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3 months 6 days ago

When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.

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Preface
4 months 4 days ago

The actor's realm is that of the fleeting.

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2 months 1 week ago

There is not a Musselman alive who would not imagine that he was performing an action pleasing to God and his Holy Prophet by exterminating every Christian on earth, while the Christians are scarcely more tolerant on their side.

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We do not have and cannot have any means of discovering whether or not we are carried along in a uniform motion of translation.

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L'état actuel et l'avenir de la physique mathematique
4 months 1 week ago

Human justice is very prolix, and yet at times quite mediocre; divine justice is more concise and needs no information from the prosecution, no legal papers, no interrogation of witnesses, but makes the guilty one his own informer and helps him with eternity's memory.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

I do not think that the dancing and singing of even little children can be explained wholly on the basis of unlearned and unformed responses to then existing objective conditions. Clearly there must be something in the present to evoke happiness. But the act is expressive only a there is in it a unison of something stored from past experience, something therefore generalized, with present conditions. In the case of expressions of happy children the marriage of past values and present incidents takes place easily; there are few obstructions to be overcome, few wounds to heal, few conflicts to resolve. With maturer persons, the reverse is the case. Accordingly the achievement of complete unison is rare; but when it occurs it is so on a deeper level and with a fuller content of meaning. And then, even though after long incubation and after precedent pangs of labor, the final expression may issue with the spontaneity of the cadenced speech or rhythmic movement of happy childhood.

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p. 74
2 months 3 days ago

Indeed, even this last moment will be recognized like the rest, at least, be just beginning to be so.

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2 months ago

No, you cannot expect people to understand the higher reaches of philosophy. Culture should be taken out of the hands of the dollar chasers. We need a national subsidy for literature. It is disgraceful that artists are treated like peddlers and that art works have to be sold like soap.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Almost as soon as I began to study philosophy, I was impressed by the way in which philosophical problems appeared, disappeared, or changed shape, as a result of new assumptions or vocabularies.

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Preface
2 months 3 days ago

The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character - precisely that and nothing more.

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2 months 5 days ago

The best thing about the sciences is their philosophical ingredient, like life for an organic body. If one dephilosophizes the sciences, what remains left? Earth, air, and water.

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Fragment No. 62
4 months 5 days ago

Creationists make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

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1 month 1 week ago

THERE IS NEVER ANYTHING TO PRO-DUCE. In spite of all its materialist efforts, production remains a utopia. We can wear ourselves out in materializing things, in rendering them visible, but we will never cancel the secret.

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(p. 65)

Marxism was a philosophical or semi-philosophical doctrine and a political ideology which was used by the communist state as the main source of legitimacy and the obligatory faith.

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New Preface, p. v
3 weeks 2 days ago

So far from a gradual progress towards perfection forming any necessary part of the Darwinian creed, it appears to us that it is perfectly consistent with indefinite persistence in one state, or with a gradual retrogression.

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2 months ago

Man alone has the power of self-realization, the power to be a self-determining subject in all processes of becoming, for he alone has an understanding of potentialities and a knowledge of 'notions.' His very existence is the process of actualizing his potentialities, of molding his life according to the notions of reason.

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P. 9
2 months 4 days ago

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

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p. 49
2 weeks ago

With other beliefs crumbling, many seek to return to what they piously describe as "Enlightenment values". But these values were not as unambiguously benign as is nowadays commonly supposed.

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2015
2 months 5 days ago

Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species.

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Vol. 1, bk. 1 : Of the Powers of Man Considered in his Social Capacity, ch. 2
1 month 5 days ago

Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training.

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(p. 41)
3 months 1 week ago

The "social contract," in the only sense in which it is not completely mythical, is a contract among conquerors, which loses its raison d'être if they are deprived of the benefits of conquest.

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Ch. 12: Powers and forms of governments

While Trump is not going to be president, Trumpism is going to survive. ...The Democrats need to look very very carefully at those election results because ...the Republicans did well not necessarily because people love what they represent, but because they don't like what the Democrats represent... Unless they sort out what that is, they are going to continue to lose elections.

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28:52:00
3 months 2 days 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 ago

The judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can and ought to be made worth living, ... underlies all intellectual effort; it is the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical) rejects theory itself.

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p. xliii
1 month 5 days ago

By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Among the things held to be just by law, whatever is proved to be of advantage in men's dealings has the stamp of justice, whether or not it be the same for all; but if a man makes a law and it does not prove to be mutually advantageous, then this is no longer just. And if what is mutually advantageous varies and only for a time corresponds to our concept of justice, nevertheless for that time it is just for those who do not trouble themselves about empty words, but look simply at the facts.

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2 months 1 week ago

In doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish; and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But the works of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold, masterly hand; touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our energies, whenever we oppress and persecute.

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Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election (6 September 1780), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II (1855), pp. 158-159
3 months 2 weeks ago

The unassisted hand and the understanding left to itself possess but little power. Effects are produced by the means of instruments and helps, which the understanding requires no less than the hand; and as instruments either promote or regulate the motion of the hand, so those that are applied to the mind prompt or protect the understanding.

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Aphorism 2
1 month 3 weeks ago

Today's mic-hogging, fast-talking, contentious young (and old) lefties continue to hawk little books and pamphlets on revolution, always with choice words or documents from Marx, Mao, even Malcolm. But I've never seen a broadside with "A Black Feminist Statement or even the writings of Angela Davis or June Jordan or Barbara Omolade or Flo Kennedy or Audre Lorde or bell hooks or Michelle Wallace, at least not from the groups who call themselves leftist. These women's collective wisdom has provided the richest insights into American radicalism's most fundamental questions: How can we build a multiracial movement? Who are the working class and what do they desire? How do we resolve the Negro Question and the Woman Question? What is freedom?

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Robin Kelley Freedom Dreams
1 month 1 week ago

The savage recognizes life only in himself and his personal desires. His interest in life is concentrated on himself alone. The highest happiness for him is the fullest satisfaction of his desires. The motive power of his life is personal enjoyment. His religion consists in propitiating his deity and in worshiping his gods, whom he imagines as persons living only for their personal aims.

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Chapter IV, Christianity Misunderstood by Men of ScienceChapter IV, Christianity Misunderstood by Men of Science
2 months 3 weeks ago

Let hopes and sorrows, fears and angers be, and think each day that dawns the last you'll see; For so the hour that greets you unforeseen, will bring with it enjoyment twice as keen.

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Book I, epistle iv, line 12 (translated by John Conington)
3 months 1 week ago

And as every present state of a simple substance is naturally a consequence of its preceding state, so its present is pregnant with its future.

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La monadologie (22).

It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government, that, having become instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or to retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history.

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Speech in the House of Commons
2 weeks ago

No doubt markets transmit information in the way that Hayek claimed. But what reason is there to believe that - unlike any other social institution - they have a built-in capacity to correct their mistakes? History hardly supports the supposition. Moods of irrational exuberance and panic can, and often do, swamp the price-discovery functions of markets.

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2 months 1 week ago

Each individual imagines that he can exist, live, think, and act for himself, and believes that he himself is the thinking principle of his thoughts; whereas in truth he is but a single ray of the ONE universal and necessary Thought.

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p. 21
2 months 1 week ago

...out of the tomb of the murdered Monarchy in France, has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of man.

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p. 7
3 months 1 week ago

What modern apologists call 'true' Christianity is something depending upon a very selective process. It ignores much that is to be found in the Gospels: for example, the parable of the sheep and the goats, and the doctrine that the wicked will suffer eternal torment in Hell fire. It picks out certain parts of the Sermon on the Mount, though even these it often rejects in practice. It leaves the doctrine of non-resistance, for example, to be practised only by non-Christians such as Gandhi. The precepts that it particularly favours are held to embody such a lofty morality that they must have had a divine origin. And yet ... these precepts were uttered by Jews before the time of Christ.

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"Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?", in Stockholm newspaper Dagens Nyheter, part II., 11/11/1954
2 weeks 2 days ago

After Hegel, philosophy confronts the possibility of its own death, and in some sense has to do so if it is to remain the most fundamental kind of thinking.

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Chapter 4, Philosophy As Writing: The Case Of Hegel, p. 88
2 months 3 days ago

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

A man, in so far as he is an individual, may be very sharply detached from others, a sort of spiritual crustacean, and yet be very poor in differentiating content. And further, it is true on the other hand that the more personality a man has and the greater his interior riches and the more he is a society within himself, the less brusquely he is divided from his fellows.

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1 month 5 days ago

When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.

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(p. 180)
3 months 1 week ago

A great stock, though with small profits, generally increases faster than a small stock with great profits. Money, says the proverb, makes money. When you have a little, it is often easier to get more. The great difficulty is to get that little.

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Chapter IX, p. 111.
3 months 6 days ago

We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.

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Letters of C. S. Lewis (29 April 1959), para. 1, p. 285 - as reported in The Quotable Lewis (1989), p. 469
4 months 1 week ago
The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.' To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one.
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2 months ago

By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For "totalitarian" is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.

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p. 5
2 months 4 days ago

Because we cannot discover God's throne in the sky with a radiotelescope or establish (for certain) that a beloved father or mother is still about in a more or less corporeal form, people assume that such ideas are "not true." I would rather say that they are not "true" enough, for these are conceptions of a kind that have accompanied human life from prehistoric times, and that still break through into consciousness at any provocation.

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2 months 1 week ago

A common monetary standard will be established, with the consent of the various governments, by which industrial transactions will be greatly facilitated. Three spheres made respectively of gold, silver, and platinum, and each weighing fifty grammes, would differ sufficiently in value for the purpose. The sphere should have a small flattened base, and on the great circle parallel to it the Positivist motto would be inscribed. At the pole would be the image of the immortal Charlemagne, the founder of the Western Republic, and round the image his name would be engraved, in its Latin form, Carolus; that name, respected as it is by all nations of Europe alike, would be the common appellation of the universal monetary standard.

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p. 430
3 months 1 week ago

It may indeed be doubted, whether butcher's meat is any where a necessary of life. Grain and other vegetables, with the help of milk, cheese, and butter, or oil, where butter is not to be had, it is known from experience, can, without any butcher's meat, afford the most plentiful, the most wholesome, the most nourishing, and the most invigorating diet.

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Chapter II, Part II, Appendix to Articles I and II.
1 month 3 weeks ago

The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.

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Ch. 6: "The Nineteenth Century", p. 136
3 months 2 weeks ago

There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage.

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