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3 months 2 weeks ago

For it very rarely otherwise happens, than that theories, that are grounded but upon few and obvious experiments, are subject to be contradicted by some such instances, as more free and diligent inquiries into what of nature is more abstruse, or even into the less obvious qualities of things, are wont to bring to light.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

"It is necessary to be given the prop that all elementary props are given." This is not necessary because it is even impossible. There is no such prop! That all elementary props are given is SHOWN by there being none having an elementary sense which is not given.

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Notes of 1919, as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : The Duty of Genius (1990) by Ray Monk
8 months 1 week ago

Though absent from our eyes, Christ our Head is bound to us by love. Since the whole Christ is Head and body, let us so listen to the voice of the Head that we may also hear the body speak.He no more wished to speak alone than He wished to exist alone, since He says: Behold, I am with you all days, unto the consummation of the world (Matt. 28:20). If He is with us, then He speaks in us, He speaks of us, and He speaks through us; and we too speak in Him.

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pp. 420-421
6 months 2 weeks ago

People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.

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Introduction to 1891 edition of Karl Marx's, The Civil War in France
7 months 5 days ago

If melodiously piping flutes sprang from the olive, would you doubt that a knowledge of flute-playing resided in the olive? And what if plane trees bore harps which gave forth rhythmical sounds? Clearly you would think in the same way that the art of music was possessed by plane trees. Why, then, seeing that the universe gives birth to beings that are animate and wise, should it not be considered animate and wise itself?

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As quoted in De Natura Deorum by Cicero, ii. 8.
6 months 6 days ago

As a way of maintaining relative intellectual independence, having the attitude of an amateur instead of a professional is a better course.

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p. 87
5 months 2 weeks ago

Ten years ago, you could have traveled thousands of miles through the United States and never seen a baseball cap turned back to front. Today, the reverse baseball cap is ubiquitous. I do not know what the pattern of geographical spread of the reverse baseball cap precisely was, but epidemiology is certainly among the professions primarily qualified to study it.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Death is too exact; it has all the reasons on its side. Mysterious for our instincts, it takes shape, to our reflection, limpid, without glamor, and without the false lures of the unknown. By dint of accumulating non-mysteries and monopolizing non-meanings, life inspires more dread than death: it is life which is the Great Unknown.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

A man, an adult, is precisely what [Aeneas] is: Achilles had been little more than a passionate boy.

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A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), Chapter 6: "Virgil and the Subject of Secondary Epic"
7 months 3 weeks ago

Instinctively we divide mankind into friends and foes - friends, towards whom we have the morality of co-operation; foes, towards whom we have that of competition. But this division is constantly changing; at one moment a man hates his business competitor, at another, when both are threatened by Socialism or by an external enemy, he suddenly begins to view him as a brother. Always when we pass beyond the limits of the family it is the external enemy which supplies the cohesive force. In times of safety we can afford to hate our neighbour, but in times of danger we must love him.

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Authority and the Individual, 1949
3 months 3 weeks ago

If, in my retirement to the humble station of a private citizen, I am accompanied with the esteem and approbation of my fellow citizens, trophies obtained by the blood-stained steel, or the tattered flags of the tented field, will never be envied. The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

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Letter To the Republican Citizens of Washington county, Maryland
6 months 1 week ago

A real reconciliation of East and West is impossible and inconceivable on the basis of a materialistic Communism, or of a materialistic Capitalism, or indeed of a materialistic Socialism. The third way will neither be "anti-Communist" nor "anti-Capitalist". It will recognize the truth in liberal democracy, and it will equally recognize the truth in Communism. A critique of Communism and Marxism does not entail an enmity towards Soviet Russia, just as a critique of liberal democracy is not entail enmity towards the west. ... But the final and most important justification of a "third way" is that there must be a place from which we may boldly testify to, and proclaim, truth, love and justice. No one today likes truth: utility and self interest have long ago been substituted for truth.

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p. 80
7 months 3 weeks ago

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, and he followeth not us: and we forbad him, because he followeth not us. But Jesus said, Forbid him not: for there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name, that can lightly speak evil of me. For he that is not against us is on our part.

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Mark 9:38-40 (KJV)
3 months 3 weeks ago

When public opinion changes, it is with the rapidity of thought.

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Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey (6 January 1816) ME 14:384
7 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.

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p. 85e
7 months 2 weeks ago

By convention sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.

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(trans. Durant 1939), Ch. XVI, §II, p. 353; citing C. Bakewell, Sourcebook in Ancient Philosophy, New York, 1909, "Fragment O" (Diels), p. 60
6 months 2 weeks ago

To suffer is to produce knowledge.

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8 months 3 days ago

Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion.

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Aphorism 20
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is sometimes difficult to avoid the impression that there is a sort of foreknowledge of the coming series of events.

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p. 94
4 months 1 week ago

With competition is connected less the intention to do the thing best than the intention to make it as profitable, as productive, as possible. Hence people study to get into the civil service (study in order to get a well-paid job), study cringing and flattery, routine and 'acquaintance with business', work 'for appearance'. Hence, while it is apparently a matter of doing 'good service', in truth only a 'good business' and earning of money are looked out for. The job is done only ostensibly for the job's sake, but in fact on account of the gain that it yields. One would indeed prefer not to be censor, but one wants to be - advanced; one would like to judge, administer, etc., according to his best convictions, but one is afraid of transfer or even dismissal; one must, above all things - live.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 237
6 months 4 weeks ago

The dead govern the living.

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Le Catéchisme positiviste
4 months 1 week ago

He has spent all his life in letting down empty buckets into empty wells; and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up again.

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Vol. I, ch. 9, p. 310
3 months 2 weeks ago

Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web.

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IV, 40
7 months 5 days ago

Neither will the horse be adjudged to be generous, that is sumptuously adorned, but the horse whose nature is illustrious; nor is the man worthy who possesses great wealth, but he whose soul is generous.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus
8 months 3 weeks ago

If there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake, clearly this must be the good. Will not knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what we should? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Works of art express space as opportunity for movement and action.

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p. 217
5 months 2 weeks ago

One feature of our own society that seems decidedly anomalous is the matter of sexual advertisement. As we have seen, it is strongly to be expected on evolutionary grounds that, where the sexes differ, it should be the males that advertise and the females that are drab. Modern western man is undoubtedly exceptional in this respect. It is of course true that some men dress flamboyantly and some women dress drably but, on average, there can be no doubt that in our society the equivalent of the peacock's tail is exhibited by the female, not by the male. Women paint their faces and glue on false eyelashes. Apart from special cases, like actors, men do not. Ch. 9. Battle of the Sexes

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8 months 3 weeks ago

All things as subsist from nature appear to contain in themselves a principle of motion and permanency; some according to place, others according to increase and diminuation; and others according to change in quality. 

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Book II, Ch. I, p. 88.
7 months 3 weeks ago

But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.

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par. 18
7 months 3 weeks ago

God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.

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Society and Solitude
5 months 3 days ago

So what is the alternative to traditional anthropocentric ethics? Antispeciesism is not the claim that "All Animals Are Equal", or that all species are of equal value, or that a human or a pig is equivalent to a mosquito. Rather the antispeciesist claims that, other things being equal, equally strong interests should count equally. Experiences that are subjectively negative or positive in hedonic tone to the same degree must count for the same.

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"The Antispeciesist Revolution", Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 26 Jul. 2013
5 months 3 weeks ago

"If he is this good at acting crazy, it's because he is." Nor is military psychology mistaken in this regard: in this sense, all crazy people simulate, and this lack of distinction is the worst kind of subversion. It is against this lack of distinction that classical reason armed itself in all its categories. But it is what today again outflanks them, submerging the principle of truth.

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"The Precession of Simulacra," p. 4
7 months 3 weeks ago

To understand political power aright, and derive from it its original, we must consider what estate all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man.

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Second Treatise of Government, Ch. II, sec. 4
5 months 3 weeks ago

When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

If it's really true, that the museum at Liberty University has dinosaur fossils which are labelled as being 3000 years old, then that is an educational disgrace. It is debauching the whole idea of a university, and I would strongly encourage any members of Liberty University who may be here...to leave and go to a proper university.

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At Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, (23 October 2006) Broadcasted by C-SPAN2
5 months 3 weeks ago

The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up!

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Fragment No. 114
4 months 2 weeks ago

Mark at present so much; what the essence of Scandinavian and indeed of all Paganism is: a recognition of the forces of Nature as godlike, stupendous, personal Agencies,-as Gods and Demons. Not inconceivable to us. It is the infant Thought of man opening itself, with awe and wonder, on this ever-stupendous Universe. To me there is in the Norse system something very genuine, very great and manlike. A broad simplicity, rusticity, so very different from the light gracefulness of the old Greek Paganism, distinguishes this Scandinavian System. It is Thought; the genuine Thought of deep, rude, earnest minds, fairly opened to the things about them; a face-to-face and heart-to-heart inspection of the things,-the first characteristic of all good Thought in all times. Not graceful lightness, half-sport, as in the Greek Paganism; a certain homely truthfulness and rustic strength, a great rude sincerity, discloses itself here.

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4 months 4 days ago

Proletarian violence, carried on as a pure and simple manifestation of the sentiment of class struggle, appears thus as a very fine and heroic thing; it is at the service of the immemorial interests of civilization; it is not perhaps the most appropriate method of obtaining immediate material advantages, but it may save the world from barbarism.

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p. 85
4 months 1 week ago

Now why, if freedom is striven after for love of the I after all - why not choose the I himself as beginning, middle, and end?

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Dover 2005, p. 163
8 months 1 day ago

Lying and guile need only to be revealed and recognized to be undone. When once lying is recognized as such, it needs no second stroke; it falls of itself and vanishes in shame.

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p. 60

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