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7 months 3 weeks ago

Staying as I am, one foot in one country and the other in another, I find my condition very happy, in that it is free.

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Letter to Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine, Paris, June/July 1648
7 months 1 week ago

Hitler never intended to defend 'the West' against Bolshevism but always remained ready to join 'the Reds' for the destruction of the West, even in the middle of the struggle against Soviet Russia.

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Part 3, Ch. 10
3 months 3 weeks ago

All the future of socialism resides in the autonomous development of workers' syndicates.

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As quoted in Essays in Political Philosophy, Vidya Dhar Mahajan, Doaba House, Lahore, 1943 p. 41
3 months 1 week ago

Every right of suffrage, like any political right in general, is not to be measured by some sort of abstract scheme of "justice," or in terms of any other bourgeois-democratic phrases, but by the social and economic relationships for which it is designed. The right of suffrage worked out by the Soviet government is calculated for the transition period from the bourgeois-capitalist to the socialist form of society, that is, it is calculated for the period of the proletarian dictatorship. But, according to the interpretation of this dictatorship which Lenin and Trotsky represent, the right to vote is granted only to those who live by their own labor and is denied to everyone else.

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Chapter Five, "The Question of Suffrage"
3 months 4 weeks ago

It is best to bear what cannot be changed.

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Seneca, Moral Letters, 107. 9. As quoted in: Frank Breslin (Retired High-School Teacher) (December 21, 2017)
7 months 4 days ago

There can be no brotherhood when some nations indulge in previously unheard of luxuries, while others struggle to stave off famine.

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Chapter 4, Reason, p. 119
4 months 4 days ago

The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.

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Characteristics.
3 months 4 weeks ago

Unjust dominion cannot be eternal.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Before we can establish any immutable 'principles' of administration, we must be able to describe, in words, exactly how an administrative organization looks and exactly how it works.

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p. xiv.
8 months 2 weeks ago

Magister Adler was deeply moved by something higher, but now when he wants to express his thoughts in words, wants to communicate, he confuses the subjective with the objective, his altered subjective state with an external event, the dawning of a light upon him with the coming into existence of something new outside him, the falling of the veil from his eyes with his having had a revelation. Subjectively his emotion is carried to the extreme; he wants to select the most powerful expression to describe it and by means of a mental deception grasps the objective qualification: having had a revelation.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

Perhaps its destruction has been brought about only that it may be raised up again to a better destiny. Oftentimes a reverse has but made room for more prosperous fortune. Many structures have fallen only to rise to a greater height.

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8 months 1 week ago

He tried to recall what he had read about the disease. Figures floated across his memory, and he recalled that some thirty or so great plagues known to history had accounted for nearly a hundred million deaths. But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one actually sees him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.

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6 months 1 week ago

I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer. This position will be characterized by some as "overoptimistic," "utopian," or "unrealistic." In order to appreciate the merits of such criticism a discussion of the ambiguity of hope and the nature of optimism and pessimism seems called for.

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p. 483
7 months 4 days ago

One who is serious all day will never have a good time, while one who is frivolous all day will never establish a household.

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Maxim no. 25.
7 months 2 weeks ago

Our moral virtues benefit mainly other people; intellectual virtues, on the other hand, benefit primarily ourselves; therefore the former make us universally popular, the latter unpopular.

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6 months 1 week ago

The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organisation of the state. But after its victory the sole organisation which the proletariat finds already in existence is precisely the state. This state may require very considerable alterations before it can fulfil its new functions. But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and in a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris Commune.

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Letter to Philipp Van Patten
7 months 2 weeks ago

I do not wish to force my thoughts upon you, but I feel forced myself. Little as I know of Captain Brown, I would fain do my part to correct the tone and the statements of the newspapers, and of my countrymen generally, respecting his character and actions. It costs us nothing to be just. We can at least express our sympathy with, and admiration of, him and his companions, and that is what I now propose to do.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Certainly it is true that Christians, so far as they themselves are concerned, are subject neither to law nor sword, and have need of neither. But take heed and first fill the world with real Christians before you attempt to rule it in a Christian and evangelical manner. This you will never accomplish; for the world and the masses are and always will be un-Christian, even if they are all baptized and Christian in name.

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p. 91
5 months 3 weeks ago

The Diary of Vaslav Nijinjsky reaches a limit of sincerity beyond any of the documents that we have referred to on this study. There are other modern works that express the same sense that civilized life is a form of living death; notably the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the novels of Franz Kafka; but there is an element of prophetic denunciation in both, the attitude of healthy men rebuking their sick neighbors. We possess no other record of the Outsider's problems that was written by a man about to be defeated and permanently smashed by those problems.

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p. 115
7 months 2 weeks ago

Avarice and injustice are always shortsighted, and they did not foresee how much this regulation must obstruct improvement, and thereby hurt in the long-run the real interest of the landlord.

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Chapter II, p. 426-427.
4 months 1 week ago

Finally, and... somewhat belatedly, there is the growing of a left that... has now been energized and is increasingly vocal... in certain quarters of the cultural community, in the arts and the universities, in Hollywood, in the media... where in some versions it also engages in a kind of illiberal... politics.

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20:21
7 months 2 weeks ago

Either Man will abolish war, or war will abolish Man.

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Fact and Fiction (1961), Part IV, Ch. 10: "Can War Be Abolished?", p. 276
6 months 2 weeks ago

When we consider the being and substance of that universe in which we are immutably set, we shall discover that neither we ourselves nor any substance doth suffer death; for nothing is in fact diminished in its substance, but all things, wandering through infinite space, undergo change of aspect.

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Introductory Epistle
7 months 2 weeks ago

There is no author to whom my father thought himself more indebted for his own mental culture, than Plato, or whom he more frequently recommended to young student. I can bear similar testimony in regard to myself. The Socratic method, of which the Platonic dialogues are the chief example, is unsurpassed as a discipline for correcting the errors, and clearing up the confusions incident to the intellectus sibi permissus...

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(pp. 21-22)
3 months 1 week ago

There is perhaps nothing more interesting than to listen to a superior man talk of what he does not know. He advances slowly, and scarcely puts his foot down without knowing if the ground is solid; he looks for plausible analogies; he tries to attach his ideas to higher and incontestable principles; he always has the tone of looking, never that of teaching; and it often happens that, even if he is mistaken, he leaves a great enough idea of his mental honesty.

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p. 43
3 months 1 week ago

Let what will be said or done, preserve your sang-froid immovably, and to every obstacle, oppose patience, perseverance, and soothing language.

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Letter to William Short
3 months 4 weeks ago

All right, men are as they should be, can be. What should they be? Surely not more than they can be! And what can they be? Not more, again, than they - can, than they have the competence, the force, to be. But this they really are, because what they are not, they are incapable of being; for to be capable means - really to be. One is not capable for anything that one really is not; one is not capable of anything that one does not really do. Could a man blinded by cataract see? Oh, yes, if he had his cataract successfully removed. But now he cannot see because he does not see. Possibility and reality always coincide. One can do nothing that one does not, as one does nothing that one cannot.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 291
3 months 4 weeks ago

There is no reason why poverty should call us away from philosophy-no, nor even actual want. For when hastening after wisdom, we must endure even hunger. Men have endured hunger when their towns were besieged, and what other reward for their endurance did they obtain than that they did not fall under the conqueror's power? How much greater is the promise of the prize of everlasting liberty, and the assurance that we need fear neither God nor man! Even though we starve, we must reach that goal.

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6 months 6 days ago

Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites? Shew me the tribute money.

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22:18-19 (KJV)

I reduce to two the systems of philosophy which deal with man's soul. The first and older system is materialism; the second is spiritualism.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

They certainly demonstrate that Seth, whether an aspect of Jane Robert's unconscious mind or a genuine "spirit," was of a high level of intelligence. Yet when Jane Roberts produced a book that purported to be the after-death journal of the philosopher William James, it was difficult to take it seriously. James's works are noted for their vigour and clarity of style; Jane Robert's "communicator" writes like an undergraduate . . . there is a clumsiness here that is quite unlike James's swift-moving, colloquial prose.

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p. 390
5 months 4 weeks ago

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

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John Cumming trans., p. 7
6 months 2 weeks ago

And now once again I asked myself the question: do I love her? And once more I could not answer, that is to say, again, for the hundredth time, I answered that I hated her.

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1 month 1 week ago

I disagree with this. If the truth is explained well, then the misunderstanding is an individual occurrence. If it is not explained well, then this doesn't apply.

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There is nothing truly real, save that which feels, suffers, pities, loves and desires, save consciousness. And we need God in order to save consciousness; not in order to think existence, but in order to live it; not in order to know the why and how of it, but in order to feel the wherefore of it.

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3 months 1 week ago

In ourselves alone the absolute light keeps shining, a sigillum falsi et sui, mortis et vitae aeternae [false signal and signal of eternal life and death itself], and the fantastic move to it begins: to the external interpretation of the daydream, the cosmic manipulation of a concept that is utopian in principle. Finding this concept, finding the right for whose sake it behoves us to live, to be organized, to have time-this is where we are headed, why we are clearing the metaphysically constitutive trails afresh, calling for what is not, building into the blue that lines all edges of the world; this is why we build ourselves into the blue and search for truth and reality where mere factuality vanishes.

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p. 43
6 months 2 weeks ago

All became so jealous of the rights of their own personality that they did their very utmost to curtail and destroy them in others, and made that the chief thing in their lives. Slavery followed, even voluntary slavery; the weak eagerly submitted to the strong, on condition that the latter aided them to subdue the still weaker. Then there were saints who came to these people, weeping, and talked to them of their pride, of their loss of harmony and due proportion, of their loss of shame. They were laughed at or pelted with stones.

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3 months 1 week ago

I shall take leave to think the worse, rather of the practice of the men than of the book of God.

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Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures (1661) "Seventh Objection"
7 months 2 weeks ago

Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man.

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p. 486
8 months 1 week ago

The fact that the general incidence of leukemia has doubled in the last two decades may be due, partly, to the increasing use of x-rays for numerous purposes. The incidence of leukemia in doctors, who are likely to be so exposed, is twice that of the general public. In radiologists the incidence is ten times greater.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

"The will of the nation" is one of those expressions which have been most profusely abused by the wily and the despotic of every age.

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Chapter IV.
7 months 1 week ago

Recalling all the erroneous things that doctors have been able to say about sex or madness does us a fat lot of good. I think that what is currently politically important is to determine the regime of verediction established at a given moment ... on the basis of which you can now recognize, for example, that doctors in the nineteenth century said so many stupid things about sex. ... It is not so much the history of the true or the history of the false as the history of verediction which has a political significance.

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Lecture 2, January 17, 1979, p. 36
3 months 1 week ago

When we reflect, that the Inquisition, by its restrictions, and authority, would have prevented the French revolution,-it is hard to say, whether the Sovereign, who, wholly, and without reserve, gave up this instrument, would not, in reality, be doing an injury to humanity.

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p. 31
2 weeks 6 days ago

Maybe...logic forms are mind independent would be better modern framing....

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7 months 2 weeks ago

He is happy, whose circumstances suit his temper; but he is more excellent, who can suit his temper to any circumstances.

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§ 6.9 : Of Qualities Useful to Ourselves, Pt. 1
7 months 2 weeks ago

There's a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire - poison and antidote.

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In Kenneth Harris Talking To: Bertrand Russell, 1971

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