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6 months 3 weeks ago

He who has thought most deeply loves what is most alive.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

The pursuit of philosophy is founded on the belief that knowledge is good, even if what is known is painful. A man imbued with the philosophic spirit, whether a professional philosopher or not, will wish his beliefs to be as true as he can make them, and will, in equal measure, love to know and hate to be in error. This principle has a wider scope than may be apparent at first sight.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.

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Letter to Harold Adam Innis (14 March 1951), published in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 223
5 months 1 week ago

There is no such thing as gratitude in international politics.

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Abridgement of Vols. 7-10 by D. C. Somervell
8 months 3 days ago

Time, which is the author of authors.

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Book I, iv, 12
6 months 3 weeks ago

The death clock is ticking slowly in our breast, and each drop of blood measures its time, and our life is a lingering fever.

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Act II.
7 months 4 weeks ago

It would be too ridiculous to go about seriously to prove that wealth does not consist in money, or in gold and silver; but in what money purchases, and is valuable only for purchasing. Money no doubt, makes always a part of the national capital; but it has already been shown that it generally makes but a small part, and always the most unprofitable part of it.

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Chapter I, p. 470.
4 months 4 days ago

Mussolini is a man no less extraordinary than Lenin. He, too, is a political genius, of a greater reach than all the statesmen of the day, with the only exception of Lenin...

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As quoted in The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarization in the 20th Century, Jacob L. Talmon, University of California Press (1981) p. 451.
5 months 2 weeks ago

There is but one mode by which man can possess in perpetuity all the happiness which his nature is capable of enjoying, - that is by the union and co-operation of all for the benefit of each. Union and co-operation in war obviously increase the power of the individual a thousand fold. Is there the shadow of a reason why they should not produce equal effects in peace; why the principle of co-operation should not give to men the same superior powers, and advantages, (and much greater) in the creation, preservation, distribution and enjoyment of wealth?

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4 months 2 weeks ago

If the king loves music, there is little wrong in the land.

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Discourses, as quoted in "I Want to Know!" by Ivan Gogol Esipoff, The Etude, Vol. LXIII, No. 9 (September 1945), p. 496
7 months 3 weeks ago

..Whenever it ceases to be true that mankind, as a rule, prefer themselves to others, and those nearest to them to those more remote, from that moment Communism is not only practicable, but the only defensible form of society...

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.

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18:16-17 (KJV) Variant translation: Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.
7 months 3 weeks ago

That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

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March 11, 1856
4 months 2 weeks ago

There is no idea more novel, more surprising, than that of associating three hundred families of different degrees of fortune, knowledge and capacity.

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The Theory of Social Organization. Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier, p. 5.
5 months 1 week ago

That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.

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p. 160

Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.

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H 13
6 months 1 week ago

Sadism is plainly connected with the need for self-assertion. At the same time it cannot be separated from the idea of defeat. A sadist is a man, who, in some sense, has his back to the wall. Nothing is further from sadism, for example, than the cheerful, optimistic mentality of a Shaw or Wells.

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p. 158
4 months 2 days ago

It is not when he is working in the office but when he is lying idly on the sand that his soul utters, "Life is beautiful."

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Ch. I : The Awakening, p. 2
7 months 1 week ago

As touching the gods, I do not know whether they exist or not, nor how they are featured; for there is much to prevent our knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.

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Opening lines of Concerning the Gods (DK 80 B4).
6 months 6 days ago

Nothing can well be imagined more painful than the present position of woman, unless, on the one hand, she renounces all outward activity and keeps herself within the magic sphere, the bubble of her dreams; or, on the other, surrendering all aspiration, she gives herself to her real life, soul and body. For those to whom it is possible, the latter is best; for out of activity may come thought, out of mere aspiration can come nothing.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!

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1 week 2 days ago

From a different time...but....

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6 months 4 weeks ago

In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.

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Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, p. 71.
5 months 2 weeks ago

The real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things that they love, and want to preserve them from abuse and decay. They are attached to their family, their friends, their religion, and their immediate environment. They have made a lifelong distinction between the things that nourish and the things that threaten their security and peace of mind.

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Conservatism and the Conservatory,, National Review
4 months 1 week ago

What madness this is, to punish oneself because one is unfortunate, and not to lessen, but to increase one's ills! You ought to display, in this matter also, that decent behaviour and modesty which has characterised all your life: for there is such a thing as self-restraint in grief also.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labour and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science. But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting farther from your goal instead ofnearer to it - at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

I don't get the insistence on God / Objective Morality. God is whatever, and objective morality is only partially right. Of course morality comes from deterministic reality, but, it doesn't emerge until we set goals, a posteriori. Then the implied options appear out of reality. So, morality is both objective and subjective, and God is...whatever.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality. It is a dim recognition of this fact which makes much of our political propaganda sound so thin. We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life. That is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology. The tempter always works on some real weakness in our own system of values - offers food to some need which we have starved.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Since, of desires some are natural and necessary; others natural, but not necessary; and others neither natural nor necessary, but the offspring of false judgment; it must be the office of temperance to gratify the first class, as far as nature requires: to restrain the second within the bounds of moderation; and, as to the third, resolutely to oppose, and, if possible, entirely repress them.

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8 months 3 weeks ago
Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today.
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6 months 3 weeks ago

It cannot but happen that those individuals whose functions are most out of equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces, will be those to die; and that those will survive whose functions happen to be most nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces. But this survival of the fittest, implies multiplication of the fittest. Out of the fittest thus multiplied, there will, as before, be an overthrowing of the moving equilibrium wherever it presents the least opposing force to the new incident force.

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The Principles of Biology, Vol. I (1864), Part III: The Evolution of Life, Ch. 7: Indirect Equilibration
7 months 3 weeks ago

Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Not only must people know, they must see with their own eyes. Because they must be made to be afraid; but also because they must be the witnesses, the guarantors, of the punishment, and because they must to a certain extent take part in it.

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Chapter One, pp.58
6 months 2 weeks ago

If there was a God of sorrow, he would grow black heavy wings, to soar not for the skies, but for inferno.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Alas, the Hero from of old has had to cramp himself into strange shapes: the world knows not well at any time what to do with him, so foreign is his aspect in the world!

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7 months 4 weeks ago

For a very small expence the public can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education.

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Chapter I, Part III, Article II, p. 847.
6 months 3 weeks ago

Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart; nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been...destroyed by sudden environmental change.

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Letter to Clare Westcott, November 26 1975. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 514
8 months 3 weeks ago

Those who need myths are indeed poor. Here the gods serve as beds or resting places as the day races across the sky.

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8 months 2 days ago

I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.

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Ch. 26. On the Education of Children
8 months 2 days ago

Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.

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Book III, Ch. 13 Variant: Of all the infirmities we have, 'tis the most savage to despise our being. (Charles Cotton translation)
7 months 3 weeks ago

If it be said, that an Omnipotent Creator, though under no necessity of employing contrivances such as man must use, thought fit to use them in order to leave traces that would enable man to recognize his creative hand, the answer is that this equally implies a limit to his omnipotence. For if he wanted men to know that they themselves and the world are his work, he, being omnipotent, had only to will that they should be aware of it.

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pages 177-178;Early Modern Texts page 16
7 months 6 days ago

By the air which I breathe, and by the water which I drink, I will not endure to be blamed on account of this discourse.

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As reported by Heraclides Ponticus (c. 360 BC), and Diogenes Laërtius, in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, "Pythagoras", Sect. 6, in the translation of C. D. Yonge
6 months 1 week ago

A man, in so far as he is an individual, may be very sharply detached from others, a sort of spiritual crustacean, and yet be very poor in differentiating content. And further, it is true on the other hand that the more personality a man has and the greater his interior riches and the more he is a society within himself, the less brusquely he is divided from his fellows.

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6 months 1 week ago

A dangerous form of psychological splitting had to have taken place, and it continues to take place, in the psyches of many African Americans who can on one hand oppose racism, and then on the other hand passively absorb ways of thinking about beauty that are rooted in white supremacist thought.

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