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1 month 2 weeks ago

The Doctrine of Knowledge, apart from all special and definite knowing, proceeds immediately upon Knowledge itself, in the essential unity in which it recognises Knowledge as existing; and it raises this question in the first place - How this Knowledge can come into being, and what it is in its inward and essential Nature? The following must be apparent: - There is but One who is absolutely by and through himself, - namely, God; and God is not the mere dead conception to which we have thus given utterance, but he is in himself pure Life. He can neither change nor determine himself in aught within himself, nor become any other Being; for his Being contains within it all his Being and all possible Being, and neither within him nor out of him can any new Being arise.

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3 months 1 week ago

We certainly must contend by every argument against him who does away with knowledge or reason or mind and then makes any dogmatic assertion about anything. The philosopher, who pays the highest honor to these things, must necessarily, as it seems, because of them refuse to accept the theory of those who say the universe is at rest, whether as a unity or in many forms, and must also refuse utterly to listen to those who say that being is universal motion; he must say that being and the universe consist of both.

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1 week 3 days ago

I'm not clever enough to be a physicist. When asked about why he chose to become a biologist.

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UR Samtiden - Verklighetens magi 27 October 2012.
3 months 2 weeks ago
Man has an invincible inclination to allow himself to be deceived and is, as it were, enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist tells him epic fables as if they were true, or when the actor in the theater acts more royally than any real king. So long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free; it is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more daring.
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1 month 4 weeks ago

Not only can logos be seen in absolutely all animals, but in many of them it has the groundwork for being perfected.

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3, 2, 4
2 months 3 weeks ago

All the excesses, all the violence, and all the vanity of great men, come from the fact that they know not what they are: it being difficult for those who regard themselves at heart as equal with all men... For this it is necessary for one to forget himself, and to believe that he has some real excellence above them, in which consists this illusion that I am endeavoring to discover to you.

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2 months 1 week ago

Amy Kofman: Have you read all the books in here?Derrida: No, only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully.

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Derrida (2003 documentary), referring to his personal library
5 days ago

I'm delighted to hear someone make the claim that there is moral progress because it can be such a incendiary thing to say, and its something that I say and deeply believe in.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

A circuit performed by a capital and meant to be a periodical process, not an individual act, is called its turnover. The duration of this turnover is determined by the sum of its time of production and its time of circulation.

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Volume II, Ch. VII, p. 158.
1 month 1 week ago

I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action - mother of all vices - I am the cause of no one's suffering.

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1 month 1 week ago

Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat.

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1 month 1 day ago

And yet this might not necessarily involve the conversion of the Trinity into a Quaternity. If... in Greek, spirit, instead of being neuter had been feminine, who can say that the Virgin Mary might not already have become an incarnation or humanization of the Holy Spirit? ...And thus a dogmatic evolution would have been effected parallel to that of the divinization of Jesus, the Son, and his identification with the Word.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The truth can wait, for she lives a long life.

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Willen in der Natur (On the Will in Nature), 1836;

It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in providence, than to see their real import or value.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

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Part IV: America,Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey, 1926
1 week 5 days ago

By doing nothing men learn to do ill.

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Maxim 318 Compare Ecclesiasticus 33:27 (KJV): "idleness teacheth much evil".
1 month 2 weeks ago

"Can any good come out of Nazareth?" This is always the question of the wiseacres and the knowing ones. But the good, the new, comes from exactly that quarter whence it is not looked for, and is always something different from what is expected. Everything new is received with contempt, for it begins in obscurity. It becomes a power unobserved.

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As quoted in "Voices of the New Time" as translated by C. C. Shackford in The Radical Vol. 7 (1870), p. 329
2 months 1 week ago

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.

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Book III, Chapter 4, "Morality and Psychoanalysis"
2 months 2 weeks ago

I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.

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3 weeks 6 days ago

Disciplinary society is still governed by no. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers.

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Source: Page 8
3 months 2 weeks ago

Man is a synthesis of psyche and body, but he is also a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. In the former, the two factors are psyche and body, and spirit is the third, yet in such a way that one can speak of a synthesis only when the spirit is posited. The latter synthesis has only two factors, the temporal and the eternal. Where is the third factor? And if there is no third factor, there really is no synthesis, for a synthesis that is a contradiction cannot be completed as a synthesis without a third factor, because the fact that the synthesis is a contradiction asserts that it is not. What, then, is the temporal?

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2 months 2 weeks ago

You, your families, your friends and your countries are to be exterminated by the common decision of a few brutal but powerful men. To please these men, all the private affections, all the public hopes, all that has been achieved in art, and knowledge and thought and all that might be achieved hereafter is to be wiped out forever. Our ruined lifeless planet will continue for countless ages to circle aimlessly round the sun unredeemed by the joys and loves, the occasional wisdom and the power to create beauty which have given value to human life.

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Leaflet issued while Russell was in Brixton Prison, 1961

The uniting of Orthodoxy with state absolutism came about on the soil of a non-belief in the Divineness of the earth, in the earthly future of mankind; Orthodoxy gave away the earth into the hands of the state because of its own non-belief in man and mankind, because of its nihilistic attitude towards the world. Orthodoxy does not believe in the religious ordering of human life upon the earth, and it compensates for its own hopeless pessimism by a call for the forceful ordering of it by state authority.

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Nihilism On A Religious Soil
1 month 5 days ago

... Nietzsche's ideas and plans: for example, the idea of giving up the whole wretched academic world to form a secular monastic community.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

It was these Romans who reunited in one State the Culture which had now been produced by the intermixture of different races, and thereby completed the period of Ancient Time, and closed the simple course of Ancient Civilization. With respect to its influence on Universal History, this nation, more than any other, was the blind and unconscious instrument for the furtherance of a higher World-Plan; after having formed itself, by its internal des tiny indicated above, into a most fit and proper instrument for that purpose.

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p. 192
1 month 2 weeks ago

Pursue Virtue virtuously.

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These words also appear in Christian Morals, Part I, Section I
1 month 1 week ago

The revolution, Stahl declared, is the 'world-historic mark of our age.' It would found 'the entire State on the will of man instead of on the commandment and ordinance of God.'

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p. 364
2 months 1 week ago

I have always - at least, ever since I can remember - had a kind of longing for death. Psyche

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1 month 1 week ago

In its relation to the reality of daily life, the high culture of the past was many things-opposition and adornment, outcry and resignation. But it was also the appearance of the realm of freedom: the refusal to behave.

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p. 71
2 months 2 weeks ago

For it is extremely absurd to expect to be enlightened by reason, and yet to prescribe to her beforehand on which side she must incline.

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A 747, B 775; as translated by F. Max Mueller
2 months 2 weeks ago

The first thing to realize, if you wish to become a philosopher, is that most people go through life with a whole world of beliefs that have no sort of rational justification, and that one man's world of beliefs is apt to be incompatible with another man's, so that they cannot both be right. People's opinions are mainly designed to make them feel comfortable; truth, for most people is a secondary consideration.

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"How to Become a Philosopher" (1942), in The Art of Philosophizing, and Other Essays (New York: Philosophical Library, 1968), p. 2
3 months 4 days ago

The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions. James Legge translation. Variant translations: The superior man acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his actions. The greater man does not boast of himself, But does what he must do. A good man does not give orders, but leads by example.

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2 months 1 week ago

The very man who has argued you down will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said.

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Reflections on the Psalms (1958), ch. VII: Connivance, p. 73
2 months 2 weeks ago

This world belongs to the energetic.

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Resources
3 weeks 5 days ago

I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women... no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.

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As quoted in Parted Lips : Lesbian Love Quotes Through the Ages (2002) by Simone Rich
2 months 2 weeks ago

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours ... In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.

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p. 364
1 week 1 day ago

Train any population rationally, and they will be rational. Furnish honest and useful employments to those so trained, and such employments they will greatly prefer to dishonest or injurious occupations. It is beyond all calculation the interest of every government to provide that training and that employment; and to provide both is easily practicable.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Go further, and require each of them to make a contribution: you will see how many things are still missing, and you will be obliged to get the assistance of a large number of men who belong to different classes, priceless men, but to whom the gates of the academies are nonetheless closed because of their social station. All the members of these learned societies are more than is needed for a single object of human science; all the societies together are not sufficient for a science of man in general.

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Article on Encyclopedia
2 months 1 week ago

Our elucidations of the preliminary concept of phenomenology show that its essential character does not consist in its actuality as a philosophical "movement." Higher than actuality stands possibility. We can understand phenomenology solely by seizing upon it as a possibility.

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Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)
2 months 5 days ago

Commit no slander; so that infamy and wickedness may not happen unto thee.

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(p. 59)
1 month 2 weeks ago

To live classically and to realize antiquity practically within oneself is the summit and goal of philology.

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Philosophical Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991) § 147
1 month 1 week ago

Nature consists of the elements given by the senses. Primitive man first takes out of them certain complexes of these elements that present themselves with a certain stability and are most important to him. The first and oldest words are names for "things". ... The sensations are no "symbols of things". On the contrary the "thing" is a mental symbol for a sensation-complex of relative stability. Not the things, the bodies, but colours, sounds, pressures, times (what we usually call sensations) are the true elements of the world.

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p. 23, as quoted in Lenin as Philosopher: A Critical Examination of the Philosophical Basis of Leninism (1948) by Anton Pannekoek, p. 454
3 months 1 week ago

History is a story without an end.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

For a desperate disease a desperate cure.

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Book II, Ch. 3. The Custom of the Isle of Cea
2 months 2 weeks ago

Either we must have war against Russia, before she has the atom bomb, or we will have to lie down and let them govern us. ... Anything is better than submission.

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Speech quoted in The Observer (21 November 1948), quoted in Robert Skildesky, Oswald Mosley (1981), p. 542 and Martin Ceadel, Thinking about Peace and War (1987), p. 52
3 months 1 week ago

Science is a systematic method for studying and working out those generalizations that seem to describe the behavior of the universe. It could exist as a purely intellectual game that would never affect the practical life of human beings either for good or evil, and that was very nearly the case in ancient Greece, for instance. Technology is the application of scientific findings to the tools of everyday life, and that application can be wise or unwise, useful or harmful. Very often, those who govern technological decisions are not scientists and know little about science.

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3 weeks 6 days ago

A screen bans reality.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.

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"The Flood", 1764
3 months 2 weeks ago

It is impossible that each of the elements should be infinite. For that is body which has interval on all sides; and that is infinite which has extension without bound.

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The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.

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F 120

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