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1 week 1 day ago

See thou tell no man; but go thy way, shew thyself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded, for a testimony unto them.

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8:4 (KJV) Said to a man cured of leprosy.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Thus parents, by humouring and cockering them when little, corrupt the principles of nature in their children, and wonder afterwards to taste the bitter waters, when they themselves have poison'd the fountain.

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Sec. 35
2 weeks 6 days ago

In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.

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Chapter XV, in a section titled Tryanny of the Majority.
1 week 6 days ago

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.

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Proposition touching Amendment of Laws
1 month 4 weeks ago

I do not speak here of divine truths... because they are infinitely superior to nature: God alone can place them in the soul... I know that he has desired that they should enter from the heart into the mind, and not from the mind into the heart, to humiliate that proud power of reasoning that pretends to the right to be the judge of the things that the will chooses; and to cure this infirm will which is wholly corrupted by its filthy attachments.

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When I was a student I was assigned "Mythologies" and "A Lover's Discourse," by Roland Barthes, and felt at once that something momentous had happened to me, that I had met a writer who had changed my course in life somehow; and looking back now, I think he did.

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Zadie Smith Interview
1 week 1 day ago

If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

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Ch. 1
2 weeks 2 days ago

We are taught to believe that a desire of domineering over our countrymen is love to our country; and those who hate civil war abet rebellion, and that the amiable and conciliatory virtues of lenity, moderation, and tenderness to the privileges of those who depend on this kingdom are a sort of treason to the state. It is impossible that we should remain long in a situation, which breeds such notions and dispositions, without some great alteration in the national character.

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The simple point which I am concerned to make is that where ultimate values are irreconcilable, clear-cut solutions cannot, in principle, be found. To decide rationally in such situations is to decide in the light of general ideals, the overall pattern of life pursued by a man or a group or a society.

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To desire friendship is a great fault. Friendship should be a gratuitous joy like those afforded by art or life. We must refuse it so that we may be worthy to receive it; it is of the order of grace.

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p. 274

Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.

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"Two Dogmas of Empiricism", p. 26
1 month 2 weeks ago

Kant stated defensively that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge. . . to make room for faith," but he had not made room for faith; he had made room for thought, and he had not "denied knowledge" but separated knowledge from thinking.

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p. 14
2 weeks 3 days ago

Borders don't stop migration; they create illegal status that enables exploitation. Undocumented workers are more exploitable, less likely to complain, easier to deport when organizing. Borders aren't about security - they're about controlling labor and wages through artificial legal categories.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Natural science is throughout either a pure or an applied doctrine of motion.

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Preface, Tr. Bax, 1883
1 month 2 weeks ago

Lincoln's place in the history of the United States and of mankind will, nevertheless, be next to that of Washington!

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1 month 2 weeks ago

There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.

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"The Expanding Mental Universe", Saturday Evening Post, 7/1/1959
2 months 1 day ago

What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.

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As quoted in Quote, Unquote (1977) by Lloyd Cory, p. 197
2 months 2 weeks ago

Nature flies from the infinite, for the infinite is unending or imperfect, and Nature ever seeks an end.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

I shall, without further discussion of the other theories, attempt to contribute something towards the understanding and appreciation of the Utilitarian or Happiness theory, and towards such proof as it is susceptible of. It is evident that this cannot be proof in the ordinary and popular meaning of the term. Questions of ultimate ends are not amenable to direct proof. Whatever can be proved to be good, must be so by being shown to be a means to something admitted to be good without proof.

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Ch. 1

The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.

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Ch. 6: "The Nineteenth Century", p. 136
1 month 2 weeks ago

Secrets in manufactures are capable of being longer kept than secrets in trade.

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Chapter VII, p. 72.
2 months 1 week ago

When one plays for top prizes one must be prepared to pay top stakes.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, your church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind or generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.

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p. 32
1 month 2 weeks ago

Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling... Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go... But, of course, ceasing to be "in love" need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense-love as distinct from "being in love"-is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God... "Being in love" first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.

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Book III, Chapter 6, "Christian Marriage"
1 month 2 weeks ago

People say law but they mean wealth.

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1841
1 month 2 weeks ago

I wished, by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her to become one.

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A Plea for Psychology as a Natural Science, 1892
2 months 1 week ago

Since those who rule in the city do so because they own a lot, I suppose they're unwilling to enact laws to prevent young people who've had no discipline from spending and wasting their wealth, so that by making loans to them, secured by the young people's property, and then calling those loans in, they themselves become even richer and more honored.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Unlimited exploitation of cheap labour-power is the sole foundation of their power to compete.

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Vol. I, Ch. 15, Section 8, pg. 520.
1 week 6 days ago

All exercise of authority perverts, and submission to authority humiliates.

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As quoted in Michael Bakunin (1937), E.H. Carr, p. 453
1 week 1 day ago

Philosophers are as jealous as women. Each wants a monopoly of praise.

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P. 30
1 month 3 weeks ago

Virtue refuses facility for her companion ... the easy, gentle, and sloping path that guides the footsteps of a good natural disposition is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road.

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Ch. 11. Of Cruelty (tr. Donald M. Frame)
1 month 2 weeks ago

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

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Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 1952
1 month 6 days ago

Leading a human life is a full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern.

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"The Absurd" (1971), p. 15.

Such words as spontaneity, sincerity, gratuitousness, richness, enrichment - words which imply an almost total indifference to contrasts of value - have come more often from their [the surrealists'] pens than words which contain a reference to good and evil. Moreover, this latter class of words has become degraded, especially those which refer to the good, as Valéry remarked some years ago. Words like virtue, nobility, honor, honesty, generosity, have become almost impossible to use or else they have acquired bastard meanings; language is no longer equipped for legitimately praising a man's character.

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"The responsibility of writers," p. 168
1 month 2 weeks ago

A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.

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Wage Labour and Capital (December 1847), in Marx Engels Selected Works, Volume I, p. 163.
1 week 1 day ago

Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.

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p. 58
1 week 1 day ago

If I compare arithmetic with a tree that unfolds upward into a multitude of techniques and theorems while its root drives into the depths, then it seems to me that the impetus of the root.

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Gottlob Frege, Montgomery Furth (1964). The Basic Laws of Arithmetic: Exposition of the System. p. 10
1 month 2 weeks ago

A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.

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Ch. V: Applications
2 months 1 week ago

There is no version of primeval history, preceding the discoveries of modern science, that is as rational and as inspiring as that of the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may 'conquer' them.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The Vedas contain a sensible account of God." "The veneration in which the Vedas are held is itself a remarkable feat. Their code embraced the whole moral life of the Hindus and in such a case there is no other truth than sincerity. Truth is such by reference to the heart of man within, not to any standard without.

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A Tribute to Hinduism, 2008
1 week ago

This new philosophy, however, was far from giving the temporal an inherent position and function in the constitution of things. Change was acting on the side of man but only because of fixed laws which governed the changes that take place. There was hope in change just because the laws that govern it do not change.

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2 months 1 week ago

I don't believe in flying saucers... The energy requirements of interstellar travel are so great that it is inconceivable to me that any creatures piloting their ships across the vast depths of space would do so only in order to play games with us over a period of decades.

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Men ... ask nothing better, it would seem, than to leave their destiny, their life, and all their thoughts in the hands of a few men with a gift for the exclusive manipulation of this or that technique.

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"Wave Mechanics," p. 75
1 month 1 week ago

The guillotine takes life almost without touching the body, just as prison deprives of liberty or a fine reduces wealth. It is intended to apply the law not so to a real body capable of feeling pain as to a juridical subject, the possessor, among other rights, of the right to exist it had to have the abstraction of the law itself.

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pp. 13, Chapter One The Body of the Condemned
1 month 2 weeks ago

What is commonly called friendship even is only a little more honor among rogues.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 95
1 week 4 days 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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