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7 months 1 week ago

While both are dear, Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Faith ever says, "If Thou wilt," not "If Thou canst."

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p. 241
4 months 1 week ago

I sit on a man's back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.

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Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence
4 months 1 week ago

All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.

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(p. 178-179)
2 months 1 week ago

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Whatever you see in the more material part of yourself, learn to refer to God and to the invisible part of yourself. In that way, whatever offers itself to the senses will become for you an occasion for the practice of piety.

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The Erasmus Reader (1990), p. 141.
5 months 1 week ago

What is Europe really but a sterile trunk which owes everything to oriental grafts?

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Letter of 18 December 1806 to Windischmann, quoted by Rene Gerard, L'Orient et la pensée romantique allemande, Paris 1963,, p. 213. quoted in Poliakov, L. (1974).
4 months 1 week ago

The precise reason why abstinence from animal food will be the first act ... of a moral life is admirably explained in the book, The Ethics of Diet [by Howard Williams]; and not by one man only, but by all mankind in the persons of its best representatives during all the conscious life of humanity. ... the moral progress of humanity - which is the foundation of every other kind of progress - is always slow; but ... the sign of true, not casual, progress is its uninterruptedness and its continual acceleration. And the progress of vegetarianism is of this kind. That progress, is expressed both in the words of the writers cited in the above-mentioned book and in the actual life of mankind, which from many causes is involuntarily passing metre and more from carnivorous habits to vegetable food, and is also deliberately following the same path in a movement which shows evident strength, and which is growing larger and larger - viz., vegetarianism.

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Ch. X
6 months 2 weeks ago

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.

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B 8
2 months 1 week ago

Providence has already begun the punishment of the guilty; more than sixty regicides, the most guilty among them, have already died a violent death.

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Chapter X, p. 97
6 months 1 week ago

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science. 

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Works and Days;
7 months 1 week ago
If you have hitherto believed that life was one of the highest value and now see yourselves disappointed, do you at once have to reduce it to the lowest possible price?
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5 months 1 day ago

Whatever be the substance which takes possession of such a soul, it will produce the same result, and will change into a pretext for not conforming to any concrete purpose. If it appears as reactionary or anti-liberal it will be in order to affirm that the salvation of the State gives a right to level down all other standards, and to manhandle one's neighbour, above all if one's neighbour is an outstanding personality. But the same happens if it decides to act the revolutionary; the apparent enthusiasm for the manual worker, for the afflicted and for social justice, serves as a mask to facilitate the refusal of all obligations, such as courtesy, truthfulness and, above all, respect or esteem for superior individuals. ... As regards other kinds of Dictatorship, we have seen only too well how they flatter the mass-man, by trampling on everything that appeared to be above the common level.

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Chapter XV: We Arrive At The Real Question
5 months 1 week ago

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

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Humanist Outlook (1968), p. 4.
4 months 1 week ago

Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber.

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(p. 261)
5 months 2 weeks ago

There are at the present time two great nations in the world-allude to the Russians and the Americans- All other nations seem to have nearly reached their national limits, and have only to maintain their power; these alone are proceeding-along a path to which no limit can be perceived.

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Chapter XVIII.
6 months 1 week ago

We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.

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Reported in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) edited by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 225
6 months 1 week ago

The man, who in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

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"Cato", 1764
5 months 1 day ago

I am I and my circumstance, and if I don't save it I don't save myself.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

There remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly.

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Preface, p. 16 (Corrected Edition)
2 months 3 weeks ago

I am old, but I certainly have not that sign of old age, extolling the past at the expense of the present.

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Vol. I, ch. 11, p. 437
6 months 1 week ago

As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.

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Power
2 months 1 week ago

Every soul, the philosopher says, is involuntarily deprived of truth; consequently in the same way it is deprived of justice and temperance and benevolence and everything of the kind. It is most necessary to keep this in mind, for thus thou wilt be more gentle towards all.

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VII, 63
6 months 6 days ago

Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

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p. 56e
5 months 3 days ago

The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, prophane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame, or blame...

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The First Part, Chapter 8, p. 34
4 months 1 week ago

The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.

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(p. 8)
4 months 2 weeks ago

When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.

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F 155
3 months 4 weeks ago

People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.

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According to Kenneth Owen Morgan (The Illustrated History of Britain (1984) p. 421) this was said by Macaulay in 1832. If so, he was quoting a letter written by Edmund Burke in 1777.
4 months 1 week ago

One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system.

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(p. 298)
4 months 3 weeks ago

If people were told: what makes carnal desire imperious in you is not its pure carnal element. It is the fact that you put into it the essential part of yourself-the need for Unity, the need for God - they wouldn't believe it. To them it seems obvious that the quality of imperious need belongs to the carnal desire as such. In the same way it seems obvious to the miser that the quality of desirability belongs to gold as such, and not to its exchange value.

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4 months 1 week ago

More generally it is completely unrealistic to claim, as Gould and many others do, that religion keeps itself away from science's turf, restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.

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When Religion Steps on Science's Turf, Free Inquiry
7 months 1 week ago

Can one be a saint without God?, that's the problem, in fact the only problem, I'm up against today.

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6 months 1 week ago

The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's empires but is not the immutable universal law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth.

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March 4, 1831
5 months 1 day ago

Is it not altogether absurd that, under actual circumstances, the average man does not feel spontaneously, and without being preached at, an ardent enthusiasm for those sciences and the related ones of biology?... Every day furnishes a new invention which this average man utilises. Every day produces a new anesthetic or vaccine from which this average man benefits. ... How is it, nevertheless, that there is no sign of the masses imposing on themselves any sacrifice of money or attention in order to endow science more worthily? Far from this being the case, the post-war period has converted the man of science into a new social pariah.

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Chap.IX: The Primitive and the Technical
6 months 1 week ago

The happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent's own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.

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Ch. 2
6 months 1 week ago

The prospect for the human race is sombre beyond all precedent. Mankind are faced with a clear-cut alternative: either we shall all perish, or we shall have to acquire some slight degree of common sense. A great deal of new political thinking will be necessary if utter disaster is to be averted.

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3 months 1 week ago

There is no idea more novel, more surprising, than that of associating three hundred families of different degrees of fortune, knowledge and capacity.

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The Theory of Social Organization. Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier, p. 5.
6 months 1 day ago

Man is a universe in little.

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Freeman (1948), p. 150
5 months 3 weeks ago

Truth is so great a perfection, that if God would render himself visible to men, he would choose light for his body and truth for his soul.

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As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, both Ancient and Modern (1908) by Tyron Edwards, p. 592
6 months 2 weeks ago

She is rightly called not only the mother of the man, but also the Mother of God ... It is certain that Mary is the Mother of the real and true God.

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Weimar edition of Martin Luther's Works, English translation edited by J. Pelikan [Concordia: St. Louis], Vol. 11, Vol. 24, 107
6 months 2 weeks ago

I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray...I am myself the matter of my book. To the Reader

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tr. Donald M. Frame, 1957
6 months ago

At times the world sees straight, but many times the world goes astray.

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Book II, epistle i, line 63
4 months 3 weeks ago

It may seem to be a long way from Blake's innocent talk of love and copulation to De Sade's need to inflict pain. And yet both are the outcome of a sexual mysticism that strives to transcend the everyday world. Simone de Beauvoir said penetratingly of De Sade's work that 'he is trying to communicate an experience whose distinguishing characteristic is, nevertheless its will to remain incommunicable'. De Sade's perversion may have sprung from his dislike of his mother or of other women, but its basis is a kind of distorted religious emotion.

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p. 90
3 months 2 days ago

Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

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6 months 1 week ago

I opened with that which good Catholics have more than once made to Huguenots. "My dear sir," said I, "were you ever baptized?" "No, friend," replied the Quaker, "nor any of my brethren." "Zounds!" said I to him, "you are not Christians then!" "Friend," replied the old man, in a soft tone of voice, "do not swear; we are Christians, but we do not think that sprinkling a few drops of water on a child's head makes him a Christian." "My God!" exclaimed I, shocked at his impiety, "have you then forgotten that Christ was baptized by St. John?" "Friend," replied the mild Quaker, "once again, do not swear. Christ was baptized by John, but He Himself never baptized any one; now we profess ourselves disciples of Christ, and not of John." "Mercy on us," cried I, "what a fine subject you would be for the holy inquisitor! In the name of God, my good old man, let me baptize you."

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Voltaire's account of his conversations with Andrew Pit

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