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9 months 1 day ago
Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.
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7 months 4 weeks ago

Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the State has become a separate entity, beside and outside civil society; but is it nothing more than the form of organization which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests.

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Part One The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 187
7 months 3 weeks ago

This inner revolution is realistic because it maintains itself deliberately within the framework of existing institutions; the oppressed reckon with the real situation.

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p. 66
5 months 1 week ago

Now civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them which they fail to meet.

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Ch. 8: Civilization on Trial
7 months 4 weeks ago

A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befal him must be from himself. He only can do himself any good or any harm. Nothing can be given to him or can taken from him but always there is a compensation.. There is a correspondence between the human soul and everything that exists in the world; more properly, everything that is known to man. Instead of studying things without the principles of them, all may be penetrated unto with him. Every act puts the agent in a new position. The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself. He is not to live the future as described to him but to live the real future to the real present. The highest revelation is that God is in every man.

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September 8, 1833
3 months 3 weeks ago

I propose in this inquiry to take nothing for granted, but to bring even accepted theories to the test of first principles, and should they not stand the test, freshly to interrogate facts in the endeavor to discover their law. I propose to beg no question, to shrink from no conclusion, but to follow truth wherever it may lead. Upon us is the responsibility of seeking the law, for in the very heart of our civilization to-day women faint and little children moan. But what that law may prove to be is not our affair. If the conclusions that we reach run counter to our prejudices, let us not flinch; if they challenge institutions that have long been deemed wise and natural, let us not turn back.

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Introductory : The Problem
6 months 3 weeks ago

All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.

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Vol. VI, par. 191
7 months 4 weeks ago

We need not suppose that when po+B40wer resides in an exclusive class, that class will knowingly and deliberately sacrifice the other classes to themselves: it suffices that, in the absence of its natural defenders, the interest of the excluded is always in danger of being overlooked: and, when looked at, is seen with very different eyes from those of the persons whom it directly concerns.

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Ch. III: The Ideally Best Polity
6 months 3 weeks ago

One principle, that I believe is wanting in you, and all our too fervent and impetuous reformers, is the thought, that almost every institution or form of society is good in its place, and in the period of time to which it belongs. How many beautiful and admirable effects grew out of Popery and the monastic institutions, in the period, when they were in their genuine health and vigour! To them we owe almost all our logic and our literature. What excellent effects do we reap, even at this day, from the feudal system and from chivalry! In this point of view, nothing can, perhaps, be more worthy of our applause than the English constitution.

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Letter to Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 March 1812), quoted in Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. II (1858), p. 86
6 months 4 weeks ago

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

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No. 1
5 months 3 weeks ago

Is attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, which is a non-canonical early Christian text

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1 month 2 days ago

The more an ideology (religion) avoids reality or adds its own context the more masturbatory and opportunistic it becomes. Spend one minute to discipline yourself and you'll come up with basic justice every time. That basic justice transcends identity particulars (religion).

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7 months 4 weeks ago

As for large landed property, its defenders have always, sophistically, identified the economic advantages offered by large-scale agriculture with large-scale landed property, as if it were not precisely as a result of the abolition of property that this advantage, for one thing, would receive its greatest possible extension, and, for another, only then would be of social benefit.

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Rent of Land, p. 66.
7 months 3 weeks ago

If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say.

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Ch. 1: "The Scope of this Book"
7 months 3 days ago

Men that look upon my outside, perusing only my condition, and fortunes, do err in my altitude; for I am above Atlas his shoulders.

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Section 11
7 months 4 weeks ago

Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction; but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. They go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful.

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p. 489
8 months 3 weeks ago

What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.

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Old Mortality (1884).
8 months 1 week ago

The steady drip of water causes stone to hollow and yield.

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Book I, line 313 (tr. Stallings) Variant translation: Continual dropping wears away a stone. Compare: "The soft droppes of rain pierce the hard marble; many strokes overthrow the tallest oaks", John Lyly, Euphues, 1579 (Arber's reprint), p. 81
4 months 2 weeks ago

Such souls are, in these days, getting somewhat out of humour with the world. Your very Byron, in these days, is at least driven mad; flatly refuses fealty to the world. The world with its injustices, its golden brutalities, and dull yellow guineas, is a disgust to such souls: the ray of Heaven that is in them does at least pre-doom them to be very miserable here. Yes:-and yet all misery is faculty misdirected, strength that has not yet found its way. The black whirlwind is mother of the lightning. No smoke, in any sense, but can become flame and radiance! Such soul, once graduated in Heaven's stern University, steps out superior to your guinea.

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4 months 1 week ago

Growth is slow but collapse is rapid.

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Ugo Bardi (2017) . "The Seneca Effect: Why growth is slow but collapse is rapid". ISSN 1612-3018. DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-57207-9.
6 months 2 weeks ago

All the cases in which means and ends are external to one another are non-esthetic.

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p. 205
6 months 2 weeks ago

Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive.

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p. 123
6 months 2 weeks ago

The man of flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies-above all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Use these rules then, and trouble thyself about nothing else.

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X, 2
8 months 1 week ago

Credulity in arts and opinions is likewise of two kinds viz., when men give too much belief to arts themselves, or to certain authors in any art. The sciences that sway the imagination more than the reason are principally three viz., astrology, natural magic, and alchemy. Alchemy may be compared to the man who told his sons that he had left them gold, buried somewhere in his vineyard; while they by digging found no gold, but by turning up the mould about the roots of the vines procured a plentiful vintage. So the search and endeavours to make gold have brought many useful inventions to light.

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De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623) as quoted by Edward Thorpe, History of Chemistry, Vol. 1, p. 43.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man's sex relation to the motorcar.

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(p.46)
5 months 1 week ago

The reason for sketching what's technically feasible with the tools of synthetic biology is that only after human complicity in the persistence of suffering in the biosphere is acknowledged can we hope to have an informed socio-political debate on the morality of its perpetuation. No serious ethical discussion of free-living animal suffering can begin in the absence of recognition of human responsibility for nonhuman well-being.

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Compassionate Biology: How CRISPR-based gene drives" could cheaply, rapidly and sustainably reduce suffering throughout the living world", BLTC Research, 2016
5 months 3 weeks ago

Orwell's essay speaks to us today. It tells us that patriotism is the sine qua non of survival, and that it arises spontaneously in the ordinary human heart. It does not depend upon any grand narrative of triumph of the kind put about by the fascists and the communists, but grows from the habits of association that we British have been fortunate enough to inherit. We do not use grand and tainted honorifics like "la patrie" or "das Vaterland". We refer simply to this spot of earth, which belongs to us because we belong to it, have lived in it, loved it, defended it and established peace and prosperity within its borders.

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'Brexit will give us back pride in our island roots', The Times (18 November 2017), p. 35
5 months 3 weeks ago

I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don't look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can't find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.

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Giles Whittell, "The world according to Richard Dawkins" (2013-09-07), The Times
6 months 2 weeks ago

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.

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"Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit"
6 months 3 weeks ago

When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

The history of mankind could... be described as a history of outbreaks of fashionable philosophical and religious maladies. These... have... one serious function... evoking criticism.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

No state sorrier than that of the man who keeps up a continual round, and pries into "the secrets of the nether world," as saith the poet, and is curious in conjecture of what is in his neighbour's heart.

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II, 13
8 months ago

It is the duty of every patriot to protect his country from its government.

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Edward Abbey, "A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government." as written in "A Voice Crying in the Wilderness" (Vox Clamantis en Deserto): Notes from a Secret Journal (1990), ISBN 0312064888
6 months 3 weeks ago

Every archetype is capable of endless development and differentiation. It is therefore possible for it to be more developed or less. In an outward form of religion where all the emphasis is on the outward figure (hence where we are dealing with a more or less complete projection) the archetype is identical with externalized ideas but remains unconscious as a psychic factor. When an unconscious content is replaced by a projected image to that extent, it is cut off from all participation in an influence on the conscious mind. Hence it largely forfeits its own life, because prevented from exerting the formative influence on consciousness natural to it; what is more, it remains in its original form - unchanged, for nothing changes in the unconscious.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

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24 June 1813
8 months 4 weeks ago

Father in heaven, when the thought of thee awakens in our soul, let it not waken as an agitated bird which flutters confusedly about, but as a child waking from sleep with a celestial smile.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

An irrational fear should never be simply let alone, but should be gradually overcome by familiarity with its fainter forms.

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On Education, Especially in Early Childhood (1926), Ch. 4: Fear
8 months ago

Quite a heavy weight, a name too quickly famous.

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La Henriade, chant troisième, l.41, 1722
7 months 4 weeks ago

Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he was capable. The End.

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Full text of Russell's book History of the World in Epitome , written in 1959
8 months 1 week ago

But by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to the undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this - that men despair and think things impossible.

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Aphorism 92
6 months 3 weeks ago

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

For anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.

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