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2 months 2 weeks ago

You, your families, your friends and your countries are to be exterminated by the common decision of a few brutal but powerful men. To please these men, all the private affections, all the public hopes, all that has been achieved in art, and knowledge and thought and all that might be achieved hereafter is to be wiped out forever. Our ruined lifeless planet will continue for countless ages to circle aimlessly round the sun unredeemed by the joys and loves, the occasional wisdom and the power to create beauty which have given value to human life.

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Leaflet issued while Russell was in Brixton Prison, 1961
2 months 1 week ago

From an ill-natured man take no loan.

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1 month 1 week ago

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

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p. 49
2 months 2 weeks ago

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.

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Ch. 2
1 month 2 weeks ago

True anarchy is the generative element of religion. Out of the annihilation of all existing institutions she raises her glorious head, as the new foundress of the world.

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English translation as quoted in The Dublin Review Vol. III (July-October 1837)
2 months 2 weeks ago

Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.

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"Walter Savage Landor", from The Dial, xii, 1841
2 months 1 week ago

We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed.

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Macquarrie & Robinson translation
1 month 1 week ago

Marx explains the alienation of labor as exemplified in, first, the relation of the worker to the product of his labor and, second, the relation of the worker to his own activity. P. 276

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3 weeks 4 days ago

On another possible world or another planet a word might be associated with much the same stereotype and much the same criteria as our term 'water', but it might designate XYZ and not H₂O. At least this could happen in a prescientific era. And it would not follow that XYZ was water; it would only follow that XYZ could look like water, taste like water, etc. What 'water' refers to depends on the actual nature of the paradigms, not just on what is in our heads.

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Language and Reality
1 month 3 days ago

Impulse, subjectivity and profanation, the old adversaries of materialistic alienation, now succumb to it. ... The representatives of the opposition to the authoritarian schema become witnesses to the authority of commercial success. ... In the service of success they renounce that insubordinate character which was theirs.

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p. 273
2 months 2 weeks ago

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

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Dedicatory epistle, as quoted in Fred R Shapiro (2006). The Yale Book of Quotations. Yale University Press. p. 468. ISBN 0-300-10798-6.
2 months 1 week ago

With a malicious man carry on no conflict, and do not molest him in any way whatever.

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2 months 1 week ago

People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in.

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Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 185
3 months 2 weeks ago

Parnenides: When there is a number of things which seem to you to be great, you may think, as you look at them all, that there is one and the same idea in them, and hence you think the great is one. But if with your mind's eye you regard the absolute great and these many great things in the same way, will not another great appear beyond, by which all these must appear to be great?

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1 month 1 week ago

Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.

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2 months 1 week ago

The way you use the word "God" does not show whom you mean - but, rather, what you mean.

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p. 50e
2 months 2 weeks ago

Politics is concerned with herds rather than with individuals, and the passions which are important in politics are, therefore, those in which the various members of a given herd can feel alike.

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1 month 1 week ago

The Protestant churches generally hold that the elements of the sacrament are flesh and blood only in a tropical sense; they nourish our souls as meat and the juice of it would our bodies. But the Catholics maintain that they are literally just that; although they possess all the sensible qualities of wafer-cakes and diluted wine. But we can have no conception of wine except what may enter into a belief, either -

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1 month ago

The people are asleep; they remain indifferent. They forge their own chains and do the bidding of their masters to crucify their Christs.

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(p. 304)
3 months 2 weeks ago
Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself, in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them. They are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see "forms." Variant translation: The constant fluttering around the single flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure urge for truth could make its appearance among men.
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1 month 1 week ago

Thought must be judged by something that is not thought, by its effect on production or its impact on social conduct, as art today is being ultimately gauged in every detail by something that is not art, be it box-office or propaganda value.

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describing the pragmatist view, p. 51.
2 weeks 1 day ago

The city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists. Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris.

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(p.12)
1 month 1 week ago

Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

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4:17 (KJV)
1 month 1 week ago

Out of the shadow of the abstract man, who thinks for the pleasure of thinking, emerges the organic man, who thinks because of a vital imbalance, and who is beyond science and art.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Yes - you, you alone must pay for everything because you turned up like this, because I'm a scoundrel, because I'm the nastiest, most ridiculous, pettiest, stupidest, and most envious worm of all those living on earth who're no better than me in any way, but who, the devil knows why, never get embarrassed, while all my life I have to endure insults from every louse - that's my fate. What do I care that you do not understand any of this?

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Part 2, Chapter 9
2 months 2 weeks ago

Man is a useless passion.

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Part 4, Chapter 2, III
3 months 6 days ago

War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free. War is the father and king of all, and has produced some as gods and some as men, and has made some slaves and some free.

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4 weeks 1 day ago

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.

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Ch. 4 "Problems of Humanistic Ethics"
1 month 3 weeks ago

The French are ... the most brilliant and the most dangerous nation of Europe, and the one that is surest to inspire admiration, hatred, terror, or pity, but never indifference.

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p. 245
2 months 1 week ago

One common strategy on which we should all be able to agree is to take steps to reduce the risk of human extinction when those steps are also highly effective in benefiting existing sentient beings. For example, eliminating or decreasing the consumption of animal products will benefit animals, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and lessen the chances of a pandemic resulting from a virus evolving among the animals crowded into today's factory farms, which are an ideal breeding ground for viruses. That therefore looks like a high-priority strategy.

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Chapter 15: Preventing Human Extinction (p. 177)
2 months 1 week ago

Antisthenes ... said once to a youth from Pontus who was on the point of coming to him to be his pupil, and was asking him what things he wanted, "You want a new book, and a new pen, and a new tablet;"

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meaning a new mind. § 4
2 months 1 week ago

He was seized and dragged off to King Philip, and being asked who he was, replied, "A spy upon your insatiable greed."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 43. Cf. Plutarch, Moralia, 70CD.
2 months 2 weeks ago

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

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Quotation and Originality
2 months 2 weeks ago

If you are describing any occurrence... make two or more distinct reports at different times... We discriminate at first only a few features, and we need to reconsider our experience from many points of view and in various moods in order to perceive the whole.

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March 24, 1857
1 month 1 week ago

Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.

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Ch. IX.: Justification of Art
1 month 2 weeks ago

I think that the principal and most basic spiritual need of the Russian People is the need for suffering, incessant and unslakeable suffering, everywhere and in everything. I think the Russian People have been infused with this need to suffer from time immemorial. A current of martyrdom runs through their entire history, and it flows not only from external misfortunes and disasters but springs from the very heart of the People themselves. There is always an element of suffering even in the happiness of the Russian People, and without it their happiness is incomplete.

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A Writer's Diary, Vol. 1: 1873-1876 (1994), pp. 161-162
1 month ago

Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man's subordination.

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1 month ago

Nietzsche's great concept of Yea-saying gave him a notion of purpose that is seen as positive.

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Nietzsche, in short, was a religious mystic. p. 275
2 months 2 weeks ago

I conceive that the description so often given of a Benthamite, as a mere reasoning machine, though extremely inapplicable to most of those who have been designated by that title, was during two or three years of my life not altogether untrue of me. ...There is nothing very extraordinary in this fact: no youth of the age I then was, can be expected to be more than one thing, and this was the thing I happened to be. Ambition and desire of distinction, I had in abundance; and zeal for what I thought the good of mankind was my strongest sentiment, mixing with and colouring all others. But my zeal was as yet little else, at that period of my life, than zeal for speculative opinions. It had not its root in genuine benevolence, or sympathy with mankind; though these qualities held their due place in my ethical standard. Nor was it connected with any high enthusiasm for ideal nobleness.

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(pp. 109-110)
1 month 1 week ago

Today war seems to have undergone a change of meaning, insofar as it is not a war of religion but a war of interests, not a war of conflicting cultures or civilizations but a war of national areas, not a war of human beings but a technical struggle of machines one against another and all against the non-combatant population.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct.

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p. 486
4 weeks 1 day ago

Our institutions and conditions rest upon deep-seated ideas. To change those conditions and at the same time leave the underlying ideas and values intact means only a superficial transformation, one that cannot be permanent or bring real betterment. It is a change of form only, not of substance, as so tragically proven by Russia.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgement for not agreeing with me in that, from which perhaps within a few days I should dissent myself.

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Section 6
1 month 1 day ago

Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind.

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Ch. 3: "The Century of Genius", p. 77
1 week 3 days ago

Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy, and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious, and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century. It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opponents exciting but false.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.

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1 month 1 week ago

Spontaneous social action will be broken up over and over again by State intervention; no new seed will be able to fructify. Society will have to live for the State, man for the governmental machine. And as, after all, it is only a machine whose existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports around it, the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of machinery, more gruesome than the death of a living organism. Such was the lamentable fate of ancient civilisation. ... Already in the times of the Antonines (IInd Century), the State overbears society with its anti-vital supremacy. Society begins to be enslaved, to be unable to live except in the service of the State. The whole of life is bureaucratised. What results? The bureaucratisation of life brings about its absolute decay in all orders.

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Chapter XIII: The Greatest Danger, The State

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