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5 months 2 weeks ago

I believe that the man choosing progress can find a new unity through the full development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom.

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3 months 1 week ago

So long as you are a slave to the opinions of the many you have not yet approached freedom or tasted its nectar...But I do not mean by this that we ought to be shameless before all men and to do what we ought not; but all that we refrain from and all that we do, let us not do or refrain from merely because it seems to the multitude somehow honorable or base, but because it is forbidden by reason and the god within us.

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Oration to the Uneducated Cynics
5 months 5 days ago

What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. The child watching TV loves these people, you know -- they're in color, and they're talking to the child. Why wouldn't a child relate to these people? And you know, if you can't sleep at 3 o'clock in the morning, you can turn on a switch, and there are your friends and relatives, and they obviously like you. And they're charming. Who wouldn't want Peter Jennings for a relative? This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house.

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Interviewed by Frank Houston, "The Salon Interview: Kurt Vonnegut", Salon
5 months 4 weeks ago

In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity. What will be the course of this revolution? Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

What worries me about religion is that it teaches people to be satisfied with not understanding the world they live in.

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Heart Of The Matter: God Under The Microscope | BBC
6 months 3 weeks ago

With a foolish man make no dispute.

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7 months 3 days ago

In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

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Quotation and Originality
3 months 2 weeks ago

No man ought to glory except in that which is his own.

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3 months 1 week ago

True peace of mind comes from accepting the worst.

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p. 158
6 months 3 days ago

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.

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Act I.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Statues are not about history. We don't memorialize each piece of history. We memorialize things that we want to value and things that we want our children to walk by and say "This person embodied the values that I care about." Therefore, statues are about values not about history.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

I'd rather be mad than feel pleasure.

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§ 3; quoted also by Eusebius of Caesarea, Praeparatio Evangelica xv. 13
5 months 1 day ago

The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.

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(p. 55)
6 months 4 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 2 weeks ago

It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term "feminism," to focus on the fact that to be "feminist" in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.

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7 months 4 days ago

Whatever is known to us by consciousness, is known beyond possibility of question. What one sees or feels, whether bodily or mentally, one cannot but be sure that one sees or feels. No science is required for the purpose of establishing such truths; no rules of art can render our knowledge of them more certain than it is in itself. There is no logic for this portion of our knowledge.

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p. 4
3 months ago

In matter of writing or reading thou must needs be taught before thou can do either: much more in matter of life.

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XI, 29 (el en)
6 months ago

Most observers of the French Revolution, especially the clever and noble ones, have explained it as a life-threatening and contagious illness. They have remained standing with the symptoms and have interpreted these in manifold and contrary ways. Some have regarded it as a merely local ill. The most ingenious opponents have pressed for castration. They well noticed that this alleged illness is nothing other than the crisis of beginning puberty.

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Fragment No. 105
5 months 5 days ago

There is one mistake we got to avoid, and that is the mistake of supposing that if you simulate it, you duplicate it. This is a deep mistake embedded in our popular culture - that simulation is equivalent to duplication, but of course it isn't. A perfect simulation of the brain - say, on a computer - would no longer thereby be conscious than a perfect simulation of a rainstorm on a weather-predicting computer will leave us all wet.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy. 

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p. 330
3 months 3 days ago

But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.

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Letter to Charles Willson Peale
7 months 3 weeks ago

The double meaning has been given to suit people's diverse intelligence. The apparent contradictions are meant to stimulate the learned to deeper study.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

If all the parts of the universe are interchained in a certain measure, any one phenomenon will not be the effect of a single cause, but the resultant of causes infinitely numerous; it is, one often says, the consequence of the state of the universe the moment before.

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5 months 1 week ago

To me, believing that some correspondence intrinsically just is reference (not as a result of our operational and theoretical constraints, or our intentions, but as an ultimate metaphysical fact) amounts to a magical theory of reference. Reference itself becomes what Locke called a 'substantial form' (an entity which intrinsically belongs with a certain name) on such a view. Even if one is willing to contemplate such unexplainable metaphysical facts, the epistemological problems that accompany such a metaphysical view seem insuperable. For, assuming a world of mind- independent, discourse-independent entities (this is the presupposition of the view we are discussing), there are, as we have seen, many different 'correspondences' which represent possible or candidate reference relations (infinitely many, in fact, if there are infinitely many things in the universe).

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Chap. 2 : A problem about reference
5 months 2 weeks ago

There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilisation at which we have arrived. The stimulus, the training, the time, are all three wanting to us; or, in other words, the means and inducements are not there. Look at the poor lives we lead. It is a wonder that we are so good as we are, not that we are so bad. In looking round we are struck with the power of the organisations we see, not with their want of power. Now and then, it is true, we are conscious that there is an inferior organisation, but, in general, just the contrary.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Yet when we speak of time... do we not unconsciously adopt this hypothesis... and put ourselves in the place of this imperfect god... Do not even the atheists put themselves in the place where god would be..?

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3 months 2 weeks ago

God, our Father, has given us the life and the art of healing to protect and maintain it.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Notwithstanding their attacks on the basic conception of rationalism, on synthetic a priori judgments, that is, material propositions that cannot be contradicted by any experience, the empiricist posits the forms of being as constant.

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p. 146.
8 months 3 days ago

The bodies of which the world is composed are solids, and therefore have three dimensions. Now, three is the most perfect number, it is the first of numbers, for of one we do not speak as a number, of two we say both, but three is the first number of which we say all. Moreover, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

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3 months 1 week ago

Objectivity does not simply involve passivity and detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement.

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p. 403
4 months 3 weeks ago

We have seen that the true source of the power of demagogues is the obstinacy of rulers and that a liberal Government makes a conservative people. 

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Speech in the House of Commons on the Reform Bill (5 July 1831), quoted in Speeches of the Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay, M.P. (1854), pp. 28-29
7 months 1 week ago

Nature offers nothing that can be called this man's rather than another's ; but, under nature, everything belongs to all - that is, they have authority to claim it for themselves. But, under dominion, where it is by common law determined what belongs to this man, and what to that, he is called just who has a constant will to render to every man his own, but he, unjust who strives, on the contrary, to make his own that which belongs to another.

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Ch. 2, Of Natural Right
8 months ago

The ancients, even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

A scholar who loves comfort is not worthy of the name.

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7 months 4 days ago

Merely to come into the world the heir of a fortune is not to be born, but to be still-born, rather. To be supported by the charity of friends, or a government-pension, - provided you continue to breathe, - by whatever fine synonymes you describe these relations, is to go into the almshouse.

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p. 487
5 months 2 weeks ago

It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.

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Theories and Things, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981
3 months ago

A horse at the end of the race...A dog when the hunt is over...A bee with its honey stored...And a human being after helping others. They don't make a fuss about it. They just go on to something else, as the vine looks forward to bearing fruit again in season. We should be like that. Acting almost unconsciously.

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(Hays translation) V, 6
7 months 3 days ago

For the prevision is allied Unto the thing so signified; Or say, the foresight that awaits Is the same Genius that creates.

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Fate
6 months 1 week ago

Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is for ever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.

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Book Two, Chapter II.
5 months 3 days ago

Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen.

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Ch. 8

A mere nothing, a tiny fibre, something that could never be found by the most delicate anatomy, would have made of Erasmus and Fontenelle two idiots, and Fontenelle himself speaks of this very fact in one of his best dialogues.

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8 months 1 day ago

Modesty is an unnatural attitude, and one which is only with difficulty taught to children.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Dialectical logic undoes the abstractions of formal logic and of transcendental philosophy, but it also denies the concreteness of immediate experience. To the extent to which this experience comes to rest with the things as they appear and happen to be, it is a limited and even false experience. It attains its truth if it has freed itself from the deceptive objectivity which conceals the factors behind the facts - that is, if it understands its world as a historical universe, in which the established facts are the work of the historical practice of man.

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p. 141

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