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6 months 4 weeks ago

There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain, or with whatever may be the specific thinking organ; while others think with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the life. And the people who think only with the brain develop into definition-mongers; they become the professionals of thought.

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7 months 1 week ago

Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.

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8 months 1 week ago

What is new in our time is the increased power of the authorities to enforce their prejudices.

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Quoted on Who Said That?, BBC TV, 8/8/1958
7 months 2 days ago

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

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"Art and Eros: A Dialogue about Art", Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (1986).
8 months 1 week ago

There is no virtue they should be excited to, nor fault they should be kept from, which I do not think they may be convinced of; but it must be by such reasons as their age and understandings are capable of, and those propos'd always in very few and plain words.

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Sec. 81
8 months 2 weeks ago

What defects women have, we must check them for in private, gently by word of mouth, for woman is a frail vessel.

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Table Talk, quoted in Luther On "Woman"
6 months 1 week ago

Evidence is the only good reason to believe anything.

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Interview shown in AlJazeera ,
8 months 1 week ago

At puberty, the elements of an unsuperstitious sexual morality ought to be taught. Boys and girls should be taught that nothing can justify sexual intercourse unless there is mutual inclination... Boys and girls should be taught respect for each other's liberty; they should be made to feel that nothing gives one human being rights over another, and that jealousy and possessiveness kill love. They should be taught that to bring another human being into the world is a very serious matter, only to be undertaken when the child will have a reasonable prospect of health, good surroundings, and parental care. But they should also be taught methods of birth control, so as to insure that children shall only come when they are wanted. Finally, they should be taught the dangers of venereal disease, and the methods of prevention and cure. The increase of human happiness to be expected from sex education on these lines is immeasurable.

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8 months 1 week ago

It seems clear to me that marriage ought to be constituted by children, and relations not involving children ought to be ignored by the law and treated as indifferent by public opinion. It is only through children that relations cease to be a purely private matter.

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Letter to Ottoline Morrell, January 30, 1916
9 months 1 week ago

With the exception of professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be history of its successive regrets and impotences.

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5 months 1 week ago

The poor are thought to be dangerous, either morally dangerous because they are unproductive social parasites - thieves, prostitutes, drug addicts, and the like - or potentially dangerous because they are disorganized, unpredictable, and tendentially reactionary. In fact the term lumpenproletariat (or rad proletariat) has functioned for times to demonize the poor as a whole. ... The industrial reserve army is a constant threat hanging over the heads of the existing working class because, first of all, its misery serves as a terrifying example to workers of what could happen to them, and, second, the excess supply of labor it represents lowers the costs of labor and undermines workers' power against employers (by serving potentially as strike breakers, for example).

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130
8 months ago

For why do you hasten to remove things that hurt your eyes, but if anything gnaws your mind, defer the time of curing it from year to year?

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Book I, epistle ii, lines 37-39; translation by C. Smart
9 months 1 week ago

Idleness is only fatal to the mediocre.

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6 months 6 days ago

We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcase, has most time to consider others.

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314
1 month 1 week ago

"Knowledge is the distilled essence of our intuitions, corroborated by experience."
- Elbert Hubbard

See biography for Elbert Hubbard:
https://civilsimian.com/Elbert-Hubbard

Read Elbert Hubbard's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/295/content

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9 months 1 week ago

All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer sight to almost everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things.

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5 months 2 days ago

Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.

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p. 5
7 months 3 days ago

The passion of laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmities of others, or with our own formerly...

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The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic Pt. I Human Nature (1640) Ch. 9
6 months 1 week ago

By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.

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8 months 1 week ago

The only non-Christians who seemed to me really to know anything were the Romantics; and a good many of them were dangerously tinged with something like religion, even at times with Christianity. The upshot of it all could nearly be expressed in a perversion of Roland's great line in the Chanson: 'Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores.'

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7 months 1 week ago

The discussion of the sexual problem is only a somewhat crude prelude to a far deeper question, and that is the question of the psychological relationship between the sexes. In comparison with this the other pales into insignificance, and with it we enter the real domain of woman. Woman's psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos.

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P.254
4 months 1 week ago

Your favour of July 31, was duly received, and was read with peculiar pleasure. The sentiments breathed through the whole do honor to both the head and heart of the writer. Mine on the subject of slavery of negroes have long since been in possession of the public, and time has only served to give them stronger root. The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain, and should have produced not a single effort, nay I fear not much serious willingness to relieve them & ourselves from our present condition of moral & political reprobation.

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8 months 1 week ago

Competition for power is of two sorts: between organizations, and between individuals for leadership within an organization.

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p. 165
8 months 5 days ago

Without some redistribution of wealth and power, downward mobility and debilitating poverty will continue to drive people into desperate channels. And without principled opposition to xenophobias from above and below, these desperate channels will produce a cold-hearted and mean-spirited America no longer worth fighting for or living in.

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(p79)
4 months 2 weeks ago

If the immediate creator of the universe be he who is proclaimed by Moses, then we hold nobler beliefs concerning him, inasmuch as we consider him to be the master of all things in general, but that there are besides national gods who are subordinate to him and are like viceroys of a king, each administering separately his own province; and, moreover, we do not make him the sectional rival of the gods whose station is subordinate to his. But if Moses first pays honour to a sectional god, and then makes the lordship of the whole universe contrast with his power, then it is better to believe as we do, and to recognise the God of the All, though not without apprehending also the God of Moses; this is better, I say, than to honour one who has been assigned the lordship over a very small portion, instead of the creator of all things.

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8 months 1 week ago

In some lyceums they tell me that they have voted to exclude the subject of religion. But how do I know what their religion is, and when I am near to or far from it? I have walked into such an arena and done my best to make a clean breast of what religion I have experienced, and the audience never suspected what I was about.

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p. 490
5 months 2 weeks ago

Today those who peer into the future want only relief from anxiety. Unable to face the prospect that the cycles of war will continue, they are desperate to find a pattern of improvement in history. It is only natural that believers in reason, lacking any deeper faith and too feeble to tolerate doubt, should turn to the sorcery of numbers. Happily there are some who are ready to assist them. Just as the Elizabethan magus transcribed tables shown to him by angels, the modern scientific scryer deciphers numerical auguries of angels hidden in ourselves.

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In the Puppet Theatre: Dark mirrors, Hidden Angels and an Algorithmic Prayer-Wheel (p. 99)
8 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
8 months 6 days ago

If someone is merely ahead of his time, it will catch up to him one day.

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p. 8e
9 months 1 week ago

I will not by suppression, or by performing tricks, try to produce the impression that the ordinary Christianity in the land and the Christianity of the New Testament are alike. "What Do I Want?"

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8 months 1 week ago

Each the herald is who wrote His rank, and quartered his own coat. There is no king nor sovereign state That can fix a hero's rate.

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Astræa
9 months 1 week ago

There is more to a science fiction story than the science it contains.

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9 months 1 week ago

Scientific writing is abhorrently stylized and places a premium on poor quality.

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7 months 3 days ago

The victor and the one who keeps My works to the end: I will give him authority over the nations and He will shepherd them with an iron scepter; He will shatter them like pottery just as I have received this from My Father.

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8 months 1 week ago

A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.

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Ch. VI: International relations, p. 106
4 months 1 day ago

Everyone sits in the prison of his own ideas; he must burst it open, and that in his youth, and so try to test his ideas on reality.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

Lycurgus the Lacedæmonian brought long hair into fashion among his countrymen, saying that it rendered those that were handsome more beautiful, and those that were deformed more terrible. To one that advised him to set up a democracy in Sparta, "Pray," said Lycurgus, "do you first set up a democracy in your own house."

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57 Lycurgus
4 months 3 days ago

Every person is an end in themselves. That's universal. To respect that leads to flourishing. Not respecting it in extremes leads to unnecessary death.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Amongst so many borrowed things, I am glad if I can steal one, disguising and altering it for some new service.

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Book III, Ch. 12. Of Physiognomy
8 months 1 week ago

The homosexual never thinks of himself when someone is branded in his presence with the name homosexual. ...His sexual tastes will doubtless lead him to enter into relationships with this suspect category, but he would like to make use of them without being likened to them. Here, too, the ban that is cast on certain men by society has destroyed all possibility of reciprocity among them. Shame isolates.

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4 months 1 week ago

In our contemporary social and intellectual plight, it is nothing less than shocking to discover that those persons who claim to have discovered an absolute are usually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest. To find people in our day attempting to pass off to the world and recommending to others some nostrum of the absolute which they claim to have discovered is merely a sign of the loss of and the need for intellectual and moral certainty, felt by broad sections of the population who are unable to look life in the face.

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7 months 1 week ago

I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

When one told Plistarchus that a notorious railer spoke well of him, "I 'll lay my life," said he, "somebody hath told him I am dead, for he can speak well of no man living."

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Of Plistarchus
8 months 2 weeks ago

Christ ought to be preached with this goal in mind - that we might be moved to faith in him so that he is not just a distant historical figure but actually Christ for you and me.

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p. 69
7 months 3 days ago

And having said this, Jesus smote his face with both his hands, and then smote the ground with his head. And having raised his head, he said: "Cursed be every one who shall insert into my sayings that I am the son of God." At these words the disciples fell down as dead, whereupon Jesus lifted them up, saying: 'Let us fear God now, if we would not be affrighted in that day.'

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Ch. 53

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