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1 month 2 days ago

All wars today tend to be netwars.

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55
2 months 3 weeks ago

There is nothing truly real, save that which feels, suffers, pities, loves and desires, save consciousness. And we need God in order to save consciousness; not in order to think existence, but in order to live it; not in order to know the why and how of it, but in order to feel the wherefore of it.

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3 months 2 days ago

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

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3 months 2 days ago

Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.

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3 months 6 days ago

That the uneducated and the ill-educated should think the hypothesis that all races of beings, man inclusive, may in process of time have been evolved from the simplest monad, a ludicrous one, is not to be wondered at. But for the physiologist, who knows that every individual being is so evolved-who knows, further, that in their earliest condition the germs of all plants and animals whatever are so similar, "that there is no appreciable distinction amongst them, which would enable it to be determined whether a particular molecule is the germ of a Conferva or of an Oak, of a Zoophyte or of a Man";-for him to make a difficulty of the matter is inexcusable.

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Spencer here references William Benjamin Carpenter, Principles of Comparative Physiology see p. 473
2 months 3 weeks ago

The state of conformity is an imitation of grace. By a strange mystery - which is connected with the power of the social element - a profession can confer on quite ordinary men in their exercise of it, virtues which, if they were extended to all circumstances of life, would make of them heroes or saints. But the power of the social element makes these virtues natural.

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Accordingly they need a compensation. p. 124
4 months 3 weeks ago

If you reject absolutely any single sensation without stopping to discriminate with respect to that which awaits confirmation between matter of opinion and that which is already present, whether in sensation or in feelings or in any immediate perception of the mind, you will throw into confusion even the rest of your sensations by your groundless belief and so you will be rejecting the standard of truth altogether. If in your ideas based upon opinion you hastily affirm as true all that awaits confirmation as well as that which does not, you will not escape error, as you will be maintaining complete ambiguity whenever it is a case of judging between right and wrong opinion.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychological motives and needs upon existing institutions.

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(p. 402)
4 months 6 days ago

We have ...as M. Ribot says, not memory so much as memories. The visual... tactile... muscular... auditory memory may all vary independently... and different individuals may have them developed in different degrees. As a rule, a man's memory is good in the departments in which his interest is strong; but those departments are apt to be those in which his discriminative sensibility is high. ...[D]ifferences in men's imagining power... the machinery of memory must be largely determined thereby.

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Ch. 16
2 months 2 weeks ago

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

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J 77

Fortune has taken away, but Fortune has given.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Virtue refuses facility for her companion ... the easy, gentle, and sloping path that guides the footsteps of a good natural disposition is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road.

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Ch. 11. Of Cruelty (tr. Donald M. Frame)
3 months 3 days ago

My soul, my soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you-are you there? I have returned, here I am again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you again, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you anew. Shall I tell you everything I have seen, experienced, and drunk in? Or do you not want to hear about all the noise of life and the world? But one thing you must know, the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life. This life is the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable, which we call "divine". There is no other way. All other ways are false paths.

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Book 2, 12. Nov. 1913
3 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.

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p. 12.
3 weeks ago

Preaching has become a byword for long and dull conversation of any kind; and whoever wishes to imply, in any piece of writing, the absence of everything agreeable and inviting, calls it a sermon.

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Vol. I, ch. 3, p. 81
2 months 3 weeks ago

You do not attain to knowledge by remaining on the shore and watching the foaming waves, you must make the venture and cast yourself in, you must swim, alert and with all your force, even if a moment comes when you think you are losing consciousness; in this way, and in no other, do you reach anthropological insight.

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p. 148
3 weeks 6 days ago

When the oak-tree is felled, the whole forest echoes with it; but a hundred acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.

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On History.
2 months ago

It is the interest of the individual and of all society, that he should be made, at the earliest period, to understand his own construction, the proper use of its parts, and how to keep them at all times in a state of health; and especially that he should be taught to observe the varied effects of different kinds of food, and different quantities, upon his own constitution. He should be taught the general and individual laws of health, thus early, that he may know how to prevent the approach of disease. And the knowledge of the particular diet best suited to his constitution, is one of the most essential laws of health.

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3rd Part
2 months 2 days ago

Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

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Chapter 3 "Accumulating Small Change" (p. 50)
2 months 4 weeks ago

We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilization: the rational character of its irrationality. Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, ... the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man's mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced.

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p. 9
5 months 4 days ago

Socrates: The shoemaker, for example, uses a square tool, and a circular tool, and other tools for cutting?

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4 months 1 week ago

That power should be exercised over any portion of mankind without any obligation of consulting them, is only tolerable while they are in an infantine, or a semi-barbarous state. In any civilized condition, power ought never to be exempt from the necessity of appealing to the reason, and recommending itself by motives which justify it to the conscience and feelings, of the governed.

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Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859), p. 24

No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.

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Letter to Judge John Tyler (June 28, 1804); in: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition (ME) (Lipscomb and Bergh, editors), 20 Vols., Washington, D.C., 1903-04, Volume 11, page 33
3 months 3 weeks ago

Death takes the mean man with the proud; The fatal urn has room for all.

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Book III, ode i, line 14 (trans. John Conington)
2 months 4 weeks ago

Genuine time, if it exists as anything else except the measure of motions in space, is all one with the existence of individuals as individuals, with the creative, with the occurrence of unpredictable novelties. Everything that can be said contrary to this conclusion is but a reminder that an individual may lose his individuality, for individuals become imprisoned in routine and fall to the level of mechanisms. Genuine time then ceases to be an integral element of their being. Our behavior becomes predictable, because it is but an external rearrangement of what went before.

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4 months 1 week ago

You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake; you must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand heap.

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January 25, 1858
4 months 2 weeks ago

Staying as I am, one foot in one country and the other in another, I find my condition very happy, in that it is free.

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Letter to Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine, Paris, June/July 1648
4 months 1 week ago

The institution of religion exists only to keep mankind in order, and to make men merit the goodness of God by their virtue. Everything in a religion which does not tend towards this goal must be considered foreign or dangerous.

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"The Ecclesiastical Ministry"
4 months 2 days ago

When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly.

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§ 219
4 months 5 days ago

As a rule, begin my lectures on Scientific Method by telling my students that scientific method does not exist. ...having been ...the one and only professor of this non-existent subject within the British Commonwealth.

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India has always been an object of yearning, a realm of wonder, a world of magic... India is the land of dreams. India had always dreamt - more of the Bliss that is man's final goal. And this has helped India to be more creative in history than any other nation. Hence the effervescence of myths and legends, religious and philosophies, music, and dances and the different styles of architecture." ...

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quoted in Patri, Umesh Hindu scriptures and American transcendentalists 1st ed. quoted from Londhe, S. (2008).
3 months 1 week ago

All the time that this horrid scene was acting or avenging, as well as for some time before, and ever since, the wicked instigators of this unhappy multitude, guilty, with every aggravation, of all their crimes, and screened in a cowardly darkness from their punishment, continued without interruption, pity, or remorse, to blow up the blind rage of the populace, with a continued blast of pestilential libels, which infected and poisoned the very air we breathed in.

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

I always argue that no kill principles can be argued as effective logically, as well as from a naturalistic perspective.

A general social contract mitigates anxiety in society, but if this is not enough, understanding that harming others leads to higher probability that you will be harmed yourself should be enough for a mentally healthy person.

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3 months 1 week ago

The Divine light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it.

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As quoted in Life and Teachings of Giordano Bruno : Philosopher, Martyr, Mystic 1548 - 1600 (1913) by Coulson Turnbull

Who holds a sword is tempted, who has youth must play,he who does not fear death on earth does not fear God.

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Odysseus, Book VIII, line 560
2 months 4 weeks ago

The fault with Hegel lies much deeper than in his glorification of the Prussian monarchy. He is guilty not so much of being servile as of betraying his highest philosophical ideas. His political doctrine surrenders society to nature, freedom to necessity, reason to caprice. And in so doing, it mirrors the destiny of the social order that falls, while in pursuit of its freedom, into a state of nature far below reason.

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P. 218
5 months 4 days ago

Knowledge is the food of the soul; and we must take care, my friend, that the Sophist does not deceive us when he praises what he sells, like the dealers wholesale or retail who sell the food of the body; for they praise indiscriminately all their goods, without knowing what are really beneficial or hurtful.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The sadistic person is as dependent on the submissive person as the latter is on the former; neither can live without the other. The difference is only that the sadistic person commands, exploits, hurts, humiliates, and that the masochistic person is commanded, exploited, hurt, humiliated. This is a considerable difference in a realistic sense; in a deeper emotional sense, the difference is not so great as that which they both have in common: fusion without integrity.

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Ch. 2
5 months 1 week 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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4 months 2 weeks ago

The thing I fear most is fear.

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Ch. 18. That Men are not to judge of our Happiness till after Death (tr. Donald M. Frame)
2 months 2 weeks ago

Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.

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H 13
4 months 2 weeks ago

Again and again our foe, religion, has given birth to deeds sinful and unholy.

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Book I, lines 82-83 (tr. C. Bailey)
4 months 2 weeks ago

Like rowers, who advance backward.

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Book III, Ch. 1. Of Profit and Honesty
5 months 3 days ago

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.

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4 months 1 week ago

As for the Soothsayer, although I am certain no one feels the true beauties of that work better than I, I am far from finding these beauties in the same places as the infatuated public does. They are not the products of study and knowledge, but rather are inspired by taste and sensitivity.

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First Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters

The socialist system of society should only be, and can only be, an historical product, born out of the school of its own experiences, born in the course of its realization, as a result of the developments of living history, which - just like organic nature of which, in the last analysis, it forms a part - has the fine habit of always producing along with any real social need the means to its satisfaction, along with the task simultaneously the solution. However, if such is the case, then it is clear that socialism by its very nature cannot be decreed or introduced by ukase. It has as its prerequisite a number of measures of force - against property, etc. The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive, cannot. New Territory. A thousand problems. Only experience is capable of correcting and opening new ways.

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Chapter Six, "The Problem of Dictatorship"
4 months 6 days ago

The worker's existence is thus brought under the same condition as the existence of every other commodity. The worker has become a commodity, and it is a bit of luck for him if he can find a buyer, And the demand on which the life of the worker depends, depends on the whim of the rich and the capitalists.

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Wages of Labor, p. 20.
3 weeks 6 days ago

What you see, yet can not see over, is as good as infinite.

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Bk. II, ch. 1.

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