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2 months 2 days ago

I like well your idea of issuing treasury notes bearing interest, because I am persuaded they would soon be withdrawn from circulation and locked up in vaults & private hoards. It would put it in the power of every man to lend his 100. or 1000 d. tho' not able to go forward on the great scale, and be the most advantageous way of obtaining a loan. The other idea of creating a National bank, I do not concur in, because it seems now decided that Congress has not that power, (altho' I sincerely wish they had it exclusively) and because I think there is already a vast redundancy, rather than a scarcity of paper medium.

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Letter to Thomas Law (6 November 1813) FE 9:433 : The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (10 Vols., 1892-99) edited by Paul Leicester Ford
7 months 3 days ago

The two guides call out to a man early and late. And yet, no, for when remorse calls to a man it is always late. The call to find the way again by seeking out God in the confession of sins is always at the eleventh hour. Whether you are young or old, whether you have sinned much or little, whether you have offended much or neglected much, the guilt makes this call come at the eleventh hour. The inner agitation of the heart understands what remorse insists upon, that the eleventh hour has come. For in the sense of time, the old man's age is the eleventh hour; and the instant of death, the final moment in the eleventh hour. The indolent youth speaks of a long life that lies before him. The indolent old man hopes that his death is still a long way off. But repentance and remorse belong to the eternal in a man.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

I have endeavoured to show that no absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves; and I may add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a physical distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life.

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Ch.2, p. 129
6 months 2 days ago

No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rare in the history of the world. There are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak who is capable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Be like a rocky promontory against which the restless surf continually pounds; it stands fast while the churning sea is lulled to sleep at its feet. I hear you say, "How unlucky that this should happen to me!" Not at all! Say instead, "How lucky that I am not broken by what has happened and am not afraid of what is about to happen. The same blow might have struck anyone, but not many would have absorbed it without capitulation or complaint."

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IV. 49, trans. Hicks
7 months 4 days ago
If each us had a different kind of sense perception — if we could only perceive things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant, or if one of us saw a stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard the same stimulus as a sound, then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature, rather, nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree. After all, what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature which, in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence.
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6 months 1 day ago

When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.

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Preface
2 months 1 week ago

Symmetry is a vast subject, significant in art and nature. Mathematics lies at its root, and it would be hard to find a better one on which to demonstrate the working of the mathematical intellect.

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Symmetry
4 months 2 weeks ago

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.

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"Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit"
1 month 4 weeks ago

A person who doesn't know what the universe is doesn't know who they are. A person who doesn't know their purpose in life doesn't know who they are or what the universe is. A person who doesn't know any of these things doesn't know why they are here. So what to make of people who seek or avoid the praise of those who have no knowledge of where or who they are?

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VIII. 52:14
5 months 3 weeks ago

The Greeks follow a wrong usage in speaking of coming into being and passing away; for nothing comes into being or passes away, but there is mingling and separation of things that are. So they would be right to call coming into being mixture, and passing away separation.

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Frag. B 17, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.
6 months 4 days ago

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.

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Book 1, Ch. 3, sec. 3 Variant: The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.
6 months 2 days ago

Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.

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Book V, Chapter XI, §13
1 month 4 weeks ago

Look within. Within is the fountain of the good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.

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VII, 59
3 months 3 weeks ago

The advanced members of the medical profession know that the health of society is not to be obtained or maintained by medicines; - that it is far better, far more easy and far wiser, to adopt substantive measures to prevent disease of body or mind, than to allow substantive measure to remain continually to generate causes to produce physical and mental disorders.

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3rd Part
7 months 2 days ago

Knowledge of the fact differs from knowledge of the reason for the fact.

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6 months 2 days ago

My father impressed upon me from the first, that the manner in which the world came into existence was a subject on which nothing was known: that the question, "Who made me?" cannot be answered, because we have no experience or authentic information from which to answer it; and that any answer only throws the difficulty a step further back, since the question immediately presents itself, "Who made God?"

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(pp. 42-43)
4 months 1 week ago

Even Darwin's natural selection only predicts that survivors will be fit enough, that is, fitter than their losing competitors; it postulates satisficing, not optimizing.

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p. 166; As cited in Ronald J. Baker (2010, p. 122).
2 months 2 weeks ago

"What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself." That was indeed a great benefit; such a person can never be alone. You may be sure that such a man is a friend to all mankind.

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Seneca is quoting Hecato.

If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.

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L 23
2 months 1 day ago

Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium.

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Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front in Farming: A Hand Book
6 months 2 days ago

The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You must have genius or a prodigious usefulness if you will hide the want of measure.

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p. 167
6 months 1 day ago

"A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmān, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The séroni could say it better than I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure, as the crah is the last part of a poem. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then-that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it."

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Hyoi, p. 73
1 month 3 weeks ago

In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them, and that is why we love him. I am quite aware that we have just now lightheartedly expelled in imagination many excellent men who are largely, perhaps chiefly, responsible for the buildings of the temple of science; and in many cases, our angel would find it a pretty ticklish job to decide. But of one thing I feel sure: if the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have come to be, any more than a forest can grow which consists of nothing but creepers. For these people any sphere of human activity will do if it comes to a point; whether they become engineers, officers, tradesmen, or scientists depends on circumstances.Now let us have another look at those who have found favor with the angel. Most of them are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other, in spite of these common characteristics, than the hosts of the rejected. What has brought them to the temple? That is a difficult question and no single answer will cover it.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Thou sufferest justly: for thou choosest rather to become good to-morrow than to be good to-day.

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VIII, 22
6 months 2 days ago

The process is so complicated that it offers ever so many occasions for running abnormally.

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Vol. II, Ch. XXI, p. 500.
6 months 1 week ago

The heathen really make their self-invented notions and dreams of God and idol. Ultimately, they put their trust in that which is nothing. So it is with all idolatry. For it happens not merely by erecting an image and worshipping it, but rather it happens in the heart. For the heart seeks help and consolation from creatures, saints, or devils. It neither cares for God, nor looks to Him for anything better than to believe that He is willing to help.

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"On Infant Baptism," Large Catechism
6 months 3 days ago

The law of simplicity and naïveté applies to all fine art, for it is compatible with what is most sublime. True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself; that is, it consists in his correctly distinguishing between what is necessary and what is superfluous. On the other hand, one should never sacrifice clearness, to say nothing of grammar, for the sake of being brief. To impoverish the expression of a thought, or to obscure or spoil the meaning of a period for the sake of using fewer words shows a lamentable want of judgment.

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2 months 1 week ago

Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.

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As quoted in Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007) by Karen Michelle Barad, p. 254
4 months 3 weeks ago

In so far as words are not used obviously to calculate technically relevant probabilities or for other practical purposes, ... they are in danger of being suspect as sales talk of some kind.

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p. 22.
6 months 3 days ago

A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.

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Authority and the Individual, 1949
4 months 4 weeks ago

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.

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Emphasizing his views on philosophy as something abstract and separate from normal life to Isaiah Berlin, in the early 1930s, as quoted in A.J. Ayer: A Life (1999) by Ben Rogers, p. 2.
4 months 2 weeks ago

The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language.

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pp. 5-6
6 months ago

All things living are in search of a better world.

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Preface
2 months 1 week ago

This is a recent interest of mine. Ask yourself the question: Why is it not justice to kill a man that kills a mouse? Then, apply that answer to a hypothetical being that stands over humanity with humanity as the mouse.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.

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Matthew 5:13-16 (NIV) (See also: Mark 9:50; Luke 14:34, 35)
2 months 2 weeks ago

That which Fortune has not given, she cannot take away.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

If the passion for truthfulness is merely controlled and stilled without being satisfied, it will kill the activities it is supposed to support. This may be one of the reasons why, at the present time, the study of the humanities runs a risk of sliding from professional seriousness, through professionalization, to a finally disenchanted careerism.

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p. 3
2 months 4 weeks ago

Ethical control may survive in small groups, but the control of the population as a whole must be delegated to specialists-to police, priests, owners, teachers, therapists, and so on, with their specialized reinforcers and their codified contingencies.

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Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), p. 155
2 months 2 weeks ago

He not only overflowed with learning but stood in the slops.

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On Macaulay; reported in Hesketh Pearson, The Smith of Smiths (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1934), p. 180
2 months 1 week ago

No wild beasts are such enemies to mankind as are most of the Christians in their deadly hatred of one another.

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Reported in Ammianus, Res gestae, bk. 22, ch. 5, sec. 4
2 months 3 weeks ago

The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

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6 months 1 day ago

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

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5 months 1 week ago

It is manifest that every soul has a certain continuity with the soul of the Universe, so that it must be understood to exist and to be included not only there where it liveth and feeleth, but it is also by its essence and substance diffused throughout immensity. The power of each soul is itself somehow present afar in the Universe. It is not mixed, yet is there in some presence.

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6 months 3 days ago

No man who believes that all is for the best in this suffering world can keep his ethical values unimpaired, since he is always having to find excuses for pain and misery.

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The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell: A fresh look at empiricism, 1927-42 (G. Allen & Unwin, 1996), p. 217
3 months 1 week ago

The result of toppling tyranny in divided countries is usually civil war and ethnic cleansing.

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The death of this crackpot creed is nothing to mourn, The Guardian
6 months 2 days ago

To-day unbind the captive, So only are ye unbound; Lift up a people from the dust, Trump of their rescue, sound!

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Boston Hymn, st. 17
6 months 2 weeks ago

I do not speak here of divine truths... because they are infinitely superior to nature: God alone can place them in the soul... I know that he has desired that they should enter from the heart into the mind, and not from the mind into the heart, to humiliate that proud power of reasoning that pretends to the right to be the judge of the things that the will chooses; and to cure this infirm will which is wholly corrupted by its filthy attachments.

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