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5 months 3 weeks ago

Wisdom thoroughly learned, will never be forgotten. Science is got by diligence; but Discretion and Wisdom cometh of GOD.

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6 months 1 week ago

Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child - this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways.

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Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1894); published in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume 1: The Private Years (1884-1914)
6 months 1 week ago

...inversion...is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.

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p. 91
2 months 1 week ago

From the union of power and money, from the union of power and secrecy, from the union of government and science, from the union of government and art, from the union of science and money, from the union of ambition and ignorance, from the union of genius and war, from the union of outer space and inner vacuity, the Mad Farmer walks quietly away.

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The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union in Entries
2 months 1 week ago

I repair, then, fellow-citizens, to the post you have assigned me. With experience enough in subordinate offices to have seen the difficulties of this the greatest of all, I have learnt to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favor which bring him into it.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.

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The Two Hands of God : The Myths of Polarity (1963), p. 29
5 months 3 weeks ago

A transition, therefore, is not undeservedly made from sense to consideration, and from this to the nobler energies of intellect. Hence, as the certain knowledge of numbers received its origin among the Phœnicians, on account of merchandise and commerce, so geometry was found out among the Egyptians from the distribution of land. When Thales, therefore, first went into Egypt, he transferred this knowledge from thence into Greece: and he invented many things himself, and communicated to his successors the principles of many. Some of which were, indeed, more universal, but others extended to sensibles.

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Chap. IV.
6 months 3 weeks ago

He who disdained not to assume us unto Himself, did not disdain to take our place and speak our words, in order that we might speak His words.

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p.421
3 months 3 weeks ago

A great chapter of the history of the world is written in the chalk. Few passages in the history of man can be supported by such an overwhelming mass of direct and indirect evidence as that which testifies to the truth of the fragment of the history of the globe, which I hope to enable you to read, with your own eyes, tonight. Let me add, that few chapters of human history have a more profound significance for ourselves. I weigh my words well when I assert, that the man who should know the true history of the bit of chalk which every carpenter carries about in his breeches-pocket, though ignorant of all other history, is likely, if he will think his knowledge out to its ultimate results, to have a truer, and therefore a better, conception of this wonderful universe, and of man's relation to it, than the most learned student who is deep-read in the records of humanity and ignorant of those of Nature.

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6 months 1 week ago

The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.

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Ch. 2 "On the Problem of a Theory of Scientific Method", Section 11: Methodological Rules as Conventions, p. 32.
4 months 3 weeks ago

In books of psychology written from the spiritualist point of view, it is customary to begin the discussion of the existence of the soul as a simple substance, separable from the body, after this style: There is in me a principle which thinks, wills and feels... Now this implies a begging of the question. For it is far from being an immediate truth that there is in me such a principle; the immediate truth is that I think, will and feel. And I - the I that thinks, wills and feels - am immediately my living body with the states of consciousness which it sustains. It is my living body that thinks, wills and feels.

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2 months 1 week ago

All is ephemeral - fame and the famous as well.

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IV, 35
6 months 2 weeks ago

I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.

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Ch. 26. On the Education of Children
5 months 2 weeks ago

The hatred that men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become fewer and less considerable, so that democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when they have least fuel. I have already given the reason for this phenomenon. [all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes.] Hence it is natural that the love of equality should constantly increase together with equality itself, and that it should grow by what it feeds on.

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Chapter III.
6 months 5 days ago

The harmony between word and deed in Socrates' life is Dorian... manifested in the courage he showed at Delium. This harmonic accord... distinguishes Socrates from a sophist... [who] can give... fine and beautiful discourses on courage, but is not courageous... [U]nlike the sophist, he can use parrhesia and speak freely because what he says accords... with what he thinks... [which] accords... with what he does.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychological motives and needs upon existing institutions.

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(p. 402)
3 months 1 day ago

Work is the grand cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,-honest work, which you intend getting done.

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Address as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, (April 2, 1866), reported in A dictionary of quotations in prose, edited by A. L. Ward (1889).
4 months 3 weeks ago

It appears that liberty is bound up with imperfection, with a right to imperfection. Socialism leads to the same type of authoritarian state as Theocracy. ... One must choose: either Socialism or liberty of spirit, the liberty of man's conscience. ... Socialism uses a "sacred" authority and establishes a "sacred" society in which there is no place for the "lay," for the free, for choice, for the unrestrained activity of human forces.

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pp. 188-189
4 months 3 weeks ago

In both positivism and Heidegger-at least in his later work-speculation is the target of attack. In both cases the thought that autonomously raises itself above the facts through interpreting them and that cannot be reclaimed by them without leaving a surplus is condemned for being empty and vain concept-mongering.

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p. 9
6 months 1 week ago

Where there is friendship, there is our natural soil.

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Letter to Nicolas-Claude Thieriot, 1734
3 months 3 weeks ago

The ideology of development has implied the globalization of the priorities, patterns, and prejudices of the West. Instead of self-generated, development is imposed. Instead of coming from within, it is externally guided. Instead of contributing to the maintenance of diversity, development has created homogeneity...

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Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology
4 months 3 weeks ago

"God does not think, He creates; He does not exist, He is eternal," wrote Kierkegaard (Afslutende uvidenskabelige Efterskrift); but perhaps it is more exact to say with Mazzini, the mystic of the Italian city, that "God is great because his thought is action" (Ai giovani d'Italila), because with Him to think is to create, and He gives existence to that which exists in His thought by the mere fact of thinking it, and the impossible is unthinkable by God. It is not written in the Scriptures that God creates with His word - that is to say, with His thought - and that by this, by His Word, He made everything that exists? And what God has once made does He ever forget? May it not be that all the thoughts that have ever passed through the Supreme Consciousness still subsist therein? In Him, who is eternal, is not all existence eternalized?

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3 months 4 days ago

What postulate do we implicitly admit? It is that the duration of two identical phenomena is the same; or... that the same causes take the same time to produce the same effects. ...Is it impossible that experiment may some day contradict our postulate?

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2 months 1 week ago

In the middle ages of Christianity opposition to the State opinions was hushed. The consequence was, Christianity became loaded with all the Romish follies. Nothing but free argument, raillery & even ridicule will preserve the purity of religion.

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Notes on Religion (October 1776), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 2, p. 256
6 months 1 week ago

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

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3 months 6 days ago

All repressed passion produces its counter-passion which is as malevolent as the natural passion would be beneficial.

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Le nouveau monde amoureux
2 months 3 weeks ago

Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.

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Letter to three students (October 1967) as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz, "The Struggle Intensifies"
2 months 2 weeks 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
4 months 1 week ago

To be good and lead a good life means to give to others more than one takes from them.

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Ch. VII
4 months 2 weeks ago

Pure justice emerges from symmetry applied human life, and human beings as ends in themselves.

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5 months 1 day ago

The nineteenth century, utilitarian throughout, set up a utilitarian interpretation of the phenomenon of life which has come down to us and may still be considered as the commonplace of everyday thinking. ... An innate blindness seems to have closed the eyes of this epoch to all but those facts which show life as a phenomenon of utility.

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p. 16
3 months 4 days ago

It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better.

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Part II. Ch. 2 : Mathematical Definitions and Education, p. 129
6 months 5 days ago

Navigation brought man face to face with the uncertainty of destiny, where each is left to himself and every departure might always be the last. The madman on his crazy boat sets sail for the other world, and it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks. This enforced navigation is both rigorous division and absolute Passage, serving to underline in real and imaginary terms the liminal situation of the mad in medieval society. It was a highly symbolic role, made clear by the mental geography involved, where the madman was confined at the gates of the cities. His exclusion was his confinement, and if he had no prison other than the threshold itself he was still detained at this place of passage. In a highly symbolic position he is placed on the inside of the outside, or vice versa. A posture that is still his today, if we admit that what was once the visible fortress of social order is now the castle of our own consciousness.

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Part One: 1. Stultifera Navis
6 months 1 week ago

Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid person's notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from their own nature and faculties.

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Ch. 1
2 months 1 week ago

I consist of a little body and a soul.

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VI, 32
4 months 3 weeks ago

The revolutionary and critical thinker is in a certain way always outside of his society while of course he is at the same time also in it. That he is in it is obvious, but why is he outside it? First, because he is not brainwashed by the ruling ideology, that is to say, he has an extraordinary kind of independence of thought and feeling; hence he can have a greater objectivity than the average person has. There are many emotional factors too. And certainly I do not mean to enter here into the complex problem of the revolutionary thinker. But it seems to me essential that in a certain sense he transcends his society. You may say he transcends it because of the new historical developments and possibilities he is aware of, while the majority still think in traditional terms.

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6 months 1 week ago

Truth is a shining goddess, always veiled, always distant, never wholly approachable, but worthy of all the devotion of which the human spirit is capable.

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Fact and Fiction (1961), Part II, Ch. 10: "University Education", p. 153
6 months 1 week ago

Two Chinamen visiting Europe went to the theatre for the first time. One of them occupied himself with trying to understand the theatrical machinery, which he succeeded in doing. The other, despite his ignorance of the language, sought to unravel the meaning of the play. The former is like the astronomer, the latter the philosopher.

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Vol. 2 "On Various Subjects" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
4 months 3 weeks ago

Information has no scent.

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2 months 6 days ago

Doubtless, it shews the wisdom of God, to have so fram'd things at first, that there can seldom or never need any extraordinary interposition of his power; or the employing from, time to time, an intelligent overseer, to regulate, assist, and control the motions of matter.

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Sect.1.
4 months 1 week ago

The stock market was created by the telegraph and the telephone, and its panics are engineered by carefully orchestrated stories in the press.

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(p. 106)
2 months 1 week ago

Cursed be all those on land and sea who eat their fill,cursed be all those who starve yet raise no hand in protest,cursed be all the bread, the wine, the meat which day by daydescends deep in the entrails of the exploited manand turns not into freedom's cry, the murderer's ruthless knife!

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Prayer of three revolutionaries, Book X, line 391
3 months 2 weeks ago

Human intuitions are systematically biased. Evolutionary psychology explains how our moral intuitions and the rationalisations they spawn have been shaped by millennia of natural selection to maximise the inclusive fitness of our genes, not to track the welfare of other sentient beings impartially conceived. Many human cultures have found nothing intuitively wrong with aggressive warfare, slavery, wife-beating, infanticide or female genital mutilation. Ultimately, folk morality is a doomed enterprise as hopeless as folk physics. A mature posthuman ethics, I'd argue, must be committed to the well-being of all sentient life; and mature posthuman technology offers the means to deliver that commitment.

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"Post-Darwinian Ethics?", H+ Magazine, May 2009
6 months 4 weeks ago

The highest perfection of human life consists in the mind of man being detached from care, for the sake of God.

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III, 130, 3
3 months 2 days ago

Never has there been one possessed of complete sincerity who did not move others. Never has there been one who had not sincerity who was able to move others.

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Discipline and Character, no. 55
6 months 1 week ago

The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. For this, indeed, is the main source of our ignorance - the fact that our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite. Variant translation: The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, clear, and well-defined will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. The main source of our ignorance lies in the fact that our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

There is a greatness in the lives of those who build up religious systems, a greatness in action, in idea and in self-subordination, embodied in instance after instance through centuries of growth. There is a greatness in the rebels who destroy such systems: they are the Titans who storm heaven, armed with passionate sincerity. It may be that the revolt is the mere assertion by youth of its right to its proper brilliance, to that final good of immediate joy. Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness of the world - the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross.

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Pt. V, ch. 1, sec. 1.
4 months 6 days ago

Nothing like a little judicious levity.

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The Wrong Box, ch. 7 (1889).
2 months 1 week ago

Reductionism (ultimately, the empirical explanability of everything and a cornerstone of science), has uses that are appropriate, and it also can be used inappropriately. It is appropriately used as a way (one way) of understanding what is empirically known or empirically knowable. When it becomes merely an intellectual "position" confronting what is not empirically known or knowable, then it becomes very quickly absurd, and also grossly desensitizing and false.

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One day, observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away the cup from his wallet with the words, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 37

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