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5 months 3 weeks ago

Obviously, Anarchism, or any other social theory, making man a conscious social unit, will act as a leaven for rebellion.

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The destiny of the spiritual World, and, - since this is the substantial World, while the physical remains subordinate to it, or, in the language of speculation, has no truth as against the spiritual, - the final cause of the World at large, we allege to be the consciousness of its own freedom on the part of Spirit, and ipso facto, the reality of that freedom.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The individual begins that long effort as an Outsider; he may finish it as a saint.

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Chapter Nine, Breaking the Circuit, final sentence
5 months 3 weeks ago

Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of.

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6 months 1 week ago

Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look to any thing but power for their relief.

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3 months 1 week ago

Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.

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5 months 4 days ago

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

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As quoted in "Dailer's Choice" by Harriet Van Horne, in New York Magazine Vol. 10, No. 13 (28 March 1977), p. 80
3 months 3 weeks ago

Value is not intrinsic, it is not in things. It is within us; it is the way in which man reacts to the conditions of his environment. Neither is value in words and doctrines, it is reflected in human conduct. It is not what a man or groups of men say about value that counts, but how they act.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

A bad feeling is a commotion of the mind repugnant to reason, and against nature.

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As quoted in Tusculanae Quaestiones by Cicero, iv. 6.
7 months 1 week ago

A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.

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As quoted in William James: The Essential Writings (1971), edited by Bruce W. Wilshire, p. xiii
6 months 1 week ago

History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequeathed to posterity only an example of sterility.

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7 months 1 week ago

So long as the product is sold, everything is taking its regular course from the standpoint of the capitalist producer.

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Vol. II, Ch. II, p. 78.
7 months 1 week ago

"And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes."

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Hyoi, p. 76
6 months 1 week ago

I am a sick man... I am a wicked man. An unattractive man.

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Part 1, Chapter 1
4 months 2 weeks ago

By far my greatest dread in life [...] is that (some variant of) the Everett interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is true. Dave's Diary, BLTC Research, May 1996

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3 months 1 week ago

The governing principles of chemical affinity are, that it is elective ; that it is definite ; that it determines the properties of the compound; and that analysis is possible.

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5 months 1 week ago

Think about the two qualities that a virus, or any sort of parasitic replicator, demands of a friendly medium, the two qualities that make cellular machinery so friendly towards parasitic DNA, and that make computers so friendly towards computer viruses. These qualities are, firstly, a readiness to replicate information accurately, perhaps with some mistakes that are subsequently reproduced accurately; and, secondly, a readiness to obey instructions encoded in the information so replicated.

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7 months 1 week ago

The New Testament is an invaluable book, though I confess to having been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days by the church and the Sabbath school, so that it seemed, before I read it, to be the yellowest book in the catalogue. Yet I early escaped from their meshes. It was hard to get the commentaries out of one's head and taste its true flavor. - I think that Pilgrim's Progress is the best sermon which has been preached from this text; almost all other sermons that I have heard, or heard of, have been but poor imitations of this. - It would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the Life of Christ because the book has been edited by Christians.

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3 months 1 week ago

No thefts of free will reported.

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(Hays translation) XI, 36
4 months 5 days ago

Is not my present nearer my past of yesterday than the present of Sirius?

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7 months 1 week ago

But when they have realized that it [society] rejects them forever, they themselves assume the ostracism of which they are victims so as not to leave the initiative to their oppressors.

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p. 65-6

I believe that the progress of experimental science, the free intercourse of nation with nation, the unrestricted influx of commodities from countries where they are cheap, and the unrestricted efflux of labour towards countries where it is dear, will soon produce, nay, I believe that they are beginning to produce, a great and most blessed social revolution.

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Speech in Edinburgh (2 November 1852), quoted in Speeches of the Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay, M.P. (1854), p. 517
3 months 3 weeks ago

I never read a book before reviewing it: it prejudices a man so.

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Reported in Bon-Mots of Sydney Smith and R. Brinsley Sheridan, edited by Walter Jerrold with grotesques by Aubrey Beardsley (London: J. M. Dent and Company, 1893), p. 24
7 months 2 weeks ago

The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education.

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Chapter II, p. 17.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Although people seem to be unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

What once sprung from earth sinks back into the earth.

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Book II, lines 999-1000 (tr. Bailey)
3 months 3 weeks ago

Dumb creatures have not human feelings, but have certain impulses which resemble them: for if it were not so, if they could feel love and hate, they would likewise be capable of friendship and enmity, of disagreement and agreement. Some traces of these qualities exist even in them, though properly all of them, whether good or bad, belong to the human breast alone.

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3 months 1 week ago

Discovery depends upon the previous cultivation or natural clearness of the appropriate Idea, and therefore no discovery is the work of accident.

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6 months 1 week ago

You seek life, and a godly fire Gushes and gleams for you out of the earth, As, with shuddering long, you Hurl yourself down to the flames of the Etna. So by a queen's wanton whim Pearls were dissolved in wine- heed her not! What folly, poet, to cast your riches Into that bright and bubbling cup! Yet still are you holy to me, as the might of the earth That bore you away, audaciously perishing! And I would follow the hero into the depths Did love not hold me.

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"Empedokles"
7 months 2 weeks ago

Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure-Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure. Such pleasures seek if private be thy end: If it be public, wide let them extend.Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view: If pains must come, let them extend to few.

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Ch. 4: Value of a Lot of Pleasure or Pain, How to be Measured
5 months 3 weeks ago

The natural impulse of the primitive man to strike back, to avenge a wrong, is out of date. Instead, the civilized man, stripped of courage and daring, has delegated to an organized machinery the duty of avenging his wrongs, in the foolish belief that the State is justified in doing what he no longer has the manhood or consistency to do.

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7 months 1 week ago

Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they "own" their bodies - those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!

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Letter XXI
7 months 4 weeks ago

I have always been of the opinion that infamy earned by doing what is right is not infamy at all, but glory.

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Speech I
6 months 1 week ago

The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.

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8 months 1 week ago

Religion is more conservative than any other aspect of human life.

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7 months 1 week ago

The hopes which inspire communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount, but they are held as fanatically and are as likely to do as much harm.

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Part I, The Present Condition of Russia, Ch. 1: What Is Hoped From Bolshevism
6 months 1 week ago

That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts...

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5 months 1 week ago

What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity. Now even that flickered out.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence.

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Book One, Chapter II.
7 months 2 weeks ago

Poor David Hume is dying very fast, but with great cheerfulness and good humour and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things then any whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God.

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Letter to Alexander Wedderburn 14 August 1776. The Correspondence of Adam Smith edited by E.C. Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press 1986. The Future Hope in Adam Smith's System, Paul Oslington
6 months 1 week ago

What is Europe really but a sterile trunk which owes everything to oriental grafts?

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Letter of 18 December 1806 to Windischmann, quoted by Rene Gerard, L'Orient et la pensée romantique allemande, Paris 1963,, p. 213. quoted in Poliakov, L. (1974).
3 months 1 week ago

Yes, you can--if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You will find rest from vain fancies if you perform every act in life as though it were your last.

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II, 5
1 month 4 days ago

All these libertarian / capitalist philosophies are about to be annihilated as we move to post scarcity value. They were always contingent and parasitic points of view, we just didn't have the technology to destroy them. Automation, maybe after a revolution, will destroy them.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Now, as to universal love and mutual aid, they are beneficial and easy beyond a doubt. It seems to me that the only trouble is that there is no superior who encourages it. If there is a superior who encourages it, promoting it with rewards and commendations, threatening its reverse with punishments, I feel people will tend toward universal love and mutual aid like fire tending upward and water downwards - it will be unpreventable in the world.

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Book 4; Universal Love III

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