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2 months 2 weeks ago

Superstition, idolatry, and hypocrisy have ample wages, but truth goes a-begging.

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53
1 month 5 days ago

It is unjust to call imaginary the diseases which are, on the contrary, only too real, since they proceed from our mind, the only regulator of our equilibrium and our health.

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2 months 1 week ago

My friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, "What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?" and gave the obvious answer: jailers.

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"On Science Fiction". Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2002). p. 67.
2 months 4 weeks ago

If you reject absolutely any single sensation without stopping to discriminate with respect to that which awaits confirmation between matter of opinion and that which is already present, whether in sensation or in feelings or in any immediate perception of the mind, you will throw into confusion even the rest of your sensations by your groundless belief and so you will be rejecting the standard of truth altogether. If in your ideas based upon opinion you hastily affirm as true all that awaits confirmation as well as that which does not, you will not escape error, as you will be maintaining complete ambiguity whenever it is a case of judging between right and wrong opinion.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

Sensitiveness without impulse spells decadence, and impulse without sensitiveness spells brutality.

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Ch. 13: "Requisites for Social Progress", p. 280
4 weeks 1 day ago

Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.

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p. 45
2 months 3 weeks ago

Therefore let every Christian, yea, let the whole body of Christ everywhere cry out, despite the tribulations it endures, despite temptations and countless scandals, saying: "Preserve my soul, for I am holy; save Thy servant, O my God, that trusteth in thee" (Ps. 85:2) No, this holy one is not proud, for he trusts in God.

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p.429
2 months 3 days ago

The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.

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Vol. I, p. 59
1 month 5 days ago

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

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2 months 1 week ago

The woman wants to dominate, the man wants to be dominated.

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 220
1 month ago

No work of art can be instantaneously perceived because there is the no opportunity for conservation and increase in tension, and hence none for that release and unfolding which gives volume to a work of art.

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p. 189
1 month 5 days ago

The next simplest feature that is common to all that comes before the mind, and consequently, the second category, is the element of Struggle.

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Lecture II : The Universal Categories, § 2 : Struggle, CP 5.45
1 month 5 days ago

Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

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1 month 5 days ago

A pair of statements may be taken conjunctively or disjunctively; for example, "It lightens and it thunders," is conjunctive, "It lightens or it thunders" is disjunctive. Each such individual act of connecting a pair of statements is a new monad for the mathematician.

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p. 268
2 months 1 week ago

There have been men before ... who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself... as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.

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Ch. 9

That Marxism should triumph in Russia, where there is no industry, would be the greatest contradiction that Marxism could undergo. But there is no such contradiction, for there is no such triumph. Russia is Marxist more or less as the Germans of the Holy Roman Empire were Romans.

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Chapter XIV: Who Rules The World?
1 month 1 day ago

Many, and I think the determining, constitutive facts remain outside the reach of the operational concept. And by virtue of this limitation-this methodological injunction against transitive concepts which might show the facts in their true light and call them by their true name-the descriptive analysis of the facts blocks the apprehension of facts and becomes an element of the ideology that sustains the facts. Proclaiming the existing social reality as its own norm, this sociology fortifies in the individuals the "faithless faith" in the reality whose victims they are.

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p. 119
1 month 1 week ago

People ... become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end. Just as money, which is a means of satisfying wants, comes to be regarded by a miser as the sole thing to be worked for, leaving the wants unsatisfied; so the conduct men have found preferable because most conducive to happiness, has come to be thought of as intrinsically preferable: not only to be made a proximate end (which it should be), but to be made an ultimate end, to the exclusion of the true ultimate end.

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Ethics (New York:1915), § 14, pp. 38-39
3 months 1 week ago
All that exists that can be denied deserves to be denied; and being truthful means: to believe in an existence that can in no way be denied and which is itself true and without falsehood.
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1 month 4 weeks ago

Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.

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p. 169.
1 month 1 day ago

Without some affinity in human ideas art would certainly be impossible; but it can never be exactly determined how far the intentions of the poet are realized.

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Gottlob Frege (1892). On Sense and Reference.

The idea that the citizen owes loyalty to a country, a territory, a jurisdiction and all those who reside within it - the root assumption of democratic politics, and one that depends upon the nation as its moral foundation - that idea has no place in the minds and hearts of many who now call themselves citizens of European states.

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2 months 1 week ago

I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough.

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Act 1, sc. 5

Casting my perils before swains.

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1 month 5 days ago

I love talking to simple people, with common folk, if you like, and I still do it and still chat now as before with anyone, regardless of intellectual level. On the contrary, I like uneducated people much better and that is obviously my Rumanian heritage.

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3 months 5 days ago

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

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Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space...it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark.

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(p. 13)
1 month 1 week ago

In all persuasions the bigots are persecutors; the men of a cool and reasonable piety are favourers of toleration; because the former sort of men not taking the pains to be acquainted with the grounds of their adversaries tenets, conceive them to be so absurd and monstrous, that no man of sense can give into them in good earnest. For which reason they are convinced that some oblique bad motive induces them to pretend to the belief of such doctrines, and to the maintaining of them with obstinacy. This is a very general principle in all religious differences, and it is the corner stone of all persecution.

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Volume II, p. 148
2 months 2 weeks ago

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.

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Book I, Ch. 20
2 months 3 weeks ago

We are members of this Head, and this body cannot be decapitated. If the Head is in glory forever, so too are the members in glory forever, that Christ may be undivided forever.

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p.433
1 month 1 day ago

I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.

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Speech at the Descartes Conference in Paris (1937) Quoted in The Forbes Scrapbook of Thoughts on the Business of Life (1950), p. 442, as "Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought."
2 months 3 days ago

This legible lesson, this ritual recording, must be repeated as often as possible; the punishments must be a school rather than a festival; an ever-open book rather than a ceremony. The duration that makes the punishment effective for the guilty is also useful for the spectators. They must be able to consult at each moment the permanent lexicon of crime and punishment. A secret punishment is a punishment half wasted. Children should be allowed to come to the places where the penalty is being carried out; there they will attend their classes in civics. And grown men will periodically relearn the laws. Let us conceive of places of punishment as a Garden of the Laws that families would visit on Sundays.

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Chapter Three, The Gentle Way in Punishment

4 ways: Agnosticism, Relativism, Amorality, Morality. 

1) I don't know. 2) Everybody is different. 3) Do whatever you can. 4) Do what you should.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls.

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Modes of Thought (1938).
2 months 1 week ago

...happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination, resting solely on empirical grounds.

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Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics (1785), Second Section.
2 months 1 week ago

Choose your parents wisely.

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On the recipe for longevity; Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 29, 2012
1 month 5 days ago

The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

Plagued by Western habits of either-or, dualistic thinking, we all may fail to understand that race, class and gender interconnect to sustain a corporate ruling class. In the language of African-American essayist bell hooks, they are interlocking systems of oppression. Neither Latina nor Anglo women should yield to the temptation of making a hierarchy of oppressions where battles are fought over whether racism is "worse" than sexism, or class oppression is "deeper" than racism, etc. Instead of hierarchies we need bridges which, after all, exist to make two ends meet.

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Elizabeth Martinez, De Colores Means All of Us

Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so... They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?... I am sick with indignation at what wives and mothers will do of the most egregious selfishness. And people call it all maternal or conjugal affection, and think it pretty to say so. No, no, let each person tell the truth from their own experience.

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Letter to Mary Clarke Mohl (13 Dec 1861), published in Florence Nightingale on Women, Medicine, Midwifery and Prostitution: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale (2005), Volume 8, edited by Lynn McDonald, p. 84
2 months 3 days ago

What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions ... and yet which still remains a context.

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Limited Inc
3 weeks 2 days ago

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.

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Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 1.
2 months 1 week ago

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

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Letter to Harrison Blake, November 16, 1857
1 month 4 weeks ago

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

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p. 165.
2 months 2 weeks ago

A person must take care to exercise moderate discipline over the body and subject it to the Spirit by means of fasting, vigils, and labor. The goal is to have the body obey and conform - and not hinder - the inner person and faith. Unless it is held in check, we know it is the nature of the body to undermine faith and the inner person.

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pp. 71-72
1 month 1 week ago

Moderation is the spirit of castrated narrow-mindedness.

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"Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaeum (1798)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #64
2 months 1 week ago

Good and strong will. Mechanism must precede science (learning). Also in morals and religion? Too much discipline makes one narrow and kills proficiency. Politeness belongs, not to discipline, but to polish, and thus comes last.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 9
3 weeks ago

Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled Utopian.

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"Socialism: Caught in the Political Trap", a lecture (c. 1912), published in Red Emma Speaks, Part 1 (1972) edited by Alix Kates Shulman
2 months 2 weeks ago

Let great authors have their due, as time, which is the author of authors, be not deprived of his due, which is, further and further to discover truth.

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Book I, iv, 10

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