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Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 months ago
The use of force alone is...

The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 3 weeks ago
Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning...

Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
4 months 4 weeks ago
Propaganda in favor of action that...

Propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to reason by means of logical arguments based upon the best available evidence fully and honestly set forth. Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lower passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty.

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Chapter 4 (p. 33)
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
2 months 3 weeks ago
There is no penalty attached to...

There is no penalty attached to a lover's oath.

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Maxim 23
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
5 months 1 day ago
Poetry is the universal art of...

Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.

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As quoted in the Introduction to Aesthetics (1842), translated by T. M. Knox, (1979), p. 89
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
1 month 3 weeks ago
But, one will say, if raw...

But, one will say, if raw experience can not legitimatize reasoning by recurrence, is it so of experiment aided by induction? We see successively that a theorem is true of the number 1, of the number 2, of the number 3 and so on; the law is evident, we say, and it has the same warranty as every physical law based on observations, whose number is very great but limited. But there is an essential difference. Induction applied to the physical sciences is always uncertain, because it rests on the belief in a general order of the universe, an order outside of us. Mathematical induction, that is, demonstration by recurrence, on the contrary, imposes itself necessarily, because it is only the affirmation of a property of the mind itself.

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Ch. I. (1905) Tr. George Bruce Halstead
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
4 months ago
Resolved to die in the last...

Resolved to die in the last dike of prevarication.

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Speech on the sixth article of charge in the impeachment of Warren Hastings (7 May 1789), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Tenth (1899), p. 406
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 months 1 week ago
When a book and a head...

When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

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D 66
Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
3 months 1 week ago
If a person loves only one...

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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Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
5 months 2 weeks ago
In each separate thing that you...

In each separate thing that you do consider the matters which come first, and those which follow after, and only then approach the thing itself.

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Book III, ch. 15, 1 (= Enchiridion 29, 1).
Philosophical Maxims
Antisthenes
Antisthenes
4 months 2 weeks ago
Wealth and poverty do not lie...

Wealth and poverty do not lie in a person's estate, but in their souls.

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iv. 34
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 4 weeks ago
In order to make himself thoroughly...

In order to make himself thoroughly undesirable, he will speak.

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p. 463
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
3 months 3 weeks ago
The living have never shown me...

The living have never shown me how to live.

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"On My Friendly Critics"
Philosophical Maxims
Lucretius
Lucretius
5 months 2 weeks ago
So potent was Religion….

So potent was Religion in persuading to do wrong.

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Book I, line 101 (tr. Alicia Stallings) H. A. J. Munro's translation: So great the evils to which religion could prompt! W. H. D. Rouse's translation: So potent was Superstition in persuading to evil deeds.
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months ago
The ornament of a house is...

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

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Domestic Life
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 3 weeks ago
Oceans of horse-hair, continents of parchment,...

Oceans of horse-hair, continents of parchment, and learned-sergeant eloquence, were it continued till the learned tongue wore itself small in the indefatigable learned mouth, cannot make unjust just.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 3 weeks ago
So in all human....
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Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
3 months 3 weeks ago
The tangible source of exploitation disappears...

The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.

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p. 32
Philosophical Maxims
Leszek Kołakowski
Leszek Kołakowski
1 month 3 weeks ago
Far from secularization inexorably leading to...

Far from secularization inexorably leading to the death of religion, it has instead given birth to the search for new forms of religious life. The imminent victory of the Kingdom of Reason has never materialized. As a whole, mankind can never get rid of the need for religious self-identification: who am I, where did I come from, where do I fit in, why am I responsible, what does my life mean, how will I face death? Religion is a paramount aspect of human culture. Religious need cannot be excommunicated from culture by rationalist incantation. Man does not live by reason alone.

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Interview with Nathan Gardels
Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
2 months 1 week ago
It's easy to support the status...

It's easy to support the status quo if one is not another of its victims.

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Reply to Meet the people who want to turn predators into herbivores, TreeHugger, 4 Dec. 2015
Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
2 months 3 weeks ago
Conservatives believe that our identities and...

Conservatives believe that our identities and values are formed through our relations with other people, and not through our relation with the state. The state is not an end but a means. Civil society is the end, and the state is the means to protect it. The social world emerges through free association, rooted in friendship and community life. And the customs and institutions that we cherish have grown from below, by the 'invisible hand' of co-operation. They have rarely been imposed from above by the work of politics, the role of which, for a conservative, is to reconcile our many aims, and not to dictate or control them.

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"Stand up for the real meaning of freedom," The Spectator
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 3 weeks ago
Love's great (and sole) originality is...

Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.

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Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
5 months 2 days ago
Indeed, history is nothing more…

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

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L'Ingénu, ch.10 (1767) Quoted in The End, part 13 of A Series of Unfortunate Events
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
5 months 2 weeks ago
To throw oneself into strange...

To throw oneself into strange teachings is quite dangerous.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 4 weeks ago
The human imagination has seldom had...

The human imagination has seldom had before it an object so sublimely ordered as the medieval cosmos. If it has an aesthetic fault, it is perhaps, for us who have known romanticism, a shade too ordered. For all its vast spaces it might in the end afflict us with a kind of claustrophobia. Is there nowhere any vagueness? No undiscovered by-ways? No twilight? Can we never really get out of doors?

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The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 1964
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
5 months ago
A living dog is better than...

A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

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pp. 366-67
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
4 months 4 days ago
Among these widely differing families of...

Among these widely differing families of men, the first that attracts attention, the superior in intelligence, in power, and in enjoyment, is the white, or European, the MAN pre-eminently so called, below him appear the Negro and the Indian.

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Chapter XVIII.
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 3 weeks ago
I am for the most part...

I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
4 months 3 weeks ago
Generally speaking, all the authorities exercising...

Generally speaking, all the authorities exercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive assignment, of differential distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized' how he is to be recognized' how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in a individual way, etc.).

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Part Four, Complete and austere institutions
Philosophical Maxims
Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri
1 month 3 weeks ago
Philosophy is not the owl of...

Philosophy is not the owl of Minerva that takes flight after history has been realized in order to celebrate its happy ending; rather, philosophy is subjective proposition, desire, and praxis that are applied to the event.

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49
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
5 months ago
Titles of property, for instance railway...

Titles of property, for instance railway shares, may change hands every day, and their owner may make a profit by their sale even in foreign countries, so that titles to property are exportable, although the railway itself is not.

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Vol. II, Ch. X, p. 215.
Philosophical Maxims
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
9 months 5 days ago
Objective thought is prayer

Tibetan prayer wheels: you write a prayer on a paper, put the rolled paper on a wheel, and turn it automatically, without thinking. In this way, the wheel itself is praying for me, instead of me - or more precisely, I myself am praying through the medium of the wheel. The beauty of it all is that in my psychological inferiority I can think about whatever I want, I can yield to the most dirty and obscene fantasies, and it does not matter because - to use a good old Stalinist expression - 'whatever I am thinking, objectively I am praying.'

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
5 months 4 days ago
A merchant, it has been said...

A merchant, it has been said very properly, is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country.

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Chapter IV, p. 456.
Philosophical Maxims
Zoroaster
Zoroaster
4 months 2 weeks ago
Suffer no anxiety, for he who...

Suffer no anxiety, for he who is a sufferer of anxiety becomes regardless of enjoyment of the world and the spirit, and contraction happens to his body and soul.

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Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
3 months 1 week ago
In contrast to festivals, events do...

In contrast to festivals, events do not create community.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 1 week ago
Who does not in some sort...

Who does not in some sort live to others, does not live much to himself.

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Book III, Ch. 10
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months ago
The value of a principle is...

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

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p. 212
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
2 weeks 6 days ago
The most beautiful fate of...

The most beautiful fate of a physical theory is to point the way to the establishment of a more inclusive theory, in which it lives on as a limiting case.

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(1917) as quoted by , The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens: the Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays (1986)
Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
3 months 2 weeks ago
The new order contradicts reason so...

The new order contradicts reason so fundamentally that reason does not dare to doubt it. Even the consciousness of oppression fades. The more incommensurate become the concentration of power and the helplessness of the individual, the more difficult for him to penetrate the human origin of his misery.

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p. 44.
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Mannheim
Karl Mannheim
3 weeks 6 days ago
In our contemporary social and intellectual...

In our contemporary social and intellectual plight, it is nothing less than shocking to discover that those persons who claim to have discovered an absolute are usually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest. To find people in our day attempting to pass off to the world and recommending to others some nostrum of the absolute which they claim to have discovered is merely a sign of the loss of and the need for intellectual and moral certainty, felt by broad sections of the population who are unable to look life in the face.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 1 week ago
Valor is stability, not of legs...

Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 4 weeks ago
Although meaningless in a tribal context,...

Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies.

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(p. 114)
Philosophical Maxims
Chrysippus
Chrysippus
4 months 2 weeks ago
He who is running a race...

He who is running a race ought to endeavor and strive to the utmost of his ability to come off victor; but it is utterly wrong for him to trip up his competitor, or to push him aside. So in life it is not unfair for one to seek for himself what may accrue to his benefit; but it is not right to take it from another.

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As quoted in De Officiis by Cicero, iii. 10.
Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
2 months 3 weeks ago
Schopenhauer argues that the empirical world...

Schopenhauer argues that the empirical world exists only as a representation: 'every object, whatever its origin, is, as object, already conditioned by the subject, and thus is essentially only the subject's representation.' A representation is a subjective state that has been ordered according to space, time and causality - the primary forms of sensibility and understanding. So long as we turn our thoughts towards the natural world, and search for the thing-in-itself behind the representation is futile. Every argument and every experience leads only to the same end: the system of representations, standing like a veil between the subject and the thing-in-itself. No scientific investigation can penetrate the veil; and yet it is only a veil, Schopenhauer affirms, a tissue of illusions which we can, if we choose, penetrate by other means. The way to penetrate the veil was stumbled upon by Kant.

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A Short History of Modern Philosophy (1981; 2nd ed. 1995), p. 177
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
5 months 1 week ago
A person must take care to...

A person must take care to exercise moderate discipline over the body and subject it to the Spirit by means of fasting, vigils, and labor. The goal is to have the body obey and conform - and not hinder - the inner person and faith. Unless it is held in check, we know it is the nature of the body to undermine faith and the inner person.

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pp. 71-72
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
3 months 3 days ago
Those who used to sacrifice animals...

Those who used to sacrifice animals did not take them for beasts. And even the Middle Ages, which condemned and punished them in due form, was in this way much closer to them than we are, we who are filled with horror at this practice. They held them to be guilty: which was a way of honoring them. We take them for nothing, and it is on this basis that we are "human" with them. We no longer sacrifice them, we no longer punish them, and we are proud of it, but it is simply that we have domesticated them, worse: that we have made of them a racially inferior world, no longer even worthy of our justice, but only of our affection and social charity, no longer worthy of punishment and of death, but only of experimentation and extermination like meat from the butchery.

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"The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses," pp. 134-135
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
3 months 3 weeks ago
A standing army, for instance, is...

A standing army, for instance, is incompatible with freedom; because subordination and rigour are the very sinews of military discipline; and despotism is necessary to give vigour to enterprise that one will directs. A spirit inspired by romantic notions of honour, a kind of morality founded on the fashion of the age, can only be felt by a few officers, whilst the main body must be moved by command, like the waves of the sea; for the strong wind of authority pushes the crowd of subalterns forward, they scarcely know or care why, with headlong fury.

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Ch. 1
Philosophical Maxims
Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri
1 month 3 weeks ago
Empire is a very stimulating account...

Empire is a very stimulating account of globalisation, but it is hopelessly wrong on two central issues. The state has not withered away. Strong states still exist-USA, China, Germany, etc-but the difference with the past is that there is now only one Empire and this is not the nebulous entity imagined by Cultural Studies, but a real, living organism and it has a name; the United States of America.

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Tariq Ali, How Bush Used 9/11 to Remap the World. CounterPunch, 8 July 2002.
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
5 months 2 days ago
The beauty or uncomeliness of many...

The beauty or uncomeliness of many things, in good and ill breeding, will be better learnt, and make deeper impressions on them, in the examples of others, than from any rules or instructions can be given about them.

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Sec. 82
Philosophical Maxims
Joseph de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre
3 weeks 6 days ago
The question is frequently asked: why...

The question is frequently asked: why there is a school of theology attached to every University? The answer is easy: It is, that the Universities may subsist, and that the instruction may not become corrupt. Originally, the Universities were only schools of theology, to which other faculties were joined, as subjects around their Queen. The edifice of public instruction, placed on such a foundation, has continued even to our day. Those who have subverted it among themselves, will repent it, in vain, for a long time to come. To burn a city, there is needed only a child or a madman; but to rebuild it, architects, materials, workmen, money, and especially time, will be required.

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XXXVIII, p. 111
Philosophical Maxims
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