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3 months 2 days ago

Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful.

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The less identity, the more violence. "Violence in the media." Canadian Forum. Volume 56, 1976, p. 9
3 months 2 weeks ago

The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.

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H 7 Variant translation: The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.
1 month 3 weeks ago

Complete, at the same time, was his confidence in his own judgment when it spoke to him decisively. He was one of those few that could believe and know as well as inquire and be of opinion. When I remember how much he admired intellectual force, how much he had of it himself, and yet how unconsciously and contentedly he gave others credit for superiority, I again see the healthy spirit of the genuine man.

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4 months 2 days ago

All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice - that is, on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity.

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5 months 5 days ago

Instead of noble men, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, round a little there and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

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Editorial, Andhra Granthalayam, vol. 1, no. 2 (1939) p. 6
5 months 2 weeks ago

To none is life given in freehold; to all on lease.

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Book III, line 971 (tr. R. E. Latham)
1 month 5 days ago

Look upon men and pity them. Look at yourself amid all men and pity yourself. In the obscure dusk of life we touch and fumble at each other, we ask questions, we listen, we shout for help.

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3 months 2 days ago

The pre-atomist multisensory void was an animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval, neither container nor contained, acoustic space penetrated by tactility.

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p. 34
3 months 1 day ago

Have courage, or cunning, when you deal with an enemy.

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Maxim 156
1 month 2 weeks ago

Valor withers without adversity.

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De Providentia (On Providence), 2.4
3 months 3 weeks ago

As in the presence of the Master, the Servants are equall, and without any honour at all; So are the Subjects, in the presence of the Soveraign. And though they shine some more, some lesse, when they are out of his sight; yet in his presence, they shine no more than the Starres in presence of the Sun.

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The Second Part, Chapter 18, p. 93
5 months 3 weeks ago

I am a Roman citizen.

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Against Verres [In Verrem], part 2, book 5, section 57; reported in Cicero, The Verrine Orations, trans. L. H. G. Greenwood (1935), vol. 2, p. 629
5 months 4 days ago

The "through-and-through" universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible impeccable all-pervasiveness. Its necessity, with no possibilities; its relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights ... It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.

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Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), Ch. 12 : Absolutism and Empiricism
3 months 2 weeks ago

Might is that which makes a thing of anybody who comes under its sway. When exercised to the full, it makes a thing of man in the most literal sense, for it makes him a corpse.

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in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 153
6 months 2 days ago

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

I am now even more persuaded of the urgent need to study why Socrates was accused. The dislike of philosophy is perennial, and the seeds of the condemnation of Socrates are present at all times, not in the bosoms of pleasure-seekers, who don't give a damn, but in those of high-minded and idealistic persons who do not want to submit their aspirations to examination.

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Western Civ, p. 19.
1 month 3 weeks ago

Thus Mr. Sale informs me, the old Arab Tribes would gather in liveliest gaudeamus, and sing, and kindle bonfires, and wreathe crowns of honour, and solemnly thank the gods that, in their Tribe too, a Poet had shewn himself. As indeed they well might; for what usefuller, I say not nobler and heavenlier thing could the gods, doing their very kindest, send to any Tribe or Nation, in any time or circumstances?

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1 month 4 days ago

In the North they are cool, sober, laborious, persevering, independent, jealous of their own liberties, and just to those of others, interested, chicaning, superstitious and hypocritical in their religion. In the South they are fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those of others, generous, candid, without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart.

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Letter to François-Jean de Chastellux (September 2, 1785). archives.gov Also quoted in Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (1984), p. 827
4 months 5 days ago

Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolitic.

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5 months 4 days ago

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

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Section 1, paragraph 14.
4 months ago

The universal view melts things into a blur.

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5 months 3 days ago

The true Enlightenment thinker, the true rationalist, never wants to talk anyone into anything. No, he does not even want to convince; all the time he is aware that he may be wrong. Above all, he values the intellectual independence of others too highly to want to convince them in important matters. He would much rather invite contradiction, preferably in the form of rational and disciplined criticism. He seeks not to convince but to arouse - to challenge others to form free opinions.

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5 months 6 days ago

Ancient histories, as one of our wits has said, are but fables that have been agreed upon.

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Jeannot et Colin, 1764
4 months ago

Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.

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1 month 4 days ago

The selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.

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Letter to Larkin Smith
3 months 2 days ago

The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.

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quoted in "Marshall McLuhan, Author, Dies; Declared 'Medium Is the Message'" by Alden Whitman, The New York Times, January 1, 1981
1 month 4 weeks ago

Now what is science? ...it is before all a classification, a manner of bringing together facts which appearances separate, though they are bound together by some natural and hidden kinship. Science, in other words, is a system of relations. ...it is in relations alone that objectivity must be sought. ...it is relations alone which can be regarded as objective.External objects... are really objects and not fleeting and fugitive appearances, because they are not only groups of sensations, but groups cemented by a constant bond. It is this bond, and this bond alone, which is the object in itself, and this bond is a relation.

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1 month 1 day ago

As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame that comes after is oblivion.

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II, 17
4 months ago

The most interesting aspect of suffering is the sufferer's belief in its absoluteness. He believes he has a monopoly on suffering. I think that I alone suffer, that I alone have the right to suffer, although I also realize that there are modalities of suffering more terrible than mine, pieces of flesh falling from the bones, the body crumbling under one's very eyes, monstrous, criminal , shameful sufferings. One asks oneself, How can this be, and if it be, how can one still speak of finality and other such old wives' tales? Suffering moves me so much that I lose all my courage. I lose heart because I do not understand why there is suffering in the world.

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in essay: the monopoly of suffering
5 months 4 days ago

Political Economy regards the proletarian ... like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle. ... (1) What is the meaning, in the development of mankind, of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labor? (2) What mistakes are made by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise wages and thereby improve the situation of the working class, or - like Proudhon - see equality of wages as the goal of social revolution?.

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First Manuscript - Wages of Labour, p. 6.
2 months 4 weeks ago

Women will be no longer made the slaves of, or dependent upon men ... They will be equal in education, rights, privileges and personal liberty.

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Sixth Part
5 months 3 days ago

Kant ... discovered "the scandal of reason," that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.

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p. 14
1 month 4 days ago

Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

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You always hear people say that philosophy makes no progress and that the same philosophical problems which were already preoccupying the Greeks are still troubling us today. But people who say that do not understand the reason why it has to be so. The reason is that our language has remained the same and always introduces us to the same questions. ... I read: "philosophers are no nearer to the meaning of 'Reality' than Plato got,...". What a strange situation. How extraordinary that Plato could have got even as far as he did! Or that we could not get any further! Was it because Plato was so extremely clever?

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p. 15e
5 months 1 week ago

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.

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Proposition touching Amendment of Laws
3 months 1 day ago

Patience is a remedy for every sorrow.

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Maxim 170
5 months 1 week ago

No proceeding is better than that which you have concealed from the enemy until the time you have executed it. To know how to recognize an opportunity in war, and take it, benefits you more than anything else. Nature creates few men brave, industry and training makes many. Discipline in war counts more than fury.

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Book 7
1 month 4 days ago

I'm not a Baptist in any formal way. I go to the Baptist church, where my wife plays the piano, on days of bad weather. On days of good weather, I ramble off into the woods somewhere. I am a person who takes the Gospel seriously, but I have had trouble conforming my thoughts to a denomination.

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The Brian Lehrer Show
1 month 3 weeks ago

All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Whether we take these characters then, or such minor ones as those which are derivable from the proportional length of the spines in the cervical vertebrae, and the like, there is no doubt whatsoever as to the marked difference between Man and the Gorilla; but there is as little, that equally marked differences, of the very same order, obtain between the Gorilla and the lower apes.

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Ch.2, p. 92
5 months 1 week ago

Not because Socrates said so, but because it is in truth my own disposition - and perchance to some excess - I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as a Frenchman, making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond.

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Ch. 9
3 months 3 weeks ago

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

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22:18-19 (KJV)
3 months ago

I would mind more if I could claim that The Selfish Gene had become severely outmoded and superseded. Unfortunately (from one point of view) I cannot. Details have changed and factual examples burgeoned mightily. But, with an exception that I shall discuss in a moment, there is little in the book that I would rush to take back now, or apologize for.

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Arthur Cain, late Professor of Zoology at Liverpool and one of my inspiring tutors at Oxford in the sixties, described The Selfish Gene in 1976 as a 'young man's book'.
4 months 2 days ago

If there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind.

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Vol. 1, bk. 1, ch.4
4 months 3 weeks ago

There were two brothers called Both and Either; perceiving Either was a good, understanding, busy fellow, and Both a silly fellow and good for little, Philip said, "Either is both, and Both is neither."

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35 Philip
2 months 1 week ago

The British state has defaulted on its core functions while attempting to remake society.

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New Statesman, 9 October 2024

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