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4 weeks 1 day ago

In politics continental Europe was infantile - horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer.

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"My Paris" (1983), p. 235
1 month 2 weeks ago

It is a sign of sovereignty to risk one's life, that is, to turn life into a game.

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2 months 1 week ago

I assert, that the ancient Whigs held doctrines, totally different from those I have last mentioned. I assert, that the foundations laid down by the Commons, on the trial of Doctor Sacheverel, for justifying the revolution of 1688, are the very same laid down in Mr. Burke's Reflections; that is to say,-a breach of the original contract, implied and expressed in the constitution of this country, as a scheme of government fundamentally and inviolably fixed in King, Lords, and Commons.-That the fundamental subversion of this antient constitution, by one of its parts, having been attempted, and in effect accomplished, justified the Revolution. That it was justified only upon the necessity of the case; as the only means left for the recovery of that antient constitution, formed by the original contract of the British state; as well as for the future preservation of the same government. These are, the points to be proved.

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p. 411
3 months 6 days ago

My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.

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Sometimes paraphrased as "Thinking is for doing", perhaps originally by S.T. Fiske (1992) Ch. 22
3 months 2 days ago

One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches.

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p. 61

Reality and history, however, are not dialectical, and no idealist rhetorical gymnastics can make them conform to the dialect.

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131
1 month 2 weeks ago

I have wanted them to have this simple definition to read again and again so they know: Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.

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Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2014), p.XII
2 months 1 week 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.
3 months 3 weeks ago

It is only he, possessed of all sagely qualities that can exist under heaven, who shows himself quick in apprehension, clear in discernment, of far-reaching intelligence, and all-embracing knowledge, fitted to exercise rule; magnanimous, generous, benign, and mild, fitted to exercise forbearance; impulsive, energetic, firm, and enduring, fitted to maintain a firm hold; self-adjusted, grave, never swerving from the Mean, and correct, fitted to command reverence; accomplished, distinctive, concentrative, and searching, fitted to exercise discrimination. All-embracing is he and vast, deep and active as a fountain, sending forth in their due season his virtues. All-embracing and vast, he is like Heaven. Deep and active as a fountain, he is like the abyss. He is seen, and the people all reverence him; he speaks, and the people all believe him; he acts, and the people all are pleased with him.

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2 weeks 1 day ago

Many city-dwellers have a romanticized conception of the living world. From another perspective, some "conservation biologists" favour e.g. "Pleistocene rewilding". By contrast, I think any truly compassionate person should be horrified at the terrible suffering of Nature "red in tooth and claw". Why not aim for a cruelty-free world instead?

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"Interview with Pensata Animal", Pensata Animal, 25 Oct. 2009
2 months 2 days ago

It makes unavoidably necessary an entirely new organization of society in which production is no longer directed by mutually competing individual industrialists but rather by the whole society operating according to a definite plan and taking account of the needs of all.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Not by way of reason, but only by way of love and suffering, do we come to the living God, the human God. Reason rather separates us from Him. We cannot first know Him in order that afterward we may love Him; we must begin by loving Him, longing for Him, hungering after Him, before knowing Him. The knowledge of God proceeds from the love of God, and this love has little or nothing of the rational in it. For God is indefinable. To seek to define Him is to seek to confine Him within the limits of our mind - that is to say, to kill Him. In so far as we attempt to define Him, there rises up before us - Nothingness.

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2 months 2 days ago

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

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The Prince (1513), Ch. 22
3 months 6 days ago

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

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Ch. 4
4 months 1 week ago
Morality is herd instinct in the individual.
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3 months 2 weeks ago

A thing therefore never returns to nothing.

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Book I, line 248 (tr. Munro)

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

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E 65
3 months 1 week ago

A man must be perfectly crazy who, where there is tolerable security, does not employ all the stock which he commands…

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Chapter I, p. 313 (see opportunity cost).
1 month 2 weeks ago

Those who have a spark of self-respect left, prefer open defiance, prefer crime to the emaciated, degraded position of poverty.

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2 months 1 week ago

When an opinion has taken root in a democracy and established itself in the minds of the majority, it afterward persists by itself, needing no effort to maintain it since no one attacks it. Those who at first rejected it as false come in the end to adopt it as accepted, and even those who still at the bottom of their hearts oppose it keep their views to themselves, taking great care to avoid a dangerous and futile contest.

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Book Three, Chapter XXI.
3 months 5 days ago

On recent and contemporary literature student's need is least and our help least. They ought to understand it better than we, and if they do not then there is something radically wrong either with them or with the literature. But I need not labour the point. There is an intrinsic absurdity in making current literature a subject of academic study, and the student who wants a tutor's assistance in reading the works of his own contemporaries might as well ask for a nurse's assistance in blowing his own nose.

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"Our English syllabus", Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939). Reprinted in Image and Imagination: Essays and Reviews by C. S. Lewis (2013), Cambridge University Press
1 month 3 weeks ago

"The bitterest sorrow that man can know is to aspire to do much and to achieve nothing"... so Herodotus relates that a Persian said to a Theban at a banquet (book ix., chap. xvi.). And it is true. With knowledge and desire we can embrace everything , or almost everything; with the will nothing, or almost nothing. And contemplation is not happiness - no! not if this contemplation implies impotence. And out of this collision between our knowledge and our power pity arises.

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3 months 1 week ago

The experiences of this period had two very marked effects on my opinions and character. In the first place, they led me to adopt a theory of life, very unlike that on which I had before acted, and having much in common with what at that time I certainly had never heard of, the anti-self-consciousness theory of Carlyle.

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(pp. 141-142)
4 months 4 days ago

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!', but 'That's funny ...'

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1 week 6 days ago

I may not be as unambiguously hostile to capitalism as many people are, but what I don't like about it is the commodification of personal experiences, it turns everyone into actors.

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Quoted in Will Self, "John Gray: Forget everything you know," The Independent
3 months 2 weeks ago

The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.

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Adagia, 1508
3 months 5 days ago

First, what do we mean by anguish? The existentialist frankly states that man is in anguish. His meaning is as follows-When a man commits himself to anything, fully realizing that he is not only choosing what he will be, but is thereby at the same time a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind-in such a moment a man cannot escape from the sense of complete and profound responsibility.

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p. 30
2 months 1 week ago

If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.

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2 months 1 week ago

All government - indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act - is founded on compromise and barter.

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3 months 5 days ago

All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

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"Charity"
3 months 1 day ago

Justice is what love looks like in public.

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Brother West (2009), p. 232
2 weeks 2 days ago

There is no disease so destructive as lust.

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1 month 6 days ago

Not sure I understand...😁...

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3 months 5 days ago

The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.

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"On Violence"
2 months 3 days ago

The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not - which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams.

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par. 51 p.46
2 months 6 days ago

No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.

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Pt. IV, Ch. 30 : General Considerations
3 months 1 week ago

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder's lack of rational conviction.

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Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately. Introduction to 1961 edition of Sceptical Essays, 1961
2 weeks 1 day ago

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

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Poets
1 month ago

As there are a very great variety of religious sects in the world (and which are probably adapted to different constitutions under different circumstances, seeing there are many good and conscientious characters in each), it is particularly recommended, as a means of uniting the inhabitants of the village into one family, that while each faithfully adheres to the principles which he most approves, at the same time all shall think charitably of their neighbours respecting their religious opinions, and not presumptuously suppose that theirs alone are right.

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"Rules and Regulations for the Inhabitants of New Lanark"
3 months 1 week ago

Spinoza says that if a stone which has been projected through the air, had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own free will. I add this only, that the stone would be right. The impulse given it is for the stone what the motive is for me, and what in the case of the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity, is in its inner nature the same as that which I recognise in myself as will, and what the stone also, if knowledge were given to it, would recognise as will.

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3 months 1 week ago

Childish and altogether ludicrous is what you yourself are and all philosophers; and if a grown-up man like me spends fifteen minutes with fools of this kind, it is merely a way of passing the time. I've now got more important things to do. Goodbye!

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Thrasymachus, in On the Indestructibility of our Essential Being by Death, in Essays and Aphorisms (1970) as translated by R. J. Hollingdale, p. 76
3 months 6 days ago

Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.

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Social Aims
2 months 6 days ago

Each individual imagines that he can exist, live, think, and act for himself, and believes that he himself is the thinking principle of his thoughts; whereas in truth he is but a single ray of the ONE universal and necessary Thought.

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p. 21
2 months 2 days ago

Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can.

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Preface (p. vii)
3 months 2 days ago

What has to be accepted, the given, is - so one could say - forms of life.

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Pt II, p. 226 of the 1968 English edition
1 month 2 weeks ago

Part of what makes moral philosophy an anachronistic field is that its practitioners continue to argue in this very traditional and aprioristic way even though they themselves do not claim that one can provide a systematic and indubitable 'foundation' for the subject. Most of them rely on what are supposed to be 'intuitions' without claiming that those intuitions deliver uncontroversial ethical premises, on the one hand, or that they have an ontological or epistemological explanation of the reliability of those intuitions, on the other.

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How Not to Solve Ethical Problems

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