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3 months 1 week ago

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. The first kind have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, while the second kind need money and consequently write for money.

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3 months 1 week ago

But capitalist production begets,with the inexorability of a law of Nature,its own negation. It is the negation of negation.

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Vol. I, Ch. 32, p. 837.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Regarding the plan to collect my writings in volumes, I am quite cool and not at all eager about it because, roused by a Saturnian hunger, I would rather see them all devoured. For I acknowledge none of them to be really a book of mine, except perhaps the one On the Bound Will and the Catechism.

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Letter to Wolfgang Capito
1 month 1 week ago

Nationality, class, race, religion, culture....subgroup identity particularity does not supersede universality and humanity.

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2 months 1 week ago

The world that I regard is my selfe, it is the Microcosme of mine owne frame, that I cast mine eye on; for the other, I use it but like my Globe, and turne it round sometimes for my recreation. Men that look upon my outside, perusing onely my condition, and fortunes, do erre in my altitude; for I am above Atlas his shoulders.

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Section 12
3 months 1 week ago

The reasons for legal intervention in favour of children, apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind, the lower animals.

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Book V, Chapter 11, Section 9
1 month 1 week ago

During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in -- and which we lost -- every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.

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Vonnegut at 80 Interview with David Hoppe Alternet
3 months 1 week ago

Most shocking of all is alledging the Sacred Scriptures to favour this wicked practice. One would have thought none but infidel cavillers would endeavour to make them appear contrary to the plain dictates of natural light, and Conscience, in a matter of common Justice and Humanity; which they cannot be. Such worthy men, as referred to before, judged otherways; Mr. Baxter declared, the Slave-Traders should be called Devils, rather than Christians; and that it is a heinous crime to buy them.

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3 months 2 days ago

You can't be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.

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p. 44e
2 months 3 weeks ago

Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention, colour by convention; atoms and Void [alone] exist in reality.

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(trans. Freeman 1948), p. 92.
3 months 6 days ago
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To the Humble Bee, st. 1
4 months 3 days ago

Fate is not in man but around him.

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2 months 2 days ago

We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface...

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Show that you know this only, how you may never either fail to get what you desire or fall into what you avoid.

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Book II, ch. 1, 37
3 months 3 weeks ago

Once for all, then, a short precept is given thee: Love, and do what thou wilt: whether thou hold thy peace, through love hold thy peace; whether thou cry out, through love cry out; whether thou correct, through love correct; whether thou spare, through love do thou spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.

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Tractatus VII, 8 Latin: "dilige et quod vis fac."; falsely often: "ama et fac quod vis." Translation by Professor Joseph Fletcher: Love and then what you will, do.
2 months 1 week ago

In America, conscription is unknown; men are enlisted for payment. Compulsory recruitment is so alien to the ideas and so foreign to the customs of the people of the United States that I doubt whether they would ever dare to introduce it into their law.

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Chapter XIII.
1 month 1 week ago

One might expect that a consideration of grievability pertains only to those who are dead, but my contention is that grievability is already operative in life, and that it is a characteristic attributed to living creatures, marking their value within a differential scheme of values and bearing directly on the question of whether or not they are treated equally and in a just way. To be grievable is to be interpellated in such a way that you know your life matters; that the loss of your life would matter; that your body is treated as one that should be able to live and thrive, whose precarity should be minimized, for which provisions for flourishing should be available. The presumption of equal grievability would be not only a conviction or attitude with which another person greets you, but a principle that organizes the social organization of health, food, shelter, employment, sexual life, and civic life.

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p. 59
3 months 1 week ago

Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he was capable. The End.

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Full text of Russell's book History of the World in Epitome , written in 1959
3 months 2 days ago

I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.

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p. 56e
3 months 1 week ago

Life seems to me essentially passion, conflict, rage... It is only intellect that keeps me sane; perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect against feeling.

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Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell in 1912, as quoted in Clark The life of Bertrand Russell (1976), p. 174

Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.

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F 53
1 month 4 weeks ago

If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over.

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(Matthew 18:15) (NIV)
3 months 1 week ago

There as here, passions are the motive of all action, but they are livelier, more ardent, or merely simpler and purer, thereby assuming a totally different character. All the first movements of nature are good and right.

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First Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
2 months 1 week ago

Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.

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Chapter XVI.
3 months 3 weeks ago

It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

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Book I, ch. 20, 17.
2 months 1 week ago

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

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Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election (6 September 1780), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II (1855), p. 148
2 months 2 days ago

The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.

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3 months 5 days ago

I fancy that most people who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

More than a century ago, in 1804, in Letter XC of that series that constitutes the immense monody of his Obermann, Sénancour wrote the words which I have put at the head of this chapter - and of all the spiritual descendants of the patriarchal Rousseau, Sénancour was the most profound and intense; of all the men of heart and feeling that France has produced, not excluding Pascal, he was the most tragic. "Man is perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if it is nothingness that awaits us, do not let us so act that it shall be a just fate." Change this sentence from it negative to the positive form - "And if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it shall be an unjust fate" - and you get the firmest basis of action for the man who cannot or will not be a dogmatist.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.

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Ch. 5: "The Romantic Reaction", p. 128

Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.

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L 34
1 month 4 weeks ago

To look at a work of art in order to see how well certain rules are observed and canons conformed to impoverished perception. But to strive to note the ways in which certain conditions are fulfilled, such as the organic means by which the media is made to express and carry definite parts, or how the problem of adequate individualization is solved, sharpens esthetic perception and enriches its content.

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p. 213
1 month 3 weeks ago

Nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process.

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Ch. 4: "The Eighteenth Century", p. 102
3 months 1 day ago

I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being.

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

The Autarch maintained his indifferent calm, but a certain lack of certainty was gathering, and he did not like to experience a lack of certainty. He liked nothing which made him aware of limitations. An Autarch should have no limitations, and on Lingane he had none that natural law did not impose.

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3 months 6 days ago

Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.

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March 1845
1 month 4 days ago

The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos - resonant utterance or word.

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p. 35
3 months 1 week ago

Ignorance is the mother of Devotion: A maxim that is proverbial, and confirmed by general experience. Look out for a people, entirely destitute of religion: If you find them at all, be assured, that they are but few degrees removed from brutes. What so pure as some of the morals, included in some theological system? What so corrupt as some of the practices, to which these systems give rise?

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Part XV - General corollary
2 months 1 week ago

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find some one to worship.

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1 month 1 week ago

What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. The child watching TV loves these people, you know -- they're in color, and they're talking to the child. Why wouldn't a child relate to these people? And you know, if you can't sleep at 3 o'clock in the morning, you can turn on a switch, and there are your friends and relatives, and they obviously like you. And they're charming. Who wouldn't want Peter Jennings for a relative? This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house.

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Interviewed by Frank Houston, "The Salon Interview: Kurt Vonnegut", Salon
3 months 5 days ago

As to [General Douglas] Macarthur, I don't feel in a position to have clear opinions about anyone I know only from newspapers. You see, whenever they deal with anyone (or anything) I know myself, I find they're always a mass of lies & misunderstandings: so I conclude they're no better in the places where I don't know.

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Letter to Mrs. Mary Van Deusen, April 30, 1951. Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 3, "Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy", 1950-1963. p. 114.
3 months 1 week ago

Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Scientific truth is characterized by its exactness and the certainty of its predictions. But these admirable qualities are contrived by science at the cost of remaining on a plane of secondary problems. leaving intact the ultimate and decisive questions. ... Yet science is but a small part of the human mind and organism. Where it stops, man does not stop.

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p. 13
4 weeks 1 day ago

A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political , legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge.

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"What is Culture?" (p. 2)
3 months 1 week ago

"I don't want to! Why should I?" "Because more people will be happier if you do than if you don't." "So what? I don't care about other people." "You should." "But why?" "Because more people will be happier if you do than if you don't."

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Dialogue between Russell and his daughter Katharine, as quoted in My Father - Bertrand Russell, 1975
2 months 6 days ago

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.

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Vol. 3, Ch. IX, State-Tamperings with Money and Banks

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