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2 months 3 weeks ago

A science that observes the laws of causation, and so is value-free, threatens human freedom and man's religious, ethical, and legal responsibility. The philosophy of values raised to that challenge, in the sense that it opposed a sphere of values, as a realm of ideal valuations, to a sphere of being that was only causally understood. It was an attempt to assert the human being as a free, responsible creature, indeed not in itself, but at least, in its valuation, what one called value. That attempt was put forth as a positivistic substitute for the metaphysical.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war. All suffering is our own.

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p. 291
2 months 3 weeks ago

Coexistent polarities are fundamentally identical.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

As there are many to whom the beauty and harmony of economic laws are hidden, and to whom the inspiring thought of a social order in which there should be work for all, leisure for all, and abundance for all - in which all might be at least as true, as generous and as manful as they wish to be - is shut out by the deference paid to economic authorities who have as it were given bonds not to find that for which they profess to seek, so there are many to-day to whom any belief in the spiritual element, in the existence of God and in a future life, is darkened or destroyed, not so much by difficulties they themselves find, but by what they take to be the teachings of science.

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Conclusion : The Moral of this Examination
4 months 3 weeks ago

An appeal to his alarm is never a good plan to rid oneself of a spirited young man.

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The Pavilion on the Links, ch. III.
5 months 1 week ago

The 'open' mind of the poet and artist can sense realities beyond the reach of our normal senses. The real problem is that our materialistic assumptions have a number of false premises built into them: it is only when we recognize this that we see there is no sharp dividing line between the everyday world and the invisible world of the clairvoyant.

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p. 294
5 months 2 weeks ago

The world of immediate experience-the world in which we find ourselves living-must be comprehended, transformed, even subverted in order to become that which it really is.

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p. 123
5 months 3 weeks ago

In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off.

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5 months 1 day ago

Never would the humanities or psychoanalysis have existed if it had been miraculously possible to reduce man to his "rational" behaviors.

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"The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses," p. 132
5 months 4 weeks ago

He was not merely a chip of the old Block, but the old Block itself.

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On Pitt's First Speech (26 February 1781), from Wraxall's Memoirs, First Series, vol. i. p. 342
6 months 3 weeks ago

Ambition is the death of thought.

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p. 77e
5 months 2 weeks ago

To eat, teeth must meet.

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The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), p. 66.
5 months 1 week ago

In a sense, all explanation must end in an ultimate arbitrariness.

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Ch. 5: "The Romantic Reaction", p. 130
5 months 3 weeks ago

We exhort the compromisers to open their hearts to truth, to free themselves of their wretched and blind circumspection, of their intellectual arrogance, and of the servile fear which dries up their souls and paralyzes their movements. Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!

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"The Reaction in Germany" (1842) Often paraphrased as, "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge"
7 months 2 days ago

Actions may be laudable or blameable; but they cannot be reasonable: Laudable or blameable, therefore, are not the same with reasonable or unreasonable. The merit and demerit of actions frequently contradict, and sometimes controul our natural propensities. But reason has no such influence. Moral distinctions, therefore, are not the offspring of reason. Reason is wholly inactive, and can never be the source of so active a principle as conscience, or a sense of morals.

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Part 1, Section 1
5 months 2 weeks ago

Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you. Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.

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17:20-21 (KJV)
2 months 4 weeks ago

My prayer is not the whimpering of a beggar nor a confession of love. Nor is it the petty reckoning of a small tradesman: Give me and I shall give you. My prayer is the report of a soldier to his general: This is what I did today, this is how I fought to save the entire battle in my own sector, these are the obstacles I encountered, this is how I plan to fight tomorrow.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The ambassador of Russia and the grandees who accompanied him were so gorgeous that all London crowded to stare at them, and so filthy that nobody dared to touch them. They came to the court balls dropping pearls and vermin.

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Vol. V, ch. 23
5 months 2 weeks ago

We never know, believe me, when we have succeeded best.

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Essays and Soliloquies
7 months ago

Lying... is so ill a quality, and the mother of so many ill ones that spawn from it, and take shelter under it, that a child should be brought up in the greatest abhorrence of it imaginable. It should be always spoke of before him with the utmost detestation, as a quality so wholly inconsistent with the name and character of a gentleman, that no body of any credit can bear the imputation of a lie; a mark that is judg'd in utmost disgrace, which debases a man to the lowest degree of a shameful meanness, and ranks him with the most contemptible part of mankind and the abhorred rascality; and is not to be endured in any one who would converse with people of condition, or have any esteem or reputation in the world.

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Sec. 131
6 months 3 weeks ago

There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.

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Ch. 11
2 months 3 weeks ago

The metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization.

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5 months 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
4 months 2 weeks ago

Only two suppositions seem to be open to us - Either each species of crocodile has been specially created, or it has arisen out of some pre-existing form by the operation of natural causes. Choose your hypothesis; I have chosen mine. I can find no warranty for believing in the distinct creation of a score of successive species of crocodiles in the course of countless ages of time.

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6 months 2 days ago

Happiest are the people who give most happiness to others.

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As quoted in Happyology by Harald W. Tietze, p. 28
4 months 4 weeks ago

If Mormonism is able to endure, unmodified, until it reaches the third and fourth generation, it is destined to become the greatest power the world has ever known.

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This quote originates in Thomas J. Yates, "Count Tolstoi and the 'American Religion' ", Improvement Era (February 1939)
5 months 1 week ago

I prefer to reach the few who really want to learn, rather than the many who come to be amused.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Hegel made famous his aphorism that all the rational is real and all the real rational; but there are many of us who, unconvinced by Hegel, continue to believe that the real, the really real, is irrational, that reason builds upon irrationalities. Hegel, a great framer of definitions, attempted with definitions to reconstruct the universe, like that artillery sergeant who said that cannon were made by taking a hole and enclosing it with steel.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The universe itself is God and the universal outpouring of its soul.

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As quoted in De Natura Deorum by Cicero, i. 15.
6 months 2 weeks ago

I am not adverting here to the alleged privacy of experience to its possessor. The point of view in question is not one accessible only to a single individual. Rather it is a type. It is often possible to take up a point of view other than one's own, so the comprehension of such facts is not limited to one's own case. There is a sense in which phenomenological facts are perfectly objective: one person can know or say of another what the quality of the other's experience is. They are subjective, however, in the sense that even this objective ascription of experience is possible only for someone sufficiently similar to the object of ascription to be able to adopt his point of view - to understand the ascription in the first person as well as in the third, so to speak. The more different from oneself the other experiencer is, the less success one can expect with this enterprise.

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pp. 171-172
7 months 2 days ago

The love of God consists in an ardent desire to procure the general welfare, and reason teaches me that there is nothing which contributes more to the general welfare of mankind than the perfection of reason.

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Closing sentence of the Preface to the general science (1677) (in P. Wiener (ed.), Leibniz Selections, Macmilland Press Ltd, 1951).
2 months 3 weeks ago

Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around.

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II, 7
Where there have been powerful governments, societies, religions, public opinions, in short wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated; for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force it way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart.
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6 months 4 weeks ago

You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake; you must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand heap.

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January 25, 1858
6 months 4 weeks ago

The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 1, § 17
2 months 3 weeks ago

The spiritual men of India, a great and watchful multitude whose spiritual status is unattainable, are many of them catholics in a deeper sense than we of the West have yet given to the word ....

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In his book, Two Letters, 1934
5 months 2 weeks ago

Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain without being uncovered.

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5 months 1 week ago

In contrast to festivals, events do not create community.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Fifth, in what measure this unification acts, seems to be regulated only by special rules; or, at least, we cannot in our present knowledge say how far it goes. But it may be said that, judging by appearances, the amount of arbitrariness in the phenomenon of human minds is neither altogether trifling nor very prominent.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

It does not matter whether the right to govern is hereditary or obtained with the consent of the governed. A State is absolute in the sense which I have in mind when it claims the right to a monopoly of all the force within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life, to tax, to establish and dis-establish property, to define crime, to punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family, to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinions. The modern State claims all of these powers, and, in the matter of theory, there is no real difference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and democrats.

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Ch. V: "The Breakdown of Authority", §5, p. 80.
5 months 2 weeks ago

If you say to someone who has ears to hear: "What you are doing to me is not just," you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like, "I have the right..." or "you have no right to..." They evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention.

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p. 63
3 months 3 weeks ago

The groups are not unified under any single authority but rather relate to each other in a network structure. Social forums, affinity groups, and other forms of democratic decision-making are the basis of the movements, and they manage to act together based on what they have in common. ... These globalization protest movements are obviously limited in many regards. First of all, although their vision and desire is global in scope, they have thus far only involved significant numbers in North America and Europe. Second, so long, as they remain merely protests movements, traveling from one summit meeting to the next, they will be incapable of becoming a foundational struggle and of articulating an alternative to social relations. These limitations may only be temporary obstacles, and the movements may discover ways to overcome them.

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86-87
4 months 3 weeks ago

Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology.

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(p. 85)
7 months 1 week ago

The law of nature teaches me to speak in my own defence: With respect to this charge of bribery I am as innocent as any man born on St. Innocents Day. I never had a bribe or reward in my eye or thought when pronouncing judgment or order. I am ready to make an oblation of myself to the King.

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(17 April 1621) Quoted by Baron John Campbell (1818), J. Murray in "The Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal of England"
2 months 3 weeks ago

Reverence the gods, and help men. Short is life.

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VI, 30
6 months 4 weeks ago

And striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form.

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May-Day
5 months 3 weeks ago

Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations. Thus the individual, his freedom and reason, are the products of society, and not vice versa: society is not the product of individuals comprising it; and the higher, the more fully the individual is developed, the greater his freedom - and the more he is the product of society, the more does he receive from society and the greater his debt to it.

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As quoted in The Philosophy of Bakunin (1953) edited by G. P. Maximoff, p. 158
5 months 3 weeks ago

We always love . . . despite; and that "despite" covers an infinity.

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