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4 weeks 1 day ago

The evil of totalitarianism is not only that it fails to protect specific liberties but that it extinguishes the very possibility of freedom.

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'Isaiah Berlin: The Value of Decency' (p.104)

Friendship is always helpful, but love sometimes even does harm

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Man consists in Truth. If he exposes Truth, he exposes himself. If he betrays Truth, he betrays himself. We speak not here of lies, but of acting against Conviction.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

For nature is not merely present, but is implanted within things, distant from none; naught is distant from her except the false, and that which existed never and nowhere-nullity. And while the outer face of things changeth so greatly, there flourisheth the origin of being more intimately within all things than they themselves. The fount of all kinds, Mind, God, Being, One, Truth, Destiny, Reason, Order.

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VIII 10 as translated by Dorothea Waley Singer
4 months 3 weeks ago

What, exactly, have the errors of exegesis and philosophy done in order to confuse Christianity, and how have they confused Christianity? Quite briefly and categorically, they have simply forced back the sphere of paradox-religion into the sphere of aesthetics, and in consequence have succeeded in brings Christian terminology to such a pass that terms which, so long as they remain within their sphere, are qualitative categories, can be put to almost any use as clever expressions.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Men did not make the earth... It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property... Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds.

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Agrarian Justice
2 months 4 days ago

There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilisation at which we have arrived. The stimulus, the training, the time, are all three wanting to us; or, in other words, the means and inducements are not there. Look at the poor lives we lead. It is a wonder that we are so good as we are, not that we are so bad. In looking round we are struck with the power of the organisations we see, not with their want of power. Now and then, it is true, we are conscious that there is an inferior organisation, but, in general, just the contrary.

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2 months 1 week ago

The more the concept of reason becomes emasculated, the more easily it lends itself to ideological manipulation and to propagation of even the most blatant lies. ... Subjective reason conforms to anything.

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pp. 24-25.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.

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p. 158
1 month 3 weeks ago

Some teachers of mankind - as Plato... the first Christians, the orthodox Muslims, and the Buddhists - have gone so far as to repudiate art. ...[They consider it] so highly dangerous in its power to infect people against their wills, that mankind will lose far less by banishing all art than by tolerating each and every art. ...such people were wrong in repudiating all art, for they denied that which cannot be denied - one of the indispensable means of communication, without which mankind could not exist. ...Now there is only fear, lest we should be deprived of any pleasures art can afford, so any type of art is patronized. And I think the last error is much grosser than the first and that its consequences are far more harmful.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The foremost, or indeed the sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced as it were to a single principle.

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Book Four, Chapter IV.
1 month 3 weeks ago

I want to block some common misunderstandings about "understanding": In many of these discussions one finds a lot of fancy footwork about the word "understanding."

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2 months 1 week ago

The fake love of ressentiment man offers no real help, since for his perverted sense of values, evils like "sickness" and "poverty" have become goods.

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L. Coser, trans. (1961), p. 92
2 months 4 days ago

Law is the continuous manifestation of God's presence - not reason for believing him absent. Great confusion arises from our using the same word law in two totally distinct senses ... as the cause and the effect. It is said that to "explain away" everything by law is to enable us to do without God. But law is no explanation of anything; law is simply a generalization, a category of facts. Law is neither a cause, nor a reason, nor a power, nor a coercive force. It is nothing but a general formula, a statistical table. Law brings us continually back to God instead of carrying us away from him.

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Suggestions for Thought : Selections and Commentaries (1994), edited by Michael D. Calabria and Janet A. MacRae, p. 41
1 month 2 weeks ago

By doing nothing men learn to do ill.

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Maxim 318 Compare Ecclesiasticus 33:27 (KJV): "idleness teacheth much evil".
3 days ago

A good education would be devoted to encouraging and refining the love of the beautiful, but a pathologically misguided moralism instead turns such longing into a sin against the high goal of making everyone feel good, of overcoming nature in the name of equality. ... Love of the beautiful may be the last and finest sacrifice to radical egalitarianism.

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p. 15.
3 weeks 5 days ago

Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just.

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Ch. 7 : Distributive Justice, Section I, The Entitlement Theory, p. 151
3 months 3 weeks ago

A merchant, it has been said very properly, is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country.

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Chapter IV, p. 456.
3 months 2 weeks ago

It seems to me as good as certain that we cannot get the upper hand against England. The English - the best race in the world - cannot lose! We, however, can lose and shall lose, if not this year then next year. The thought that our race is going to be beaten depresses me terribly, because I am completely German.

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Writing about the eventual outcome of World War I, in which he was a volunteer in the Austro-Hungarian army (25 October 1914), as quoted in The First World War (2004) by Martin Gilbert, p. 104
2 weeks 4 days ago

This miracle of social concord would result not from direct conciliation, which would be impossible, but from the development of new interests, and especially from the amazement with which the minds of men would be filled on being convinced of the radical falseness of the civilized social order by comparison with the associative or combined, and of the errors in which the social world has been so long plunged - misled by speculative philosophy, which upholds and extols this order with all its defects to the entire neglect of the study of association.

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The Theory of Social Organization. Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier, p. 5.
3 months 2 weeks ago

What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. That my will is good or evil. Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world. The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father. To pray is to think about the meaning of life.

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Journal entry (11 June 1916), p. 72e and 73e
1 month 2 weeks ago

Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

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(p. 13)
3 months 2 weeks ago

All those movements which took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which had the Reformation as their main expression and result should be analyzed as a great crisis of the Western experience of subjectivity and a revolt against the kind of religious and moral power which gave form, during the Middle Ages, to this subjectivity. The need to take a direct part in spiritual life, in the work of salvation, in the truth which lies in the Book-all that was a struggle for a new subjectivity.

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p. 782
2 months 2 weeks ago

Christian Kings may erre in deducing a Consequence, but who shall Judge?

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The Third Part, Chapter 43, p. 330
3 months 3 weeks ago

What is now common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H.C.F. [Highest Common Factor], and Man's conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.

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3 months 1 week ago

In the beginning there were two primal spirits,Twins spontaneously active,These are the Good and the Evil, in thought, and in word, and in deed.

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Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 30, 3.
4 months 2 days ago

But by far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and deceptions of the senses; in that things which strike the sense outweigh things which do not immediately strike it, though they be more important. Hence it is that speculation commonly ceases where sight ceases; insomuch that of things invisible there is little or no observation.

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Aphorism 50
2 months 6 days ago

Capitalism lacks narrativity.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals.

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(p. 261)
2 months 1 week 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 3 weeks ago

I am far from denying that newspapers in democratic countries lead citizens to do very ill-considered things in common; but without newspapers there would be hardly any common action at all. So they mend many more ills than they cause.

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Book Two, Chapter VI.
4 months 1 week ago

There are two kinds of pleasure: one consisting in a state of rest, in which both body and mind are undisturbed by any kind of pain; the other arising from an agreeable agitation of the senses, producing a correspondent emotion in the soul. It is upon the former of these that the enjoyment of life chiefly depends. Happiness may therefore be said to consist in bodily ease, and mental tranquility.

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4 months 3 weeks ago
Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has hitherto always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed: - history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!
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3 months 3 weeks ago

One mode of emotional excitability is exceedingly important in the composition of the energetic character, from its peculiarly destructive power over inhibitions. I mean what in its lower form is mere irascibility, susceptibility to wrath, the fighting temper; and what in subtler ways manifests itself as impatience, grimness, earnestness, severity of character. Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. The pain may be pain to other people or pain to one's self - it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood is on one, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does it; for, as Moltke says of war, destruction pure and simple is its essence.

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3 months 3 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 1 week ago

Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another's great tribulation: not because any man's troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive from what ills you are free yourself is pleasant.

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Book II, lines 1-4 (tr. Rouse)
2 months 4 weeks ago

Times before you, when even the living men were Antiquities; when the living might exceed the dead, and to depart this world, could not be properly said, to go unto the greater number. Dedication

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2 months 1 week ago

When we cannot obtain a thing, we comfort ourselves with the reassuring thought that it is not worth nearly as much as we believed.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 73
3 months 3 weeks ago

The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.

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Book IV, Chapter VI, §2
3 months 3 weeks ago

The law of faith, being a covenant of free grace, God alone can appoint what shall be necessarily believed by everyone whom He will justify. What is the faith which He will accept and account for righteousness, depends wholly on his good pleasure. For it is of grace, and not of right, that this faith is accepted. And therefore He alone can set the measures of it: and what he has so appointed and declared is alone necessary. No-body can add to these fundamental articles of faith; nor make any other necessary, but what God himself hath made, and declared to be so. And what these are which God requires of those who will enter into, and receive the benefits of the new covenant, has already been shown. An explicit belief of these is absolutely required of all those to whom the gospel of Jesus Christ is preached, and salvation through his name proposed.

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§ 156
3 months 2 weeks ago

Justice is what love looks like in public.

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Brother West (2009), p. 232
3 months 3 weeks ago

It seems to me certain that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness.

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p. 368
2 months 2 weeks ago

So it is that after each night, facing a new day, the impossible necessity of dealing with it fills us with dread; exiled in light as if the world had just started, inventing the sun, we flee from tears-just one of which would be enough to wash us out of time.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referentials, these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation. Whereas so many generations, and particularly the last, lived in the march of history, in the euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolution-today one has the impression that history has retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but emptied of references. It is into this void that the phantasms of a past history recede, the panoply of events, ideologies, retro fashions-no longer so much because people believe in them or still place some hope in them, but simply to resurrect the period when at least there was history, at least there was violence (albeit fascist), when at least life and death were at stake.

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"History: A Retro Scenario," pp. 43-44
1 month 6 days ago

The system of technological production that we have today has been justified in terms of creating more goods to feed more people and to meet more needs. But it actually destroys more of the resources that we need in order to meet those multiple needs. If we shift to an ecological perception, a diversity perception, we realize that some of the instruments of which we are very proud are actually extremely primitive for dealing with nature. To me that is the great lesson of ecological awareness at the turn of the millennium.

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1998
4 months 2 weeks ago

I was once being interviewed by Barbara Walters [...] In between two of the segments she asked me [...] "But what would you do if the doctor gave you only six months to live?" I said, "Type faster." This was widely quoted, but the "six months" was changed to "six minutes," which bothered me. It's "six months."

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.

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Book IV, Chapter 4, "Good Infection"

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