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5 months 2 weeks ago

He who created you without you will not justify you without you.

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169
5 months 3 days ago

Some old poet's grand imagination is imposed on us as adamantine everlasting truth, and God's own word! Pythagoras says, truly enough, "A true assertion respecting God, is an assertion of God"; but we may well doubt if there is any example of this in literature.

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5 months 3 days ago

None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The only way out of today's misery is for people to become worthy of each other's trust.

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4 months 1 week ago

We carry with us the wonders, we seek without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies, wisely learns in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume.

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Section 15
1 month 2 weeks ago

When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique. He is universal by virtue of the inseparability of his organism from the cosmos. He is unique in that he is just this organism and not any stereotype of role, class, or identity assumed for the convenience of social communication.

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p. 9
5 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

Rational free spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoitre the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.

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H 36
3 months 3 days ago

What is the Jew?...What kind of unique creature is this whom all the rulers of all the nations of the world have disgraced and crushed and expelled and destroyed; persecuted, burned and drowned, and who, despite their anger and their fury, continues to live and to flourish. What is this Jew whom they have never succeeded in enticing with all the enticements in the world, whose oppressors and persecutors only suggested that he deny (and disown) his religion and cast aside the faithfulness of his ancestors?! The Jew - is the symbol of eternity. ... He is the one who for so long had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A people such as this can never disappear. The Jew is eternal. He is the embodiment of eternity.

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Attributed in "The Final Resolution", in Jewish World Periodical (1908), p. 189
1 month 4 weeks ago

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.
5 months 4 days ago

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

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Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), p. 224
1 month 1 day ago

The vices are very justly man's executioners.

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Chapter X, p. 85
3 months 4 weeks ago

The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.

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5 months 3 days 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 3 weeks ago

Fire is the best of servents; but what a master!

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Bk. II, ch. 9.
5 months 1 week ago

How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniences. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other people, in order to carry a greater number. They walk about loaded with a multitude of baubles, in weight and sometimes in value not inferior to an ordinary Jew's-box, some of which may sometimes be of some little use, but all of which might at all times be very well spared, and of which the whole utility is certainly not worth the fatigue of bearing the burden.

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Chap. I.
3 months 2 weeks ago

A precise language awaits a completed metaphysics.

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1 month 2 days ago

A definition of the political can be obtained only by discovering and defining the specifically political categories.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

To confuse our own constructions and inventions with eternal laws or divine decrees is one of the most fatal delusions of men. 

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Essays in Honour of E. H. Carr (1974) edited by Chimen Abramsky, p. 9
3 months 2 weeks ago

Some will ask, what about weak natures, must they not be protected? Yes, but to be able to do that, it will be necessary to realize that education of children is not synonymous with herdlike drilling and training. If education should really mean anything at all, it must insist upon the free growth and development of the innate forces and tendencies of the child. In this way alone can we hope for the free individual and eventually also for a free community, which shall make interference and coercion of human growth impossible.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

We must needs believe in the other life, in the eternal life beyond the grave. ...And we must needs believe in that other life, perhaps, in order that we may deserve it, in order that we may obtain it, for it may be that he neither deserves it nor will obtain it who does not passionately desire it above reason and, if need be, against reason.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

When a man is in a fair way and sees all life open in front of him, he seems to himself to make a very important figure in the world. His horse whinnies to him; the trumpets blow and the girls look out of window as he rides into town before his company; he receives many assurances of trust and regard--sometimes by express in a letter--sometimes face to face, with persons of great consequence falling on his neck. It is not wonderful if his head is turned for a time. But once he is dead, were he as brave as Hercules or as wise as Solomon, he is soon forgotten.

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The Sire de Maletroit's Door.
1 month 1 day ago

If the potential of every number is in the monad, then the monad would be intelligible number in the strict sense, since it is not yet manifesting anything actual, but everything conceptually together in it.

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On the Monad
1 month 2 days ago

Facts are the materials of science, but all Facts involve Ideas. Since, in observing Facts, we cannot exclude Ideas, we must, for the purposes of science, take care that the Ideas are clear and rigorously applied.

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5 months 4 days ago

How every line is of such strong, determined, and consistent meaning! And on every page we encounter deep, original, lofty thoughts, while the whole world is suffused with a high and holy seriousness.

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About Indian sacred scriptures. quoted in Londhe, S. (2008).
4 months 3 days ago

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

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Part I Section I

When thou art offended at any man's fault, forthwith turn to thyself and reflect in what manner thou doest error thyself... For by attending to this thou wilt quickly forget thy anger, if this consideration is also added, that the man is compelled; for what else could he do? or, if thou art able, take away from him the compulsion.

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X, 30
6 months ago

What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?

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1 month 2 days ago

Why should charity be offered the unemployed? It is not alms they ask. They are insulted and embittered and degraded by being forced to accept as paupers what they would gladly earn as workers. What they ask is not charity, but the opportunity to use their own labor in satisfying their own wants. Why can they not have that? It is their natural right. He who made food and clothing and shelter necessary to man's life has also given to man, in the power of labor, the means of maintaining that life; and when, without fault of their own, men cannot exert that power, there is somewhere a wrong of the same kind as denial of the right of property and denial of the right of life - a wrong equivalent to robbery and murder on the grandest scale. Charity can only palliate present suffering a little at the risk of fatal disease. For charity cannot right a wrong; only justice can do that. Charity is false, futile, and poisonous when offered as a substitute for justice.

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p. 179
5 months 4 days ago

I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

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Ch. 1: The Value of Scepticism
5 months 5 days ago

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
1 month 2 weeks ago

The deeper we look into nature, the more we recognize that it is full of life, and the more profoundly we know that all life is a secret and that we are united with all life that is in nature. Man can no longer live for himself alone. We realize that all life is valuable, and that we are united to all this life. From this knowledge comes our spiritual relationship to the universe.

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p. 248
3 months 3 weeks ago

Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.

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Chapter IV
3 months 1 day ago

My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

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Letter to Robert Fulford, 1964. Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 300
3 months 4 weeks ago

I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

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1 month 3 days ago

The naturalists, you know, distribute the history of nature into three kingdoms or departments: zoology, botany, mineralogy. Ideology, or mind, however, occupies so much space in the field of science, that we might perhaps erect it into a fourth kingdom or department. But inasmuch as it makes a part of the animal construction only, it would be more proper to subdivide zoology into physical and moral.

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Thomas Jefferson, Letter (24 Mar 1824) to Mr. Woodward. Collected in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Correspondence (1854), 339.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Now, justification in this life is given to us according to these three things: first by the laver of regeneration by which all sins are forgiven; then, by a struggle with the faults from whose guilt we have been absolved; the third, when our prayer is heard, in which we say: Forgive us our debts, because however bravely we fight against our faults, we are men; but the grace of God so aids as we fight in this corruptible body that there is reason for His hearing us as we ask forgiveness.

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Against Julian, Book II, ch. 8, 22. In The Fathers of the Church, Matthew A. Schumacher, tr., 1957, ISBN 0813214009 ISBN 9780813214009 pp. 83-84.
4 months 3 days ago

A subject interests me and holds my attention only so long as it presents me with difficulties, only so long as I am at odds with it and have, as it were, to struggle with it; but once I have mastered it I hurry on to something else, to a new subject; for my interest is not confined to any particular field or subject; it extends to everything human. This does not mean that I am an intellectual miser or egoist, who amasses knowledge for himself alone; by no means! What I do and think for myself, I must also think and do for others. But I feel the need of instructing others in a subject only so long as, while instructing others, I am also instructing myself.

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Lecture I, , R. Manheim, trans. (1967), p. 2
1 month 3 days ago

I see too many proofs of the imperfection of human reason, to entertain wonder or intolerance at any difference of opinion on any subject; and acquiesce in that difference as easily as on a difference of feature or form; experience having long taught me the reasonableness of mutual sacrifices of opinion among those who are to act together for any common object, and the expediency of doing what good we can, when we cannot do all we would wish.

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Letter to John Randolph (1 December 1803), 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. 109, pp. 54
3 months 4 weeks ago

May some future student go over this ground again, and have the leisure to give his results to the world.

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4 months ago

Love works magic. It is the final purpose Of the world story, The Amen of the universe.

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4 months 1 week ago

There is no good father who would want to resemble our Heavenly Father.

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No. 51
3 months 1 week ago

Well, he wasn't a relativist. There's a long and complicated story of the rise of a desire for scientific relativism. Part of it may well be simply sort of rage against reason, the fear of the sciences and a kind of total dislike of the arrogance of a great many scientists who say we're finding out the truth about everything-and here [with Kuhn] there was a way to undermine that arrogance.

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Ian Hacking, in Gary Stix, "A Q&A with Ian Hacking on Thomas Kuhn's Legacy as "The Paradigm Shift" Turns 50"
4 months ago

In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interest of the immense majority in subjection to them. This is the sense in which we are really Anarchists.

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