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5 months 1 week ago

You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she still will hurry back.

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Book I, epistle x, line 24
5 months 1 week ago

It is difficult to speak of the universal specifically.

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Line 128
3 months 2 weeks ago

The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures.

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(p. 99)
5 months 2 weeks ago

Beating is the worst, and therefore the last means to be us'd in the correction of children, and that only in the cases of extremity, after all gently ways have been try'd, and proved unsuccessful; which, if well observ'd, there will very seldom be any need of blows.

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Sec. 84
5 months 2 weeks ago

Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.

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Inès reiterating to Garcin that they cannot ignore one another, Act 1, sc. 5
3 months 3 weeks ago

The techniques of the practitioner are usually called 'synthetic'. He designs by organizing known principles and devices into larger systems.

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Simon (1945, p. 353); As cited in: Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences (2009) p. 425.
4 months 2 weeks ago

The Crown of Great Britain cannot, in my opinion, be too magnificent. Let us see some great public works set on foot; let it never be said, that the Commons of Great Britain failed in what they owe to the first Crown in the world. Looking up to royalty, I do say, it is the oldest and one of the best parts of our constitution. I wish it should look like royalty; that it should look like a King; like a King of Great Britain.

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Speech in the House of Commons (28 February 1769)
5 months 3 weeks ago

Love in animals, has not for its only object animals of the same species, but extends itself farther, and comprehends almost every sensible and thinking being. A dog naturally loves a man above his own species, and very commonly meets with a return of affection.

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Part 2, Section 12
5 months 2 weeks ago

Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent: All are needed by each one, Nothing is fair or good alone.

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Each and All, st. 1
1 month 2 weeks ago

National defense through war always involves some degree of national defeat. This paradox has been with us from the very beginning of our republic. Militarization in defense of freedom reduces the freedom of the defenders. There is a fundamental inconsistency between war and freedom.

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4 months ago

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Children (nay, and men too) do most by example.

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Sec. 67
4 months 1 week ago

If I were to go blind, what would bother me the most would be no longer to be able to stare idiotically at the passing clouds.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The first and the simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind is Curiosity.

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Part I Section I
5 months 2 weeks ago

"We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito."

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2 months 2 days ago

Do I write out of love to men? No, I write because I want to procure for my thoughts an existence in the world; and, even if I foresaw that these thoughts would deprive you of your rest and your peace, even if I saw the bloodiest wars and the fall of many generations springing up from this seed of thought - I would nevertheless scatter it. Do with it what you will and can, that is your affair and does not trouble me.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 262, 263
5 months 3 weeks ago

You must not murder. (Exodus 20:13) Q. What does this mean? A. We should fear and love God so that we may not hurt or harm our neighbor in his body, but help and befriend him in every bodily need [in every need and danger of life and body].

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4 months 1 week ago

To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.

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"The Meaning of Life".
4 months 2 weeks ago

This tendency towards a Christian-European Universal Monarchy has shown itself successively in the several States which could make pretensions to such a dominion, and, since the fall of the Papacy, it has become the sole animating principle of our History. We by no means seek to determine whether this notion of Universal Monarchy has ever been distinctly entertained as a definite plan .... Thus each State either strives to attain this Universal Christian Monarchy, or at least to acquire the power of striving after it;-to maintain the Balance of Power when it is in danger of being disturbed by another; and, in secret, for power, that it may eventually disturb it itself.

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P. 213-214
4 months 3 weeks ago

How shall the dead arise, is no question of my faith; to believe only possibilities, is not faith, but mere philosophy.

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Section 48
6 months 2 weeks ago

They despised everything but virtue, caring little for their present state of life, and thinking lightly of the possession of gold and other property, which seemed only a burden to them; neither were they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their self-control; but they were sober, and saw clearly that all these goods are increased by virtue and friendship with one another, whereas by too great regard and respect for them, they are lost and friendship with them.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

If you punish him for what he sees you practise yourself, he... will be apt to interpret it the peevishness and arbitrary imperiousness of a father, who, without any ground for it, would deny his son the liberty and pleasure he takes himself.

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Sec. 71
2 months 1 week ago

You may take great comfort from the fact that suffering inwardly for the sake of truth proves abundantly that one loves it and marks one out as being of the elect.

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Saint Sulpice and the Hidden God.
4 months 3 days ago

The bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth.

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p. 146
6 months 2 weeks ago

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories, and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Fate and temperament are the names of a concept.

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As quoted in Demian (1972) by Hermann Hesse, trans. W.J. Strachan
5 months 2 weeks ago

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstacies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.

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Page 159
5 months 2 weeks ago

Clearly when the liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another.

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Chapter IV, Section 32, p. 203
4 months 1 week ago

When capitalism is negated, social processes no longer stand under the rule of blind natural laws.

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P. 318
2 months 1 week ago

What I called the perplexed jungle of Paganism sprang, we may say, out of many roots: every admiration, adoration of a star or natural object, was a root or fibre of a root; but Hero-worship is the deepest root of all; the tap-root, from which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and grown.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Dostoevsky once wrote: "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted"; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse.

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pp. 33-34
5 months 2 weeks ago

To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessor's body at the time.

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Lecture I, "Religion and Neurology"
4 months 1 week ago

Institutionalized desublimation thus appears to be an aspect of the "conquest of transcendence" achieved by the one-dimensional society. Just as this society tends to reduce, and even absorb opposition (the qualitative difference!) in the realm of politics and higher culture, so it does in the instinctual sphere. The result is the atrophy of the mental organs for grasping the contradictions and the alternatives and, in the one remaining dimension of technological rationality, the Happy Consciousness comes to prevail.

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p. 79
5 months 6 days ago

Into the middle things.

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Line 148
4 months 1 week ago

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

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2 months 1 week ago

The second failing of liberalism comes directly out of the fact that it attempts to lower the horizons of politics. Liberal societies do not want to tell you how to live. They do not want to define "the good life" because that is the source of conflict, but as a result liberal societies tend not to satisfy these very deep human cravings for community, because... there's something wrong with the basic liberal premise that we all start... as self-interested individuals. We're not self-interested individuals.

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15:22
5 months 3 weeks ago

What can only be taught by the rod and with blows will not lead to much good; they will not remain pious any longer than the rod is behind them.

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The Great Catechism. Second Command

When young, one is confident to be able to build palaces for mankind, but when the time comes one has one's hands full just to be able to remove their trash.

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Letter to Johann Kaspar Lavatar
5 months 2 weeks ago

Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Many counterrevolutionary books have been written in favor of the Revolution. But Burke has written a revolutionary book against the Revolution.

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Fragment No. 104; on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
1 month 2 weeks ago

On bourgeois ground ... change is impossible anyway even if it were desired. In fact, bourgeois interest would like to draw every other interest opposed to it into its own failure; so, in order to drain the new life, it makes its own agony apparently fundamental, apparently ontological. The futility of bourgeois existence is extended to be that of the human situation in general, of existence per se.

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The Principle of Hope (1959), N. Plaice, trans. (1986), p. 4
5 months 3 weeks ago

They are splendidly built [Italian Hospitals], the best food and drink are at hand, the attendants are very diligent, the physicians are learned, the beds and coverings are very clean, and the bedsteads are painted. As soon as a sick man is brought in, all his clothes are taken off in the presence of a notary and are faithfully kept for him. He is then laid in a handsomely painted bed with clean sheets. Two physicians are fetched at once. Attendants come with food and drink, served in immaculate glass vessels; these are not touched with as much as a finger but are brought on a tray.

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3930
4 months 1 week ago

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.

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5 months 1 week ago

Coition is a slight attack of apoplexy. For man gushes forth from man, and is separated by being torn apart with a kind of blow.

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Freeman (1948), p. 150
5 months 2 weeks ago

The public is a ferocious beast: one must chain it up or flee from it.

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Letter to Mademoiselle Quinault, quoted in Charles Sainte-Beuve, "Lettres inédites de Voltaire," Causeries de Lundi (20 October 1856) ; an English translation can be found on this page:
5 months 2 weeks ago

"...the church of England, when she baptizes any one, makes him not a Christian [...] the church of England is mistaken, and makes none but socinians Christians"

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279
6 months 2 weeks ago

Creationists make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

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