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Martin Luther
Martin Luther
4 months 5 days ago
Concerning the female sorcerer. Roman law...

Concerning the female sorcerer. Roman law also prescribes this. Why does the law name women more than men here, even though men are also guilty of this? Because women are more susceptible to those superstitions of Satan; take Eve, for example. They are commonly called "wise women." Let them be killed.

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Sermon on Exodus, 1526, WA XVI, p. 551 as quoted in Luther on Women: A Sourcebook, edited by Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, (2003), p. 231
Philosophical Maxims
Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri
3 weeks 2 days ago
Even when labor is subjugated by...

Even when labor is subjugated by capital it always necessarily maintains its own autonomy, and this ever more clearly true today with respect to the new immaterial, cooperative and collaborative forms of labor. This relationship is not isolated to the economic terrain but, as we will argue later, spills over into the biopolitical terrain of society as a hole, including military conflicts. In any case, we should recognize here that even in asymmetrical conflicts victory in terms of complete domination is not possible. All that can be achieved is a provisional and limited maintenance of control and order that must constantly be policed and preserved. Counterinsurgency is a full-time job.

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54
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel
2 months 4 weeks ago
Where there is…

Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.

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"Selected Ideas (1799-1800)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (1968) #101
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 3 weeks ago
TV is not good at covering...

TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern...[TV] tends to fosters patterns rather than events.

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Philosophical Maxims
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
8 months 3 days ago
Take ideology seriously

What is really disturbing about The Name of the Rose, however, is the underlying belief in the liberating, anti-totalitarain force of laughter, of ironic distance. Our thesis here is almost the exact opposite of the underlying premise of Eco's novel: in contemporary socities, democratic or totalitarian, that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are so to speak, part of the game. The ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally. Perhaps the greatest danger for totalitarianism is people who take ideology seriously.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 3 weeks ago
"Their own strength has betrayed them....

"Their own strength has betrayed them. They have [...] pulled down Deep Heaven on their heads."

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Ch. 13 : They Have Pulled Down Deep Heaven on Their Heads
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
3 months 3 days ago
Half our days we pass in...

Half our days we pass in the shadow of the earth; and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 3 weeks ago
It is so characteristic, that just...

It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.

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p. 96
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 weeks ago
What can be said, lacks reality....

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 4 weeks ago
Although usury is itself a form...

Although usury is itself a form of credit in its bourgeoisified form, the form adapted to capital, in its pre-bourgeois form it is rather the expression of the lack of credit.

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Notebook V, The Chapter on Capital, p. 455.
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig von Mises
Ludwig von Mises
1 week 6 days ago
For the time being, the ominous...

For the time being, the ominous peril of the communist parties in the West lies in their stand on foreign affairs. The distinctive mark of all present-day communist parties is their devotion to the aggressive foreign policy of the Soviets. Whenever they must choose between Russia and their own country, they do not hesitate to prefer Russia. Their principle is: Right or wrong, my Russia. They strictly obey all orders issued from Moscow. When Russia was an ally of Hitler, the French communists sabotaged their own country's war effort and the American communists passionately opposed President Roosevelt's plans to aid England and France in their struggle against the Nazis.

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Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
4 months 1 week ago
Appearances to the mind are of...

Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man's task.

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Book I, ch. 27, § 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 weeks ago
To have failed in everything, always,...

To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 weeks ago
Philosophy's error is to be too...

Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 months 1 week ago
Whenever one tries to suppress doubt,...

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.

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Lectures in philosophy [Leçons de philosophie] (1959) as translated by Hugh Price p. 103
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 3 weeks ago
Renaissance Italy became a kind of...

Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class.

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(p. 136)
Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
3 months 3 weeks ago
At best the principles that economists...

At best the principles that economists have supposed the choices of rational individuals to satisfy can be presented as guidelines for us to consider when we make our decisions.

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Chapter IX, Section 84, p. 558
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
2 months 2 weeks ago
If the result of a war...

If the result of a war is to change nothing, but only to destroy, with the mere result that a group of human beings who do not differ notably from the conquered acquires preponderant advantages for the future, there is lacking the affective strength of an existence that has inspired faith, of an existence whose destiny would have been decided by the war.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
3 months 3 weeks ago
It is said that "being" is...

It is said that "being" is the most universal and the emptiest concept. As such it resists every attempt at definition. Nor does this most universal and thus indefinable concept need any definition. Everybody uses it constantly and also already understands what is meant by it.

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Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 3 weeks ago
The sublime is excited in me...

The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself.

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p. 14
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 3 weeks ago
A good indignation brings out all...

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

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1841
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 months 1 week ago
The state of conformity is an...

The state of conformity is an imitation of grace. By a strange mystery - which is connected with the power of the social element - a profession can confer on quite ordinary men in their exercise of it, virtues which, if they were extended to all circumstances of life, would make of them heroes or saints. But the power of the social element makes these virtues natural.

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Accordingly they need a compensation. p. 124
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 3 weeks ago
You could attach prices to thoughts....

You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.

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p. 52e
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
4 months 1 day ago
There is not a negro from...

There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.

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Chap. II.
Philosophical Maxims
Walter Kaufmann
Walter Kaufmann
3 weeks 6 days ago
There is thus a certain plausibility...

There is thus a certain plausibility to Nietzsche's doctrine, though it is dynamite. He maintains in effect that the gulf separating Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee.

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p. 151
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
3 months 3 weeks ago
A genuine first-hand religious experience like...

A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration.

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Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 weeks ago
Whether or not there exists a...

Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves - that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Searle
John Searle
2 months ago
Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism...

Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.

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Consciousness and Language (2002) p. 47.
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
3 months 4 weeks ago
That power should be exercised over...

That power should be exercised over any portion of mankind without any obligation of consulting them, is only tolerable while they are in an infantine, or a semi-barbarous state. In any civilized condition, power ought never to be exempt from the necessity of appealing to the reason, and recommending itself by motives which justify it to the conscience and feelings, of the governed.

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Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859), p. 24
Philosophical Maxims
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
2 months 2 weeks ago
People from a planet without flowers...

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

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A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970); 2001, p. 170.
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 2 weeks ago
I am not bothered by...

I am not bothered by the fact that I am not understood. I am bothered when I do not know others.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 5 days ago
All of the days go toward...

All of the days go toward death and the last one arrives there.

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Ch. 20. Of the Force of Imagination
Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
3 months 3 weeks ago
Our concern is solely with the...

Our concern is solely with the basic structure of society and its major institutions and therefore with the standard cases of social justice.

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Chapter II, Section 10, pg. 58
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 2 weeks ago
This mortal Don Quixote died and...

This mortal Don Quixote died and descended into hell, which he entered lance on rest, and freed all the condemned, as he freed the galley slaves, and he shut the gates of hell, and tore down the scroll that Dante saw there and replaced it by one on which was written "Long live hope!" and escorted by those whom he had freed, and they laughing at him, he went to heaven. And God laughed paternally at him, and this divine laughter filled his soul with eternal happiness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
4 months 1 week ago
He that gives quickly….

He that gives quickly gives twice.

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Adagia, 1508
Philosophical Maxims
Willard van Orman Quine
Willard van Orman Quine
2 months 1 week ago
Even a statement very close to...

Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle?

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"Two Dogmas of Empiricism"
Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
4 months 1 week ago
Not to be a proud and...

Not to be a proud and haughty person, you have to follow the old proverb and "know thyself." That is to say, you must regard your special talents, whatever beauty or fame you have, as gifts from God, and not as things you earned for yourself. Whatever is low and mean is not God's doing, however. Here you can only blame yourself. Remember the squalor of your birth and how naked and poor you were when you crawled into the light of day like a little animal.

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p.154
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 weeks 4 days ago
Has any man, or any society...

Has any man, or any society of men, a truth to speak, a piece of spiritual work to do; they can nowise proceed at once and with the mere natural organs, but must first call a public meeting, appoint committees, issue prospectuses, eat a public dinner; in a word, construct or borrow machinery, wherewith to speak it and do it. Without machinery, they were hopeless, helpless.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 5 days ago
Observe, observe perpetually.

Observe, observe perpetually.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
5 months ago
We have seen how it is...
We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science. Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions.
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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 weeks 4 days ago
If we read History with any...

If we read History with any degree of thoughtfulness, we shall find that checks and balances of Profit and Loss have never been the grand agents with men, that they have never been roused into deep, thorough, all-pervading efforts by any computable prospect of Profit and Loss, for any visible, finite object; but always for some invisible and infinite one.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
3 weeks ago
A man builds....
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Main Content / General
George Santayana
George Santayana
2 months 2 weeks ago
Prosperity, both for individuals and for...

Prosperity, both for individuals and for states, means possessions; and possessions mean burdens and harness and slavery; and slavery for the mind, too, because it is not only the rich man's time that is pre-empted, but his affections, his judgement, and the range of his thoughts.

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"The Irony of Liberalism"
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
2 months 3 weeks ago
Throughout all organic nature there is...

Throughout all organic nature there is at work a modifying influence of the kind... as the cause, these specific differences: an influence which, though slow in its action, does, in time, if the circumstances demand it, produce marked changes-an influence, which to all appearance, would produce in the millions of years, and under the great varieties of condition which geological records imply, any amount of change.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 5 days ago
The only good histories are those...

The only good histories are those that have been written by the persons themselves who commanded in the affairs whereof they write.

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Book II, Ch. 10. Of Books
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 4 weeks ago
Why in any case, this glorification...

Why in any case, this glorification of man? How about lions and tigers? They destroy fewer animals or human lives than we do, and they are much more beautiful than we are. How about ants? They manage the Corporate State much better than any Fascist. Would not a world of nightingales and larks and deer be better than our human world of cruelty and injustice and war? The believers in Cosmic Purpose make much of our supposed intelligence, but their writings make one doubt it. If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment in, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final result of all my efforts.

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Religion and Science, 1935
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
4 months 1 week ago
Since it is Reason which shapes...

Since it is Reason which shapes and regulates all other things, it ought not itself to be left in disorder.

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Book I, ch. 17, 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
4 months 6 days ago
Truth will sooner come out from...

Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion.

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Aphorism 20
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
2 months 2 weeks ago
The slaves of developed industrial civilization...

The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves.

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p. 32
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
3 months 1 week ago
Truth is so great a perfection,...

Truth is so great a perfection, that if God would render himself visible to men, he would choose light for his body and truth for his soul.

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As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, both Ancient and Modern (1908) by Tyron Edwards, p. 592
Philosophical Maxims
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