2 weeks ago

With a few glorious and glaring exceptions, the shadow of Jim Crow was cast in its new glittering form expressed in the language of superficial diversity... The disarray of a scattered curriculum, the disenchantment of talented yet deferential faculty, and the disorientation of precious students loom large... To witness a faculty enthusiastically support a candidate for tenure then timidly defer to a rejection based on the Harvard administration's hostility to the Palestinian cause was disgusting... We all know the mendacious reasons given had nothing to do with academic standards... This kind of narcissistic academic professionalism, cowardly deference to the anti-Palestinian prejudices of the Harvard administration, and indifference to my Mother's death constitutes an intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of deep deaths...

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Quoted in Civil rights activist Cornel West resigns from Harvard, By Jackie Salo, New York Post, July 13, 2021
7 months 2 weeks ago

Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what - it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?

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4 months 2 weeks ago

I find that even Eminent Writers (such as Raymund Lully, Paracelsus, and others) do so abuse the termes they employ, that as they will now and then give divers things one name, so they will oftentimes give one thing, many Names; and some of them (perhaps) such, as do much more properly signifie some Distinct Body of another kind; nay even in Technical Words or Termes of Art, they refrain not from this Confounding Liberty; but will, as I have Observ'd call the same Substance, sometimes the Sulphur, and Sometimes the Mercury, of a Body.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The Jesuits founded their politics on the virtual disappearance of God and on the worldly and spectacular manipulation of consciences-the evanescence of God in the epiphany of power-the end of transcendence, which now only serves as an alibi for a strategy altogether free of influences and signs. Behind the baroqueness of images hides the éminence grise of politics.

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"The Precession of Simulacra," p. 5
4 months 2 weeks ago

Speech is insufficient to utter the last things; and this troubles it not, because the last things may be heard speaking for themselves. At last, after long delay the wondering soul gives form to that which is stirring within it and produces its works art and song and mighty deeds.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.

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Fate
5 months 4 days ago

If you have been given a talent, exercise it freely and happily like the sun: give everyone from your splendour.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The principles of logic and mathematics are true simply because we never allow them to be anything else. And the reason for this is that we cannot abandon them without contradicting ourselves, without sinning against the rules which govern the use of language, and so making our utterances self-stultifying. In other words, the truths of logic and mathematics are analytic propositions or tautologies.

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p. 77.
8 months 2 weeks ago

Wisdom and contrivance are shown in overcoming difficulties, so there is no place for them in a Being for whom no difficulties exist.

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pages 176-177; Early Modern Texts page 16
8 months 3 weeks ago

This freedom from absolute, arbitrary power, is so necessary to, and closely joined with a man's preservation, that he cannot part with it, but by what forfeits his preservation and life together: for a man, not having the power of his own life, cannot, by compact, or his own consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the absolute, arbitrary power of another, to take away his life, when he pleases.

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Second Treatise of Civil Government, Ch. IV, sec. 23
7 months 5 days ago

In both positivism and Heidegger-at least in his later work-speculation is the target of attack. In both cases the thought that autonomously raises itself above the facts through interpreting them and that cannot be reclaimed by them without leaving a surplus is condemned for being empty and vain concept-mongering.

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p. 9
7 months 3 days ago

The term many presupposes the term one, and the term one presupposes the term many.

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Pt. I, ch. 2, sec. 2.
5 months 4 weeks ago

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

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Poets

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