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5 months 2 weeks ago

Now what has been said about the Jews is also to be understood about Cahorsins, and anyone else depending upon the depravity of usury.

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art. 4
1 month 1 week ago

The much occupied man has no time for wantonness, and it is an obvious commonplace that the evils of leisure can be shaken off by hard work.

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Line 9
3 weeks 6 days ago

Behind the stream of my mind and body, behind the stream of my race and all mankind, behind the stream of plants and animals, I watch with trembling the Invisible, treading on all visible things and ascending. Behind his heavy and blood-splattered feet I hear all living things being trampled on and crushed. His face is without laughter, dark and silent, beyond joy and sorrow, beyond hope.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

We must plow through the whole of language.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 131
3 weeks 5 days ago

After all, it is my principle that the will of the Majority should always prevail.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

For his purposes (and mine), scientific medicine is defined as the set of practices which submit themselves to the ordeal of being tested. Alternative medicine is defined as that set of practices which cannot be tested, refuse to be tested, or consistently fail tests. If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine. Conversely, if a technique devised by the President of the Royal College of Physicians consistently fails in double-blind trials, it will cease to be a part of 'orthodox' medicine. Whether it will then become 'alternative' will depend upon whether it is adopted by a sufficiently ambitious quack (there are always sufficiently gullible patients).

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Foreword to Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations by John Diamond, Vintage, 2001.
5 months 6 days ago

A constant element of enjoyment must be mingled with our studies, so that we think of learning as a game rather than a form of drudgery, for no activity can be continued for long if it does not to some extent afford pleasure to the participant.

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Letter to Christian Northoff (1497), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 114
3 months 2 weeks ago

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

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"Art and Eros: A Dialogue about Art", Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (1986).
1 month 3 weeks ago

News and truth are not the same thing and must be clearly distinguished. The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act. Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.

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Ch. XXIV: "News, Truth, and a Conclusion", p. 358 The clause in bold is sometimes quoted on its own in the form, "The news and the truth are not the same thing."
4 months 1 week ago

Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they please.

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As quoted in The World's Laconics: Or, The Best Thoughts of the Best Authors (1853) by Everard Berkeley Variant: Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they will.
3 months 2 weeks ago

So long as you "have" yourself, have yourself as an object, your experience of man is only as of a thing among things.

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p. 148
3 months 2 weeks ago

The intellectual is called on the carpet. ... Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you.

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p. 192
3 weeks 5 days ago

A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The principles of logic and mathematics are true simply because we never allow them to be anything else. And the reason for this is that we cannot abandon them without contradicting ourselves, without sinning against the rules which govern the use of language, and so making our utterances self-stultifying. In other words, the truths of logic and mathematics are analytic propositions or tautologies.

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p. 77.
4 months 4 weeks ago

Don't think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

It is impossible to imagine a more dramatic and horrifying combination of scientific triumph with political and moral failure than has been shown to the world in the destruction of Hiroshima. From the scientific point of view, the atomic bomb embodies the results of a combination of genius and patience as remarkable as any in the history of mankind.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

There is no problem in all mathematics that cannot be solved by direct counting. But with the present implements of mathematics many operations can be performed in a few minutes which without mathematical methods would take a lifetime.

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p. 197; On mathematics and counting.
5 months 4 days ago

We are born to inquire after truth; it belongs to a greater power to possess it. It is not, as Democritus said, hid in the bottom of the deeps, but rather elevated to an infinite height in the divine knowledge.

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Book III, Ch. 8. Of the Art of Conversation
3 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing, in fact, is as universal or as ancient as the iniquitous and absurd; truth and justice, on the contrary, are the least universal, the youngest features in the development of human society.

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5 months ago

If nature has been frugal in her gifts and endowments, there is the more need of art to supply her defects. If she has been generous and liberal, know that she still expects industry and application on our part, and revenges herself in proportion to our negligent ingratitude. The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds; and instead of vines and olives for the pleasure and use of man, produces, to its slothful owner, the most abundant crop of poisons.

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Part I, Essay 16: The Stoic
4 months 3 weeks ago

Of all evils of war the greatest is the purely spiritual evil: the hatred, the injustice, the repudiation of truth, the artificial conflict.

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Justice in War-Time (1916), p. 27
2 months 2 weeks ago

Believe me, my friends, you are yet very deficient with regard to the best modes of training your children, or of arranging your domestic concerns.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon.

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"The Will to Believe" p. 15
3 weeks 4 days ago

Now to get back to our given Church: it lives almost entirely for modesty and moneyed piety. It zealously inveighs against the harm done to Joseph and the sheep, but it has made its arrangements with the upper classes and serves as their spiritual defender. It bristles at see-through blouses, but not at slums in which half-naked children starve, and not, above all, at the conditions that keep three quarters of mankind in misery. It condemns desperate girls who abort a foetus, but it consecrates war, which aborts millions. It has nationalized its God, nationalized him into ecclesiastic organization, and has inherited the Roman empire under the mask of the Crucified. It preserves misery and injustice, having first tolerated and then approved the class power that causes them; it prevents any seriousness about deliverance by postponing it to St. Never-Ever's Day or shifting it to the beyond.

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p. 144
4 months 4 weeks ago

A spurious axiom of the first class is: Whatever is, is somewhere and sometime.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.

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Lecture VI, Pragmatism's Conception of Truth
3 months 3 weeks ago

The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and ... each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.

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p. 340
5 months ago

What a noble privilege is it of human reason to attain the knowledge of the supreme Being; and, from the visible works of nature, be enabled to infer so sublime a principle as its supreme Creator? But turn the reverse of the medal. Survey most nations and most ages. Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are any thing but sick men's dreams: Or perhaps will regard them more as the playsome whimsies of monkies in human shape, than the serious, positive, dogmatical asseverations of a being, who dignifies himself with the name of rational.

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Part XV - General corollary
2 months 3 weeks ago

The strongest of all warriors are these two - Time and Patience.

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Bk. X, ch. 16
1 month 2 weeks ago

Marxism was a philosophical or semi-philosophical doctrine and a political ideology which was used by the communist state as the main source of legitimacy and the obligatory faith.

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New Preface, p. v
3 months 3 weeks ago

Through a wise and salutary neglect [of the colonies], a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection; when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away within me. My vigour relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake; you must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand heap.

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January 25, 1858
4 months 4 weeks ago

In art the Chinese aim at being exquisite, and in life at being reasonable.

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The Problem of China (1922), Ch. XI: Chinese and Western Civilization Contrasted
4 months 4 weeks ago

We are and irrefutable arbiters of value, and in the world of value Nature is only a part. Thus in this world we are greater than Nature. In the world of values, Nature in itself is neutral, neither good nor bad deserving of neither admiration nor censure. It is we who create value and our desires which confer value. In this realm we are kings, and we debase our kingship if we bow down to Nature. It is for us to determine our good life, not for Nature - not even for Nature personified as God.

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3 months 1 week ago

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

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Ch. 7
3 months 1 week ago

Anyone who can understand that the Buddhist idea of Nirvana is not merely negative, and that the Buddha himself who (like the Superman) 'looks down on suffering humanity like a hillsman on the planes' is not an atheistic monster, will instantly see how this misses the point. Nietzsche was not an atheist, any more than the Buddha was. Anyone who reads the Night Song and the Dance Song in Zarathustra will recognize that they spring out of the same emotion as the Vedic or Gathic hymns or the Psalms of David. The idea of the Superman is a response to the need for salvation in precisely the same way that Buddhism was a response to the 'three signs'.

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p. 135

One needs only eyes to see the necessary influence of old age on reason.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Idea or Vision, in its sensuous meaning, would be something that could be perceived only by the bodily eye and not by any other sense such as taste, hearing, etc.; it would be such a thing as a rainbow, or the forms which pass before us in dreams. Idea or Vision, in its supersensuous meaning, would denote, first of all, in conformity with the sphere in which the word is to be valid, something that cannot be perceived by the body at all, but only by the mind; and then, something that cannot, as many other things can, be perceived by the dim feeling of the mind, but only by the eye of the mind, by clear perception.

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The Chief Difference Between The Germans And The Other Peoples Of Teutonic Descent p. 59
5 months 2 weeks ago

Listen widely to remove your doubts and be careful when speaking about the rest and your mistakes will be few. See much and get rid of what is dangerous and be careful in acting on the rest and your causes for regret will be few. Speaking without fault, acting without causing regret: 'upgrading' consists in this.

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5 months 4 weeks ago
The objective of all human arrangements is through distracting one's thoughts to cease to be aware of life.
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3 months 3 weeks ago

In the present state of society it appears necessary to go back to first principles in search of the most simple truths, and to dispute with some prevailing prejudice every inch of ground. To clear my way, I must be allowed to ask some plain questions, and the answers will probably appear as unequivocal as the axioms on which reasoning is built; though, when entangled with various motives of action, they are formally contradicted either by the words or conduct of men.

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Ch. 1, opening
3 months 3 weeks ago

I did not hate the author of my misfortunes - truth and justice acquit me of that; I rather pitied the hard destiny to which he seemed condemned. But I thought with unspeakable loathing of those errors, in consequence of which every man is fated to be, more or less, the tyrant or the slave. I was astonished at the folly of my species, that they did not rise up as one man, and shake off chains so ignominious, and misery so insupportable. So far as related to myself, I resolved - and this resolution has never been entirety forgotten by me - to hold myself disengaged from this odious scene, and never fill the part either of the oppressor or the sufferer.

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2 months 1 week ago

What could be a better indication of man's continued dependence on nature than the fact that today's so-called post-industrial societies satisfy most of their food needs through imports from so-called underdeveloped countries?

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Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development
4 months 3 weeks ago

For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interests the common interest of all the members of society, that is, sality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.

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"Concerning the production of Consciousness"
4 months 3 weeks ago

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

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Act 11, sc. 2
1 month 3 weeks ago

It is no coincidence that the ABM Treaty was signed midway between the delinking of the U.S. dollar from the gold standard in 1971 and the first oil crisis in 1973. These were the years not only of monetary and economic crises but also of both the beginning of the destruction of the welfare state and the shift of the hegemony of economic production from the factory to more social and immaterial sectors. One might think of these various transformations as different faces of one common phenomenon, one grand social transformation.

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39
3 weeks 2 days ago

The universal intelligence puts itself in motion for every separate effect... or it puts itself in motion once, and everything else comes by way of a sequence in a manner; or individual elements are the origin of all things. In a word, if there is a god, all is well; and if chance rules, do not thou be governed by it.

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IX, 28

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