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5 months 2 weeks ago

Allow me, Gentlemen, to pose this question in a more serious manner. Do I need to tell you that it is not a question at first of the natural, physiological, ethnographic difference that exists between individuals, but of the social difference, that is produced by the economic organization of society? Give to all the children, from their birth, the same means of maintenance, education, and instruction; give then to all the men thus raised the same social milieu, the same means of earning their living by their own labor, and you will see then that many of these differences, that we believe to be natural differences, will disappear because they are nothing but the effect of an unequal division of the conditions of intellectual and physical development - of the conditions of life.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?

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Letter to Johannes Kepler (1610), as quoted in The Crime of Galileo (1955) by Giorgio De Santillana
2 months 2 weeks ago

The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of all those applauding hands. The people who praise us-how capricious they are, how arbitrary. And the tiny region in which it all takes place.

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(Hays translation) IV, 4
7 months 1 week ago

Only after Winter comes do we know that the pine and the cypress are the last to fade.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

Much in the study of the paranormal was what we would now call pseudo-science. But the line between science and pseudo-science is smudged and shifting; where it lies seems clear only in retrospect. There is no pristine science untouched by the vagaries of faith.

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Foreword: Two Attempts to Cheat Death (p. 5)
4 months 1 week ago

I can assure you that there is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life. You learn that which is of inestimable importance - that there are a great many people in the world who are just as clever as you are. You learn to put your trust, by and by, in an economy and frugality of the exercise of your powers, both moral and intellectual; and you very soon find out, if you have not found it out before, that patience and tenacity of purpose are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.

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On Medical Education
6 months 3 weeks ago

All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.

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A 146, B 185
5 months 3 weeks ago

The mind understands something only insofar as it absorbs it like a seed into itself, nurtures it, and lets it grow into blossom and fruit. Therefore scatter holy seeds into the soil of the spirit.

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"Ideas," Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), § 5
3 months 1 week ago

You will die, not because you are ill, but because you are alive; even when you have been cured, thesame end awaits you; when you have recovered, it will be not death, but ill health, that you have escaped.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.

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26:26-29 (KJV)
2 months 3 weeks ago

There are, in the Palætiological Sciences, two antagonist doctrines: 'Catastrophes' and 'Uniformity'. The doctrine of a 'uniform course of nature' is tenable only when we extend the notion of uniformity so far that it shall include catastrophes.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

It is a base thing for the countenance to be obedient and to regulate and compose itself as the mind commands, and for the mind not to be regulated and composed by itself.

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VII, 37
6 months 3 weeks ago

The possession and the exercise of political, and among others of electoral, rights, is one of the chief instruments both of moral and of intellectual training for the popular mind; and all governments must be regarded as extremely imperfect, until every one who is required to obey the laws, has a voice, or the prospect of a voice, in their enactment and administration.

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Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859), p. 22
6 months 3 weeks ago

His obedience is real since he really and truly fulfills his mission, since he runs real risks in order to carry out the beloved's orders. But, on the other hand, it is imaginary because he submits only to a creature of his mind.

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p. 152
5 months 5 days ago

It seems that thought itself has a power for which it has never been given credit.

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p. 16

How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us?

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Ch. 27. Of Friendship
5 months 2 weeks ago

Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.

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5 months 1 week ago

In the past human life was lived in a bullock cart; in the future it will be lived in an aeroplane; and the change of speed amounts to a difference in quality.

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Ch. 6: "The Nineteenth Century", p. 137
5 months 1 week ago

I remember well a junior seminar I gave with Paul Tillich shortly before the outbreak of the Third Reich. A participant spoke out against the idea of the meaning of existence. She said life did not seem very meaningful to her and she didn't know whether it had a meaning. The very voluble Nazi contingent became very excited by this and scraped the floor noisily with their feet. Now, I do not wish to maintain that this Nazi foot-shuffling proves or refutes anything in particular, but I do find it highly significant. I would say it is a touchstone for the relation of thinking to freedom. It raises the question whether thought can bear the idea that a given reality is meaningless and that mind is unable to orientate itself; or whether the intellect has become so enfeebled that it finds itself paralysed by the idea that all is not well with the world.

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pp. 19-20
2 months 3 weeks ago

Botany is the school for patience, and it's amateurs learn resignation from daily disappointments.

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Thomas Jefferson, in letter to Madame de Tessé (25 Apr 1788). In Thomas Jefferson Correspondence: Printed from the Originals (1916), 7.
4 months 2 weeks ago

With so many mind-bytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

No one can flatter himself that he is immune to the spirit of his own epoch, or even that he possesses a full understanding of it. Irrespective of our conscious convictions, each one of us, without exception, being a particle of the general mass, is somewhere attached to, colored by, or even undermined by the spirit which goes through the mass. Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness.

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Paracelsus the Physician
1 month 4 days ago

What you mean is the people you hate you make ridiculous to yourself.... praying to "God" to do the work you did already....

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2 months 3 weeks ago

To cleave that sea in the gentle autumnal season, murmuring the name of each islet, is to my mind the joy most apt to transport the heart of man into paradise.

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On the Aegean Sea, in Ch. 2
6 months 2 weeks ago

Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.

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The Question Concerning Technology
6 months 3 weeks ago

I do not think the resemblance between the Christian and the merely imaginative experience is accidental. I think that all things, in their own way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least. "Reflect" is the important word. This lower life of the imagination is not a beginning of, nor a step toward, the higher life of the spirit, merely an image.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Political independence, as the right to owe his existence and continuance in society not to the arbitrary will of another, but to his own rights and powers as a member of the commonwealth.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Nature is satisfied with little; and if she is, I am also.

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As quoted in The Story of Philosophy (1933) by Will Durant, p. 176
2 months 1 week ago

In Lenin I honor a man, who in total sacrifice of his own person has committed his entire energy to realizing social justice. I do not find his methods advisable. One thing is certain, however: men like him are the guardians and renewers [Erneuerer] of mankind's conscience.

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4 months 1 day ago

If we already lived in a cruelty-free world, the notion of re-introducing suffering, exploitation and creatures eating each other would seem not so much frightful as unimaginable - no more seriously conceivable than reverting to surgery without anaesthesia today.

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Reprogramming Predators, BLTC Research, 2009
3 months 1 week ago

He that owns himself has lost nothing. But how few men are blessed with ownership of self!

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament.

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Speech to the Electors of Bristol (3 November 1774); as published in The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke
4 months 2 weeks ago

Poverty is the lack of many things, but avarice is the lack of all things.

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Maxim 236
6 months 3 weeks ago

The theory of Communism may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

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Section 2, paragraph 13.
6 months 3 weeks ago

China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.

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Chapter XI, Part III, (First Period) p. 221.
7 months 6 days ago

But if one should guide his life by true principles, man's greatest riches is to live on a little with contented mind; for a little is never lacking.

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Book V, lines 1117-1119 (tr. Rouse)
5 months 3 weeks ago

Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.

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Volume iii, p. 335
6 months 3 weeks ago

Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.

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The Civil War in France : "The Third Address", May 1871
7 months 1 week ago

Down in adoration falling,Lo! the sacred Host we hail;Lo! o'er ancient forms departing,Newer rites of grace prevail;Faith for all defects supplying,Where the feeble senses fail.

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Pange, Lingua, stanza 5 (Tantum Ergo)
6 months 3 weeks ago

I love liberty, and I loathe constraint, dependence, and all their kindred annoyances. As long as my purse contains money it secures my independence, and exempts me from the trouble of seeking other money, a trouble of which I have always had a perfect horror; and the dread of seeing the end of my independence, makes me proportionately unwilling to part with my money. The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty, that which we lack and strive to obtain is the instrument of slavery.

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6 months 3 weeks 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
5 months 3 weeks ago

There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.

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Book One, Chapter XIII.
5 months 1 week ago

Humility consists of knowing that in this world the whole soul, not only what we term the ego in its totality, but also the supernatural part of the soul, which is God present in it, is subject to time and to the vicissitudes of change. There must be absolutely acceptance of the possibility that everything material in us should be destroyed. But we must simultaneously accept and repudiate the possibility that the supernatural part of the soul should disappear.

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"Concerning the Our Father" in Waiting on God (1972), Routledge & Kegan Paul edition, p. 153
6 months 3 weeks ago

Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often perceive how near I had come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial affair, - the news of the street; and I am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish, - to permit idle rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought. Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself, - an hypæthral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods? I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve the mind's chastity in this respect.

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pp. 491-2
2 months 2 weeks ago

A little flesh, a little breath, and a Reason to rule all - that is myself.

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II. 2, trans. Maxwell Staniforth
5 months 3 weeks ago

There never, gentlemen, was a period in which the steadfastness of some men has been nut to so sore a trial. It is not very difficult for well-formed minds to abandon their interest; but the separation of fame and virtue is an harsh divorce. Liberty is in danger of being made unpopular to Englishmen. Contending for an imaginary power, we begin to acquire the spirit of domination, and to lose the relish of honest equality.

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6 months 1 week ago

Do not be arrogant because of your knowledge, but confer with the ignorant man as with the learned. For knowledge has no limits, and none has yet achieved perfection in it. Good speech is more hidden than malachite, yet it is found in the possession of women slaves at the millstones.

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Maxim no. 1.

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