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2 months 1 week ago

I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.

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2 months 6 days ago

From whence it follows, that were the publique and private interest are most closely united, there is the publique most advanced.

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The Second Part, Chapter 19, p. 97
2 months 1 week ago

Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have any other tie upon another, but by our word.

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Book I, Ch. 9
2 months 3 weeks ago

If two right lines cut one another, they will form the angles at the vertex equal. ...This... is what the present theorem evinces, that when two right lines mutually cut each other, the vertical angles are equal. And it was first invented according to Eudemus by Thales...

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Proposition XV. Thereom VIII.
1 month 2 weeks ago

High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

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Introduction to Our Time Is Now: Notes From the High School Underground, John Birmingham, ed.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Even if a civil society were to be dissolved by the consent of all its members (e.g., if a people inhabiting an island decided to separate and disperse throughout the world), the last murderer remaining in prison would first have to be executed, so that each has done to him what his deeds deserve and blood guilt does not cling to the people for not having insisted upon this punishment; for otherwise the people can be regarded as collaborators in his public violation of justice.

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Kt6:333
3 months 4 weeks ago

We ought neither to fasten our ship to one small anchor nor our life to a single hope.

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Fragment 30 (Oldfather translation)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Dispose thy Soul to all good and necessary things!

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1 month 3 weeks ago

When we subordinate rest to work, we ignore the divine.

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4 weeks 1 day ago

If some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer. The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to any one who will take it of me.

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"On Descartes' Discourse touching the method of using one's reason rightly and of seeking scientific truth"
1 month 1 week ago

In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.

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(p. 125)
2 months 1 week ago

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Sacred and inspired divinity, the sabaoth and port of all men's labours and peregrinations.

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Book II
3 months 2 weeks ago

That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

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March 11, 1856
1 month 3 weeks ago

The history of other cultures is non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.

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Chap 4, Sect 2
3 months 2 weeks ago

What do you think of the aspect of the money market? ... This time, by the by, the thing has assumed European dimensions such as have never been seen before, and I don't suppose we'll be able to spend much longer here merely as spectators. The very fact that I've at last got round to setting up house again and sending for my books seems to me to prove that the 'mobilisation' of our persons is AT HAND.

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Letter to Friedrich Engels (26 September 1856), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 40. Letters 1856-59 (2010), pp. 71-72
1 month 4 weeks ago

It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.

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Ch. 13: "Requisites for Social Progress", p. 291
3 months 3 days ago

Disease of the home and of the life comes about in the same way as that of the body.

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Freeman (1948), p. 170 Variant: Disease occurs in a household, or in a life, just as it does in a body.
3 weeks 1 day ago

What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one... It's this in-between that I'm calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one - which is really the realm of the artist.

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Every Time We Say Goodbye in Sight and Sound [London]
2 months 5 days ago

As we shall see later, the most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur. To maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted inquiry ― these are the essentials of thinking.

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Chapter 1: "What Is Thought?"
5 days ago

It would be better to be without the Shu-King than to believe every word of it.

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"Knowledge and Wisdom", no. 131 · "Celebration and Worship", no. 587
3 months 2 weeks ago

What is commonly called friendship even is only a little more honor among rogues.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 95
2 months 5 days ago

Almost anything that consoles us is a fake.

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The Sovereignty of Good (1970) p. 59.
1 month 3 weeks ago

Roughly speaking, rationality is concerned with the selection of preferred behavior alternatives in terms of some system of values, whereby the consequences of behavior can be evaluated.

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p. 84.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

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The Opera (1852).
2 months 1 week ago

To get to know a truth properly, one must polemicize it.

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Quoted in The Viking Book of Aphorisms by Wystan Hugh Auden (1962) p. 323
2 months 4 days ago

De Lubac discusses an atheism which means to suppress this searching, he says, "even including the problem as to what is responsible for the birth of God in human consciousness."

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p. 45
1 month 1 week ago

The population of the US is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the US leads the world by miles. You would think that a country with such resources, and such a field of talent, would be able to elect a leader of the highest quality. Yet, what has happened? At the end of all the primaries and party caucuses, the speeches and the televised debates, after a year or more of non-stop electioneering bustle, who, out of that entire population of 300 million, emerges at the top of the heap? George Bush.

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"Bin Laden's victory " The Guardian
4 months 2 weeks ago

You wanted God's ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth so that he could properly fulfill your wish. And yet, if he were to share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father.

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1 month 1 week ago

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

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1 month 6 days ago

When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.

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Should he have spoken?, The New Criterion (September 2006), p. 22; also in The Roger Scruton Reader (2009) edited by Mark Dooley
3 months 1 week ago

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. - And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

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§ 129

Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes everything identical with man. And the work of man is to supernaturalize Nature - that is to say, to make it divine by making it human, to help it to become conscious of itself, in short. The action of reason, on the other hand, is to mechanize or materialize.

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3 months 1 week ago

Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The example of the Jews, in many things, may not be imitated by us; they had not only orders to cut off several nations altogether, but if they were obliged to war with others, and conquered them, to cut off every male; they were suffered to use polygamy and divorces, and other things utterly unlawful to us under clearer light.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.

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1 week 2 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

The adjective is the enemy of the substantive.

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Variants: The adjective is the enemy of the noun. Quote attributed in Arthur Schopenhauer (translated by Mrs Rudolf Dircks), Essays of Schopenhauer (2004), Kessinger Publishing, p. 31
3 months 3 weeks ago

I assert once again as a truth to which history as a whole bears witness that men may second their fortune, but cannot oppose it; that they may weave its warp, but cannot break it. Yet they should never give up, because there is always hope, though they know not the end and more towards it along roads which cross one another and as yet are unexplored; and since there is hope, they should not despair, no matter what fortune brings or in what travail they find themselves.

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Book 2, Ch. 29 (as translated by LJ Walker and B Crick)
3 months 2 weeks ago

For my own part, not believing in universal selfishness, I have no difficulty in admitting that Communism would even now be practicable among the elite of mankind, and may become so among the rest.

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2 months 4 days ago

Dialogue and monologue are silenced. Bundled together, men march without Thou and without I, those of the left who want to abolish memory, and those of the right who want to regulate it: hostile and separated hosts, they march into the common abyss.

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p. 33
2 months 3 weeks ago

The utility of a science which enables men to take cognizance of the travellers on the mind's highway, and excludes those disorderly interlopers, verbal fallacies, needs but small attestation. Its searching penetration by definition alone, before which even mathematical precision fails, would especially commend it to those whom the abstruseness of the study does not terrify, and who recognise the valuable results which must attend discipline of mind. Like a medicine, though not a panacea for every ill, it has the health of the mind for its aim, but requires the determination of a powerful will to imbibe its nauseating yet wholesome influence: it is no wonder therefore that puny intellects, like weak stomachs, abhor and reject it.

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Introduction to Aristotle's Organon, as translated by Octavius Freire Owen (1853), p. v
3 months 2 weeks ago

I don't like the spirit of socialism - I think freedom is the basis of everything.

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Letter to Constance Malleson (Colette), September 29, 1916
2 months 1 week ago

Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling; only no imagination is mere.

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Vol. VI, par. 286
4 months 2 weeks ago
With all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. In the actual act of deception... they are overcome by belief in themselves. It is this which then speaks so miraculously and compellingly to those who surround them.
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1 month 4 weeks ago

The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.

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"Two dogmas of Empiricism", p. 26
3 months 2 weeks ago

Did you not read our articles about the June revolution, and was not the essence of the June revolution the essence of our paper? Why then your hypocritical phrases, your attempt to find an impossible pretext? We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable.

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The final issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung (18 May 1849)''Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, Vol. VI, p. 503
5 days ago

Mencius went to see King Huei of Liang. The king said, "Venerable sir, since you have not counted it far to come here, a distance of a thousand li, may I presume that you are provided with counsels to profit my kingdom?" Mencius replied, "Why must your Majesty use that word "profit"? What I am provided with, are counsels to benevolence and righteousness, and these are my only topics.

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Book 1, part 1, as translated by James Legge in The Life and Works of Mencius (1875), p. 124
1 month 1 week ago

I sit on a man's back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.

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Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence

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