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2 months 5 days ago

Scientific theories are distinguished from myths... in being criticizable, and... open to modifications... They can be neither verified nor probabilified.

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2 weeks 5 days ago

The spirit of militarism has already permeated all walks of life. Indeed, I am convinced that militarism is a greater danger here than anywhere else, because of the many bribes capitalism holds out to those whom it wishes to destroy.

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1 month 2 days ago

Word - that invisible dagger.

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1 month 6 days ago

Among other men Reason awakes in another form-as the impulse towards Personal Freedom, which, although it never opposes the mild rule of the inward Instinct which it loves, yet rises in rebellion against the pressure of a stranger Instinct which has usurped its rights; and in this awakening it breaks the chains,-not of Reason as Instinct itself, but of the Instinct of foreign natures clothed in the garb of external power.

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p. 8
2 months 1 week ago

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others. It is much more nearly certain that we are assembled here tonight than it is that this or that political party is in the right. Certainly there are degrees of certainty, and one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter skepticism, and complete skepticism would, of course, be totally barren and completely useless.

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"Skepticism"
2 months 1 week ago

Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself.

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2 weeks 5 days ago

The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.

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2 months 1 week ago

Thus there is nothing waste, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearence. We might compare this to the appearence of a pond in the distance, where we can see the confused movement and swarming of the fish, without distinguishing the fish themselves.Thus we are that each living body has a dominante entelechy, which in case of an animal is the soul, but the members of this living body are full of other living things, plants and animals, of which each has in turn ita dominant entelechy or soul.

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Monadology (69-70).
2 months 2 weeks ago

Habit is a second nature.

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Book III, Ch. 10
1 month 3 days ago

The assumption that the human psyche possesses layers that lie below consciousness is not likely to arouse serious opposition. But... there could just as well be layers lying above consciousness... The conscious mind can only claim a relatively central position and must put up with the fact that the unconscious psyche transcends and as it were surrounds it on all sides. Unconscious contents connect it backward with the physiological states on the one hand and archetypal data on the other. But it is extended forward by intuitions which are conditioned partly by archetypes and partly by subliminal perceptions depending on the relativity of time and space in the unconscious.

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p. 132
1 month 1 week ago

I pray you, magnificent Sir, do not trouble yourself to return to us, but await our coming to you.

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Third Dialogue
4 weeks ago

In all ranges of experience, externality of means defines the mechanical.

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p. 206
1 week 2 days ago

It is the fantasy of seizing reality live that continues-ever since Narcissus bent over his spring. Surprising the real in order to immobilize it, suspending the real in the expiration of its double. You bend over the hologram like God over his creature: only God has this power of passing through walls, through people, and finding Himself immaterially in the beyond. We dream of passing through ourselves and of finding ourselves in the beyond: the day when your holographic double will be there in space, eventually moving and talking, you will have realized this miracle. Of course, it will no longer be a dream, so its charm will be lost.

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"Holograms," p. 105
2 months 1 week ago

Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life. The aim of politics should be to make the lives of individuals as good as possible.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

The man of flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies-above all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother.

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Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground -- situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.

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Letter to Clare Westcott, November 26 1975. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 514
1 month 2 days ago

If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.

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2 months 1 week ago

The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

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As quoted in the Communist Manifesto (1848) p. 7
2 months 2 weeks ago

There is another ground of hope that must not be omitted. Let men but think over their infinite expenditure of understanding, time, and means on matters and pursuits of far less use and value; whereof, if but a small part were directed to sound and solid studies, there is no difficulty that might not be overcome.

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Aphorism 111

Environment is process, not container.

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(p. 30)

Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Count all wickedness foreign and alien.

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§ 5
2 months 1 week ago

Figure to yourself the mixture of surprise and delight which has this instant been poured into my mind by the sound of my name, as uttered by you, in the speech just read to me out of the Morning Herald... By one and the same man, not only Parliamentary Reform, but Law Reform advocated. Advocated? and by what man? By one who, in the vulgar sense of profit and loss, has nothing to gain by it... Yes, only from Ireland could such self-sacrifice come; nowhere else: least of all in England, cold, selfish, priest-ridden, lawyer-ridden, lord-ridden, squire-ridden, soldier-ridden England, could any approach to it be found.

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Letter to Daniel O'Connell (15 July 1828) , quoted in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. X (1843), pp. 594-595
1 month 3 weeks ago

What is to prevent one from telling truth as he laughs, even as teachers sometimes give cookies to children to coax them into learning their A B C?

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Book I, satire i, line 24 (translation by H. Fairclough)
2 months 2 weeks ago

Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.

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Book III, Ch. 13 Variant: Of all the infirmities we have, 'tis the most savage to despise our being. (Charles Cotton translation)
4 weeks 1 day ago

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Antagoras the poet was boiling a conger, and Antigonus, coming behind him as he was stirring his skillet, said, "Do you think, Antagoras, that Homer boiled congers when he wrote the deeds of Agamemnon?" Antagoras replied, "Do you think, O king, that Agamemnon, when he did such exploits, was a peeping in his army to see who boiled congers?"

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46 Antigonus I
2 weeks 6 days ago

What nationalist educators often fail to recognize is that merely being taught by teachers who are black has not and will not solve the problem if the teachers have been socialized to internalize racist thinking.

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2 weeks 6 days ago

Black women control the world. We are through being discriminated against.

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Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002) ISBN 0-06-093829-3
2 months 2 weeks ago

Leave the ass burdened with laws behind in the valley. But your conscience, let it ascend with Isaac into the mountain.

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Chapter 2, Verse 14
2 months 1 week ago

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

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June 21, 1852

Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But it cannot have been the sort of God that we need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early.

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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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2 weeks 4 days ago

Neurosis can be understood best as the battle between tendencies within an individual; deep character analysis leads, if successful, to the progressive solution.

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p. 264
2 months 1 week ago

There is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality. When any opinion leads to absurdities, it is certainly false; but it is not certain that an opinion is false, because it is of dangerous consequence. Such topics, therefore, ought entirely to be forborne; as serving nothing to the discovery of truth, but only to make the person of an antagonist odious.

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Of Liberty and Necessity, Part II
2 weeks ago

To successfully adjudicate ethical problems, as opposed to 'solving' them, it is necessary that the members of the society have a sense of community. A compromise that cannot pretend to be the last word on an ethical question, that cannot pretend to derive from binding principles in an unmistakeably constraining way, can only derive its force from a shared sense of what is and is not reasonable, from loyalties to one another, and a commitment to 'muddling through' together.

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"How Not to Solve Ethical Problems"
2 months 1 week ago

This proof can at most, therefore, demonstrate the existence of an architect of the world, whose efforts are limited by the capabilities of the material with which he works, but not of a creator of the world, to whom all things are subject.

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A 627, B 655 (Physico-Theological Proof Impossible)
2 months 1 week ago

I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.

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Author's prefaces to the First Edition.
1 month 2 days ago

Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!

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2 weeks ago

Philosophy was never just ontotheology, and even when philosophers were concerned with ontotheology, they were concerned with much more than that. That is the first reason that the idea of a fundamental "crisis" in philosophy and of the "end of philosophy" is deeply mistaken. And if the questions of philosophy are indeed "unsettleable," in the sense that they will always be with us, that is a wonderful thing, not something to be regretted.

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Science and Philosophy
2 months 5 days ago

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.'

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First we have to believe, and then we believe.

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K 55
2 months 1 week ago

When communist workmen associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need - the need for society - and what appears as a means becomes an end. You can observe this practical processing its most splendid results whenever you see French socialist workers together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring together. Company, association, and conversation, which again has society as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is on mere phase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies.

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"The Meaning of Human Requirements" p.99-100,The Marx-Engels Reader
1 month 2 days ago

...all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Whence we see spiders, flies, or ants entombed and preserved forever in amber, a more than royal tomb.

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Historia Vitæ et Mortis; Sylva Sylvarum, Cent. i. Exper. 100, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed.
2 months 1 week ago

As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct.

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p. 486
2 months 3 weeks ago

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.

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XI, 14
2 months 1 week ago

Let us cultivate our garden.

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