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3 months 5 days ago

It is the principle of antipathy which leads us to speak of offences as deserving punishment. It is the corresponding principle of sympathy which leads us to speak of certain actions as meriting reward. This word merit can only lead to passion and error. It is effects good or bad which we ought alone to consider.

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MSS 29, 32, University College Collection
3 months 6 days ago

I. The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities, that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.

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Chapter II, Part II, p. 892.
3 months 3 weeks ago

When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them.

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3 months 1 week ago

He that gives quickly gives twice.

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Adagia, 1508
2 weeks 1 day ago

Some things never change...

Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
Emma Goldman believed freedom was meaningless if it did not extend to thought, speech, love, and the body itself.

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3 months 1 week ago

Don't discuss yourself, for you are bound to lose; if you belittle yourself, you are believed; if you praise yourself, you are disbelieved.

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Book III, Ch. 8
3 months 3 weeks ago

The way which the superior man pursues, reaches wide and far, and yet is secret. Common men and women, however ignorant, may intermeddle with the knowledge of it; yet in its utmost reaches, there is that which even the sage does not know. Common men and women, however much below the ordinary standard of character, can carry it into practice; yet in its utmost reaches, there is that which even the sage is not able to carry into practice. Great as heaven and earth are, men still find some things in them with which to be dissatisfied. Thus it is that, were the superior man to speak of his way in all its greatness, nothing in the world would be found able to embrace it, and were he to speak of it in its minuteness, nothing in the world would be found able to split it.

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1 month 2 days ago

It will be said, "Patriotism has welded mankind into states, and maintains the unity of states." But men are now united in states; that work is done; why now maintain exclusive devotion to one's own state, when this produces terrible evils for all states and nations? For this same patriotism which welded mankind into states is now destroying those same states. If there were but one patriotism say of the English only then it were possible to regard that as conciliatory, or beneficent. But when, as now, there is American patriotism, English, German, French, Russian, all opposed to one another, in this event, patriotism no longer unites, but disunites.

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Patriotism and Government
1 month 4 weeks ago

The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.

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p 14
3 months 3 days ago

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.

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A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42 (1996), p. 281
4 months ago

What a human being believes, however, no matter with what ardor, is not necessarily objective truth.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.

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3 months 4 days ago

I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker.

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As attributed in More Random Walks in Science : An Anthology (1982) by Robert L. Weber, p. 65
2 months 3 weeks ago

Wrongly do the Greeks suppose that aught begins or ceases to be; for nothing comes into being or is destroyed; but all is an aggregation or secretion of pre-existent things: so that all-becoming might more correctly be called becoming-mixed, and all corruption, becoming-separate.

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quoted in Heinrich Ritter, Tr. from German by Alexander James William Morrison, The History of Ancient Philosophy, Vol.1
1 month 2 weeks ago

That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.

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1 week 4 days ago

When one is gripped by excruciating physical pain, one is always shocked at just how frightful it can be.

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"The Abolitionist Project", Talks given at the FHI (Oxford University) and the Charity International Happiness Conference, 2007
3 months 4 days ago

Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment - a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man's existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 13, § 160
2 weeks 4 days ago

The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working, and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery. Their volition, if they have any, is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes.

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4 months ago

Since those who rule in the city do so because they own a lot, I suppose they're unwilling to enact laws to prevent young people who've had no discipline from spending and wasting their wealth, so that by making loans to them, secured by the young people's property, and then calling those loans in, they themselves become even richer and more honored.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.

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4 weeks 1 day ago

The popularity of the paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement. I think that the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same appetite which drives the best of true science, and it is an appetite which true science is best qualified to satisfy.

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"Science Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder", John Brockman, Edge.org, December 29, 1996
2 months 3 weeks ago

I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist.

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Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault
4 months ago

If you suspect that my interest in the Bible is going to inspire me with sudden enthusiasm for Judaism and make me a convert of mountain‐moving fervor and that I shall suddenly grow long earlocks and learn Hebrew and go about denouncing the heathen — you little know the effect of the Bible on me. Properly read, it is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what - it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The miser deprives himself of his treasure because of his desire for it.

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p. 260
4 months 5 days ago
He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon.
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2 months 3 days ago

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

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Letter to M. de Menonville
3 months 1 day ago

Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.

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Inès reiterating to Garcin that they cannot ignore one another, Act 1, sc. 5

Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other's eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the experience of either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centrepoint of God's creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature.

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Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 3.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", pp. 267-268
3 months 1 week ago

He that I am reading seems always to have the most force.

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Book II, Ch. 12. Apology for Raimond Sebond
2 months 3 weeks ago

The rule of Big Money and its attendant culture of cupidity and mendacity has so poisoned our hearts, minds and souls that a dominant self-righteous neoliberal soulcraft of smartness, dollars and bombs thrives with little opposition.

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America is spiritually bankrupt. We must fight back together. The Guardian,

It goes without saying that any persons may attempt to unite kindred spirits, but, whatever their hopes and longings, none have the right to impose their vision of unity upon the rest.

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Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework as Utopian Common Ground, p. 325
1 month 2 weeks ago

The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", p. 268
2 months 1 week ago

To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.

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As quoted in The Anchor Book of French Quotations with English Translations (1963) by Norbert Gutermam
1 month 4 weeks ago

Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.

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4 months 3 days ago

When people are friends, they have no need of justice, but when they are just, they need friendship in addition.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth . . .

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Every time that a man has, with a pure heart, called upon Osiris, Dionysus, Buddha, the Tao, etc., the Son of God has answered him by sending the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit has acted upon his soul, not by inciting him to abandon his religious tradition, but by bestowing upon him light - and in the best of cases the fullness of light - in the heart of that same religious tradition. ... It is, therefore, useless to send out missions to prevail upon the peoples of Asia, Africa or Oceania to enter the Church.

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Section 8
3 months 2 days ago

The film concludes with ... the most nauseatingly luscious, the most penetratingly vulgar mammy song that it has ever been my lot to hear. My flesh crept as the loud speaker poured out those sodden words, the greasy, sagging melody. I felt ashamed of myself for listening to such things, for even being a member of the species to which such things are addressed.

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"Silence is Golden," p. 62

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

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L 49
3 months 3 days ago

Unbelievers (so called) as well as of believers, there are many species, including almost every variety of moral type. But the best among them, as no one who has had opportunities of really knowing them will hesitate to affirm (believers rarely have that opportunity), are more genuinely religious, in the best sense of the word religion, than those who exclusively arrogate to themselves the title.

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(pp. 45-46)
1 month 2 weeks ago

This is the Outsider's extremity. He does not prefer not to believe; he doesn't like feeling that futility gets the last word in the universe; his human nature would like to find something it can answer to with complete assent. But honesty prevents his accepting a solution that he cannot reason about.

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Chapter Five, The Pain Threshold
3 months 4 weeks ago

Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

No matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.

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p. 125
1 month 3 weeks ago

Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.

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p. 61
2 months 3 weeks ago

He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.

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Book I, epistle ii, lines 41-42
1 month 3 weeks ago

Be it well understood, I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not. Freedom is not an activity pursued by an entity that, apart from and previous to such pursuit, is already possessed of a fixed being. To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity, not to have subscribed to a determined being, to be able to be other than what one was, to be unable to install oneself once and for all in any given being. The only attribute of the fixed, stable being in the free being is this constitutive instability.

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"Man has no nature"

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