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I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am. When two expeditions of scientists, financed by the Royal Academy, went forth to test my theory of relativity, I was convinced that their conclusions would tally with my hypothesis. I was not surprised when the eclipse of May 29, 1919, confirmed my intuitions. I would have been surprised if I had been wrong.

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5 months 1 week ago

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented.

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5 months 4 days ago

The ceremonial (hot or cold) as opposed to the haphazard (lukewarm) characterizes piety.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 127
4 months 1 week ago

Should the believers in special creations consider it unfair thus to call upon them to describe how special creations take place, I reply that this is far less than they demand from the supporters of the Development Hypothesis. They are merely asked to point out a conceivable mode. On the other hand, they ask, not simply for a conceivable mode, but for the actual mode.

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Let us... take in our hands the staff of experience... To be blind and to think that one can do without this staff is the worst kind of blindness.

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4 months 6 days ago

The plebeian must expect to find himself neglected and despised in proportion as he is remiss in cultivation the objects of esteem; the lord will always be surrounded with sycophants and slaves. The lord therefore has no motive to industry and exertion; no stimulus to rouse him from the lethargic 'oblivious pool', out of which every human intellect originally arose.

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Book V, Chapter 10, "Of Hereditary Distinction"
3 months 3 weeks ago

"A man thinks he is dying for his country," said Anatole France, "but he is dying for a few industrialists." But even that is saying too much. What one dies for is not even so substantial and tangible as an industrialist.

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p. 224
5 months 1 week ago

Whatever happens, I cannot be a silent witness to murder or torture. Anyone who is a partner in this is a despicable individual. I am sorry I cannot be moderate about it...

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Quoted in The New York Times Biographical Service, Vol. I (1970), p. 294, said by Russell "in the spring of 1967"
3 months 6 days ago

The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive.

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(p. 201)
1 month 3 weeks ago

Just as an enemy is more dangerous to a retreating army, so every trouble that fortune brings attacks us all the harder if we yield and turn our backs.

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5 months 1 week ago

What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler, will more resemble the stubborn dullness of Molotov than the sensual vindictive cruelty of Stalin.

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Part 3, Ch. 10, § 2
4 months 4 days ago

The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.

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5 months 1 week ago

Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young And always keep us so.

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Ode to Beauty, st. 2
3 months 4 days ago

Natural selection is like artificial selection, but without the human chooser. Instead of a human deciding which offspring shall die in which shall reproduce, nature 'decides'. The quotation marks are vital because nature doesn't consciously decide. This might seem too obvious to emphasize, but you'd be surprised by the number of people who think natural selection implies some kind of personal choice. They couldn't be more wrong. It just is the case that some offspring are more likely to die while others have what it takes to survive and reproduce. Therefore, as the generations go by, the average, typical creature in the population becomes ever better at the arts of surviving and reproducing. Ever better, I should specify, when, when measured against some absolute standard.

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Chapter 1, "Facing Mount Rushmore" (p. 34)
5 months 2 weeks ago

It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.

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The Prince (1513), Ch. 6; translated by W. K. Marriott
5 months 2 weeks ago

The thing I fear most is fear.

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Ch. 18. That Men are not to judge of our Happiness till after Death (tr. Donald M. Frame)
4 months 1 week ago

A definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing defined.

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Introduction On Taste
5 months 3 days ago

Homosexuality appears as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.

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Vol I: La volonté de savoir
6 months 5 days ago

Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously. "No artist tolerates reality," says Nietzsche.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

Truth is great and its effectiveness endures. 

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Maxim no. 5. Cf. 1 Esdras 4:41
3 months 1 day ago

Never in the history of the world have there been so many migrants. And almost all of them are migrating from regions where nationality is weak or non-existent to the established nation states of the West. They are not migrating because they have discovered some previously dormant feeling of love or loyalty towards the nations in whose territory they seek a home. On the contrary, few of them identify their loyalties in national terms and almost none of them in terms of the nation where they settle. They are migrating in search of citizenship which is the principal gift of national jurisdictions, and the origin of the peace, law, stability and prosperity that still prevail in the West.

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6 months 1 week ago

Out of love, God becomes man. He says: Here you see what it is to be a human being; but he adds: Take care, for I am also God - blessed is he who takes no offense at me. 

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As translated by Howard V. Hong and EdnaH. Hong (1980) Variant translation; Out of love, God becomes man. He says: "See, here is what it is to be a human being."
5 months 2 weeks ago

Tell your master that if there were as many devils at Worms as tiles on its roofs, I would enter.

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Psalm. Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (translated by Frederic H. Hedge), Reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
5 months 2 weeks ago

I find that the best goodness I have has some tincture of vice.

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Ch. 20
3 months 1 week ago

After Plotinus, says Schassler, fifteen centuries passed without the slightest scientific interest for the world of beauty and art. ...In reality, nothing of the kind happened. The science of aesthetics ... neither did nor could vanish, because it never existed. ... the Greeks were so little developed that goodness and beauty seemed to coincide. On that obsolete Greek view of life the science of aesthetics was invented by men of the eighteenth century, and especially shaped and mounted in Baumgarten's theory. The Greeks (as anyone may read in Bénard's book on Aristotle and Walter's work on Plato) never had a science of aesthetics.

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1 month 1 week ago

The metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

I live from day to day, and content myself with having enough to meet my present and ordinary needs; for the extraordinary, all the provision in the world could not suffice.

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Ch. 14
3 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
5 months 1 week ago

We invite this Congress, and through it the scientists of the world and the general public, to subscribe to the following resolution: "In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them".

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4 months 1 day ago

But Aversion wee have for things, not only which we know have hurt us; but also that we do not know whether they will hurt us, or not.

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The First Part, Chapter 6, p. 24
1 month 1 week ago

The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk; but divert your attention by the objects surrounding you. Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far. The Europeans value themselves on having subdued the horse to the uses of man; but I doubt whether we have not lost more than we have gained, by the use of this animal. No one has occasioned so much, the degeneracy of the human body. An Indian goes on foot nearly as far in a day, for a long journey, as an enfeebled white does on his horse; and he will tire the best horses. There is no habit you will value so much as that of walking far without fatigue.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

False men and shams talk big and do nothing.

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5 months 1 week ago

We live to improve, or we live in vain.

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Address and Declaration at a Select Meeting of the Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty (August 20, 1791) p. 5
1 month 2 weeks ago

Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.

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This quote was attributed to Albert Schweitzer by Rachel Carson on p. 17 of her seminal work Silent Spring (1962), and is widely cited on various Internet websites, but an actual source from Schweitzer's works is elusive.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Cease therefore to be dismayed by the mere novelty and so to reject reason from your mind with loathing: weigh the questions rather with keen judgment and if they seem to you to be true, surrender, or if the thing is false, gird yourself to the encounter.

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Book II, lines 1040-1043 (tr. Munro)
1 month 4 days ago

And of universal nature, the notion I would offer, should be something like this. Nature is the aggregate of the bodies, that make up the world, in its present state, considered as a principle, by virtue whereof, they act and suffer, according to the laws of motion, prescribed by the author of things.

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Sect. 2.
3 months 1 day ago

A free society is a community of free beings, bound by the laws of sympathy and by the obligations of family love. It is not a society of people released from all moral constraint-for that is precisely the opposite of a society. Without moral constraint there can be no cooperation, no family commitment, no long-term prospects, no hope of economic, let alone social, order.

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"The Limits of Liberty," The American Spectator
2 months 3 weeks ago

The chalk is no unimportant element in the masonry of the earth's crust, and it impresses a peculiar stamp, varying with the conditions to which it is exposed, on the scenery of the districts in which it occurs.

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5 months 1 week ago

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

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Act 2, sc. 3
6 months 6 days ago

Well, then, arrest him. You can accuse him of something or other afterward.

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5 months 1 week ago

Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Let men learn (as we have said above) the difference that exists between the idols of the human mind, and the ideas of the Divine mind. The former are mere arbitrary abstractions; the latter the true marks of the Creator on his creatures, as they are imprinted on, and defined in matter, by true and exquisite touches. Truth, therefore, and utility are here perfectly identical.

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Aphorism 124
1 month 4 days ago

Shamed, dishonored, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus capitalist society stands. Not as we usually see it, playing the roles of peace and righteousness, of order, of philosophy, of ethics - as a roaring beast, as an orgy of anarchy, as a pestilential breath, devastating culture and humanity - so it appears in all its hideous nakedness.

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Ch. 1, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (1970), trns: Mary-Alice Waters
1 month 1 week ago

To farm is to be placed absolutely.

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"Imagination in Place"
3 months 3 weeks ago

Life is agid. Life is fulgid. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of.

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Quine's response in 1988 when asked his philosophy of life. (He invented the word "agid".) It makes up the entire Chapter 54 in Quine in Dialogue (2008).
2 months 2 weeks ago

The populist rant about greedy banks that is being loudly ventilated in Congress is a distraction from the true causes of the crisis. The dire condition of America's financial markets is the result of American banks operating in a free-for-all environment that these same American legislators created. It is America's political class that, by embracing the dangerously simplistic ideology of deregulation, has responsibility for the present mess.

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5 months 3 days ago

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.

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Part Three, Panopticism

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