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4 months 4 weeks ago

I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

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Ch. 1: The Value of Scepticism
1 month 6 days ago

To what purpose, pray, exist all these things that be born? Whence come male and female? Whence the difference in kind of all things that be, amongst visible species, unless there be certain pre-existing and previously established Reasons and Causes subsisting beforehand, in the nature of a pattern? With regard to which, though we are dull of sight, yet let us strive to clear away the mist from the eyes of the soul.

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4 months 2 days ago

Thus the social position of women is in this respect very similar to that of philosophers and of the working classes. And we now see why these three elements should be united. It is their combined action which constitutes the moral or modifying force of society.

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p. 235
3 months 2 weeks ago

The philosophical anthropologist ... can know the wholeness of the person and through it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity out and does not remain an untouched observer.

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p. 148
4 months 3 weeks ago

Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.

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Lecture VI, Pragmatism's Conception of Truth
4 months 4 weeks ago

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.

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Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, March, 1912, as quoted in Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2012), p. 1318
3 months 4 weeks ago

Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security.

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3 months 1 week ago

The liturgy of emptiness dispels the capitalist economy of the commodity.

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3 months 1 week ago

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

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p. 135; Ch. 17, December 15, 1939.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Chi Wan thought thrice, and then acted. When the Master was informed of it, he said, "Twice may do."

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3 months 1 week ago

In refusing to face evil, Sinclair has gained nothing and lost a great deal; the Buddhist scripture expenses it: those who refuse to discriminate might as well be dead.

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Chapter Three, The Romantic Outsider
3 weeks 6 days ago

Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education & free discussion are the antidotes of both.

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Letter to John Adams
4 months 3 weeks ago

The small are always dependent on the great; they are "small" precisely because they think they are independent. The great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other "greats" and who can transform it in an original manner.

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p. 35
1 month 3 weeks ago

Astronomers... define duration in the following way: time... so defined that Newton's law and that of vis viva [or of the conservation of energy] may be verified. Newton's law is an experimental truth... only approximate... We still have only a definition by approximation.

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4 months 3 days ago

Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? Without the favour of the everlasting register, the first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah's long life had been his only chronicle.Oblivion is not to be hired. The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man. Twenty seven names make up the first story before the flood, and the recorded names ever since contain not one living century. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the Æquinox? Every hour adds unto that current arithmetick, which scarce stands one moment.

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Chapter V
2 months 3 weeks ago

It is an article of passionate faith among "politically correct" biologists and anthropologists that brain size has no connection with intelligence; that intelligence has nothing to do with genes; and that genes are probably nasty fascist things anyway.

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5 months 5 days ago

There can be no doubt that the Virgin Mary is in heaven. How it happened we do not know.

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Weimar edition of Martin Luther's Works (Translation by William J. Cole) Vol. 10, p. 268

He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.

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B 30
1 month 1 week ago

Prove your words by your deeds.

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3 months 1 week ago

In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call "inert ideas"-that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful.

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5 months ago

The concept of space is not abstracted from external sensations.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 14, § 164
3 weeks 6 days ago

Philological analogies are to be preserved if possible, but modified according to scientific convenience.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

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3 months 1 week ago

If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak. That is, it creates a vision of the world that puts into the limelight the social misery that is usually hidden or concealed by the dominant viewpoints of a society. "Intellectual" in that sense simply means those who are willing to reflect critically upon themselves as well as upon the larger society and to ascertain whether there is some possibility of amelioration and betterment.

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"Chekhov, Coltrane, and Democracy: Interview by David Lionel Smith." in The Cornel West Reader. Basic Books. 2000. p. 551. ISBN 978-0-465-09110-2.
3 months 1 week ago

One of the major problems of our society is that so many people are too intelligent to accept religion, but not intelligent or strong-minded enough to look for acceptable alternatives; in the same way, many people are strong-minded enough not to want to be 'organization men', but incapable of seeing beyond an act of protest. These situations produce a sense of being 'between two stools', lacking real motive; a sense of mental strain is produced that may find its outlet in violence, or in organised anti-social behaviour.

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p. 224, Crimes of Freedom -- and their cure
5 months 1 day ago

III. Every tax ought to be levied at the time, or in the manner, in which it is most likely to be convenient for the contributor to pay it.

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Chapter II Part II, p. 893.
5 months 6 days ago

I am a lover of liberty. I will not and I cannot serve a party.

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Spongia adversus aspergines Hutteni (1523), § 176, As quoted in Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1900) by Ephraim Emerton, p. 377
3 months 2 weeks ago

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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3 weeks 3 days ago

The particular conception of ideology operates primarily with a psychology of interests, while the total conception uses a more formal functional analysis, without any reference to motivations, confining itself to an objective description of the structural differences in minds operating in different social settings. The former assumes that this or that interest is the cause of a given lie or deception. The latter presupposes simply that there is a correspondence between a given social situation and a given perspective, point of view, or apperception mass. In this case, while an analysis of constellations of interests may often be necessary it is not to establish causal connections but to characterize the total situation. Thus interest psychology tends to be displaced by an analysis of the correspondence between the situation to be known and the forms of knowledge.

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5 months 5 days ago

There never was in the world two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains; the most universal quality is diversity.

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Book II, Ch. 37. Of the Resemblance of Children to their Fathers
4 months 4 weeks ago

An individual may perceive a way of life, or a method of social organisation, by which more of the desires of mankind could be satisfied than under the existing method. If he perceives truly, and can persuade men to adopt his reform, he is justified. Without rebellion, mankind would stagnate, and injustice would be irremediable.

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Ch. 15: Power and moral codes
4 months 2 weeks ago

In a shared fish, there are no bones.

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Freeman (1948), p. 157
2 months 2 weeks ago

We know of no great revolution which might not have been prevented by compromise early and graciously made... [I]n all movements of the human mind which tend to great revolutions there is a crisis at which moderate concession may amend, conciliate, and preserve.

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'Hallam', The Edinburgh Review (September 1828), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review, Vol. I (1843), p. 216
4 months 3 weeks ago

Criminals together. We're in hell, my little friend, and there's never any mistake there. People are not damned for nothing. 

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Act 1, sc. 5 Variant translation: Among murderers. We are in hell, my dear, there is never a mistake and people are not damned for nothing.
4 months 4 weeks ago

Man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this.

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3 months 1 week ago

Society creates the victims that it afterwards vainly attempts to get rid of.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

I finished the Iliad to-day... I never admired the old fellow so much, or was so strongly moved by him. What a privilege genius like his enjoys! I could not tear myself away. I read the last five books at a stretch during my walk to-day, and was at last forced to turn into a bypath, lest the parties of walkers should see me blubbering for imaginary beings, the creations of a ballad-maker who has been dead two thousand seven hundred years. What is the power and glory of Caesar and Alexander to that? Think what it would be to be assured that the inhabitants of Monomotapa would weep over one's writings.

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Anno Domini 4551! Letter to his niece Margaret (August 1851), quoted in George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Volume II (1876), pp. 186-187
4 months 3 weeks ago

If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief.

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Ch. 1: Introductory
4 months 4 days ago

Divinity reveals herself in all things... everything has Divinity latent within itself. For she enfolds and imparts herself even unto the smallest beings, and from the smallest beings, according to their capacity. Without her presence nothing would have being, because she is the essence of the existence of the first unto the last being.

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As translated by Arthur Imerti
4 months 3 weeks ago

Earth proudly wears the Parthenon As the best gem upon her zone.

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The Problem, st. 3
1 month 3 weeks ago

The ones who are preoccupied by logic are above all; to read their works, one is tempted to believe they have advanced only step by step, after the manner of a Vauban who pushes on his trenches against the place besieged, leaving nothing to chance. The others are guided by intuition and, at the first stroke, make quick but sometimes precarious conquests, like bold cavalrymen of the advance guard.

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quoted in Jacques Hadamard, An essay on the psychology of invention in the mathematical field (1954), pp. 106.
5 months 4 weeks ago

A whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, "To hell with you."

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Quoted in "Feeling Rejected? Join Updike, Mailer, Oates..." by Barbara Bauer and Robert F. Moss, New York Times (21 July 1985), section 7, page 1, column 1
5 months 5 days ago

Courtesy is a science of the highest importance. It is, like grace and beauty in the body, which charm at first sight, and lead on to further intimacy and friendship, opening a door that we may derive instruction from the example of others, and at the same time enabling us to benefit them by our example, if there be anything in our character worthy of imitation.

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