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4 months 6 days ago

By simply moving information and brushing information against information, any medium whatever creates vast wealth.

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6 months 1 week ago

Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Nay, men, if any of you had heeded what I was ever foretelling and advising, ye would now neither be fearing a single man nor putting your hopes in a single man.

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Quoted by Plutarch, Life of Cato the Younger, 52 Bernadotte Perrin, ed. Plutarch's Lives, Vol. 8, LCL 100 (1919), pp. 247, 361
7 months 1 week ago

The Sophist demonstrates that everything is true and nothing is true.

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2 months 1 week ago

I congratulate you, my dear friend, on the law of your state for suspending the importation of slaves, and for the glory you have justly acquired by endeavoring to prevent it forever. This abomination must have an end, and there is a superior bench reserved in heaven for those who hasten it.

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6 months 3 days ago

For anyone who at the end of Western philosophy can and must still question philosophically, the decisive question is no longer merely "What basic character do beings manifest?" or "How may the being of beings be characterized?" but "What is this 'being' itself?" The decisive question is that of "the meaning of being," not merely that of the being of beings.

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p. 18
6 months 1 week ago

War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances ... that no human wisdom can calculate the end. Prospects on the Rubicon

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London: J. Debrett, 1787
6 months 1 week ago

Acquisitiveness - the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title to goods - is a motive which, I suppose, has its origin in a combination of fear with the desire for necessaries.

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6 months 1 week ago

My basis is supported by the authority of the greatest moralist of modern times; for such, undoubtedly, J. J. Rousseau is,-that profound reader of the human heart, who drew his wisdom not from books, but from life, and intended his doctrine not for the professorial chair, but for humanity; he, the foe of all prejudice, the foster-child of nature, whom alone she endowed with the gift of being able to moralise without tediousness, because he hit the truth and stirred the heart.

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Part III, Ch. VIII, 9, p. 230
7 months 4 days ago

No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession.

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4 months 3 days ago

Decisive actions are often taken in a moment and without any conscious deliverance from the rational parts of man.

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The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the Young Man in Holy Orders.
5 months ago

For it is not the bare Words, but the Scope of the writer that giveth true light, by which any writing is to bee interpreted; and they that insist upon single Texts, without considering the main Designe, can derive no thing from them clearly; but rather by casting atomes of Scripture, as dust before mens eyes, make everything more obscure than it is; an ordinary artifice of those who seek not the truth, but their own advantage.

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The Third Part, Chapter 43, p. 331
6 months 1 week ago

I should say that the universe is just there, and that is all.

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BBC Radio Debate on the Existence of God, Bertrand Russell v. Frederick Copleston, 1948
2 months 3 weeks ago

A man is as old as his arteries, and as young as his ideas.

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Ch. 4 : On Old Age
7 months 5 days ago

We face eternity now. We have no universe left, no outside phenomena, no emotions, no passions. Nothing but ourselves and thought. We face an eternity of introspection, when all through history we have never known what to do with ourselves on a rainy Sunday.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the other woes of mankind, is wisdom.

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6 months 1 week ago

The mere word 'design' by itself has no consequences and explains nothing. It is the barrenest of principles. The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer - and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.

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Lecture III, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered
2 months 4 weeks ago

In all European countries, especially in England, one class of Captains and commanders of men, recognizable as the beginning of a new real and not imaginary "Aristocracy," has already in some measure developed itself: the Captains of Industry;-happily the class who above all, or at least first of all, are wanted in this time. In the doing of material work, we have already men among us that can command bodies of men. And surely, on the other hand, there is no lack of men needing to be commanded: the sad class of brother-men whom we had to describe as "Hodge's emancipated horses," reduced to roving famine,-this too has in all countries developed itself; and, in fatal geometrical progression, is ever more developing itself, with a rapidity which alarms every one. On this ground, if not on all manner of other grounds, it may be truly said, the "Organization of Labor" (not organizable by the mad methods tried hitherto) is the universal vital Problem of the world.

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5 months 1 week ago

...they who would make peace without a previous knowledge of the terms, make a surrender. They are conquered. They do not treat; they receive the law. Is this the disposition of the people of England? Then the people of England are contented to seek in the kindness of a foreign systematick enemy combined with a dangerous faction at home, a security which they cannot find in their own patriotism and their own courage. They are willing to trust to the sympathy of Regicides the guarantee of the British Monarchy. They are content to rest their religion on the piety of atheists by establishment. They are satisfied to seek in the clemency of practised murderers the security of their lives. They are pleased to confide their property to the safeguard of those who are robbers by inclination, interest, habit, and system. If this be our deliberate mind, truly we deserve to lose, what it is impossible we should long retain, the name of a nation.

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p. 48
6 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
6 months 1 week ago

The evident justice and utility of the foregoing maxims have recommended them more or less to the attention of all nations.

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Chapter II, Part II, p. 894.
5 months 2 weeks ago

If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, heat; if height, depth; if solid, fluid; if hard, soft; if rough, smooth; if calm, tempest; if prosperity, adversity; if life, death.

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As quoted in Bibliotheca Sacra and Theological Review by ? Vol. IV, No. 8 (1847) by Dallas Theological Seminary, p. 107
2 months 3 weeks ago

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves; let us be above such transparent egotism. If you can't say good and encouraging things, say nothing. Nothing is often a good thing to do, and always a clever thing to say.

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We Have a Right To Be Happy Today, commencement address at the Webb School of Claremont, California
6 months 3 weeks ago

A doubtful balance is made between truth and pleasure, and... the knowledge of one and the feeling of the other stir up a combat the success of which is very uncertain, since, in order to judge of it, it would be necessary to know all that passes in the innermost spirit of the man, of which man himself is scarcely ever conscious.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

An absolute power would be one that never becomes apparent, never pointed to itself, one that rather blended completely into what goes without saying. Power shines in its own absence.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Talk never yet could guide any man's or nation's affairs; nor will it yours, except towards the Limbus Patrum, where all talk, except a very select kind of it, lodges at last.

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1 month 1 week ago

After years of study, consolidation, destruction, rebuilding, shifting, redefining….it eventually stops, I promise. It doesn’t go on forever, for all intents and purposes. Functionally we don’t have to know everything to know enough. We can know what is good, simply by knowing enough.

Studying objective reality, watching the consequences of subjectively driven beings setting certain principles but failing to evaluate the consequences of their insistence drove me to investigate to understand.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

I am not bothered by the fact that I am not understood. I am bothered when I do not know others.

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6 months 1 week ago

Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.

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The Life and Writings of Addison', The Edinburgh Review (July 1843), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review: A New Edition (1852), p. 706
2 months 4 weeks ago

These things, which we state lightly enough here, are yet of deep import, and indicate a mighty change in our whole manner of existence. For the same habit regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions, for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.

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5 months 1 week ago

But the Quincunx of Heaven runs low, and 'tis time to close the five ports of knowledge. We are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasmes of sleep, which often continueth præcogitations; making Cables of Cobwebbes and Wildernesses of handsome Groves. Beside Hippocrates hath spoke so little and the Oneirocriticall Masters, have left such frigid Interpretations from plants, that there is little encouragement to dream of Paradise it self. Nor will the sweetest delight of Gardens afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dulnesse of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the Bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a Rose.

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Ch. 5
5 months ago

To those who hold abstractly to Hegel's political philosophy, Hobhouse replies that the very fact of class society, the patent influence of class interests on the state, renders it impossible to designate the state as expressive of the real will of individuals as a whole. 'Wherever a community is governed by one class or one race, the remaining class or race is permanently in the position of having to take what it can get.'

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P. 396
7 months 6 days ago

For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet.

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6 months 1 week ago

I am sorry that my convictions do not allow me to repeat my friend's offer, said one of the others. But I have had to abandon the humanitarian and egalitarian fancies. His name was Mr. Neo-Classical.

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Pilgrim's Regress 89
3 months 2 weeks ago

When I was a child, the institution of war, which, by then, had been in existence for perhaps about five thousand years, was still being taken for granted by most people in the World as a normal and acceptable fact of life. One small religious community, the Society of Friends, was at that time singular in condemning war as immoral and in consequently refusing to have any part or lot in war-making.

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Experiences (New York: Oxford UP, 1969) pt. 2, sect. 4
2 months 5 days ago

An arrow has one motion and the mind another. Even when pausing, even when weighing conclusions, the mind is moving forward, toward its goal. (Hays translation) VIII, 60

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Get, by six hundred and fifty-eight votes, or by no vote at all, by the silent intimation of your own eyesight and understanding given you direct out of Heaven, and more sacred to you than anything earthly, and than all things earthly,-a correct image of the fact in question, as God and Nature have made it: that is the one thing needful; with that it shall be well with you in whatsoever you have to do with said fact. Get, by the sublimest constitutional methods, belauded by all the world, an incorrect image of the fact: so shall it be other than well with you; so shall you have laud from able editors and vociferous masses of mistaken human creatures; and from the Nature's Fact, continuing quite silently the same as it was, contradiction, and that only. What else?

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6 months 1 week ago

In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

"Normal science" means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice.

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p. 10
5 months 1 week ago

For the first time in sixty years, the priests, the old aristocracy and the people met in a common sentiment-a feeling of revenge, it is true, and not of affection; but even that is a great thing in politics, where a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Middle age begins with marriage; for then work and responsibility replace carefree play, passion surrenders to the limitations of social order, and poetry yields to prose.

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Ch. 3 : On Middle Age
6 months 1 week ago

Let us not forget what befits our present state in the pursuit of vain fancies. Mankind has its place in the sequence of things; childhood has its place in the sequence of human life; the man must be treated as a man and the child as a child. Give each his place, and keep him there. Control human passions according to man's nature; that is all we can do for his welfare. The rest depends on external forces, which are beyond our control.

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6 months 1 week ago

Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes.

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Ch. 9, p. 138 [2012 reprint]

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