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6 months 4 weeks ago

Our Traders in Men (an unnatural commodity!) must know the wickedness of that Slave-Trade, if they attend to reasoning, or the dictates of their own hearts; and such as shun and stiffle all these, wilfully sacrifice Conscience, and the character of integrity to that golden Idol.

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3 months 4 days ago

He who perceives death perceives a sense of the human comedy, and quickly becomes a poet.

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pp. 39-40
3 months 3 weeks ago

Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.

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Ch. VI: "Some Necessary Iconoclasm", p. 168.
5 months 1 week ago

Yes, yes, I see it all! - an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwords, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums and libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist - for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?

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7 months 4 days ago

My appetite comes to me while eating.

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Book III, Ch. 9. Of Vanity
3 months 4 days ago

Christianity is at the very root of the evil that has corrupted the West. This is the truth, and it admits no doubt.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.

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The Communist Manifesto, footnote
6 months 1 day ago

It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor; as such differences become less, it grows feeble; and when they disappear, it will vanish too.

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Book Three, Chapter XVIII.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Who is there that can recognize real intellect, and do reverence to it; and discriminate it well from sham intellect, which is so much more abundant, and deserves the reverse of reverence? He that himself has it!-One really human Intellect, invested with command, and charged to reform Downing Street for us, would continually attract real intellect to those regions, and with a divine magnetism search it out from the modest corners where it lies hid. And every new accession of intellect to Downing Street would bring to it benefit only, and would increase such divine attraction in it, the parent of all benefit there and elsewhere!

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7 months 4 days ago

Mother love is stronger than the filth and scabbiness on a child, and so the love of God toward us is stronger than the dirt that clings to us.

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94
5 months 3 weeks ago

If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.

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Fragment
5 months 2 weeks ago

The spectacle of what religions have been in the past, of what certain religions still are to-day, is indeed humiliating for human intelligence. What a farrago of error and folly!'

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Chapter II : Static Religion
5 months 3 weeks ago

Hegel ... proceeds abstractly from the pre-existence of the intellect. ... He does not appeal to the intellect within us.

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Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 68
2 weeks 5 days ago

Humanity can survive with religion IF:

1) Religion respects obvious reality.
2) Religion respects universal human rights.

Quit lying and dreaming of killing. Is that really too much to ask?

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6 months 3 weeks ago

His obedience is real since he really and truly fulfills his mission, since he runs real risks in order to carry out the beloved's orders. But, on the other hand, it is imaginary because he submits only to a creature of his mind.

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p. 152
6 months 1 day ago

In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.

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Chapter XV, in a section titled Tryanny of the Majority.
6 months 4 weeks ago

It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life."

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Quotation and Originality
7 months ago

With regard to politics and the character of princes and great men, I think I am very moderate. My views of things are more conformable to Whig principles; my representation of persons to Tory prejudices. Nothing can so much prove that men commonly regard more persons than things, as to find that I am commonly numbered among the Tories.

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E. C. Mossner, Life of David Hume (Clarendon Press, 2001), p. 311.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Our claim is that a common political project is possible. This possibility of course will have to be verified and realized in practice. ... We are capable of democracy. The challange is to organize it politically.

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226
3 months 1 week ago

If religion has put forward the proposition that we are all of us sinners, I set another against it: we are all of us perfect! Because, in each moment, we are all we can be, and never need to be more.

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Landstreicher, p. 226
5 months 3 weeks ago

If I used to ask myself, over a coffin, "what good did it do the occupant to be born?" I now put the same question about anyone alive.

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7 months 4 days ago

Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

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Book I, Ch. 7
2 months 3 weeks ago

You will recollect that before the Revolution, Coke Littleton was the universal elementary book of law students, and a sounder Whig never wrote, nor of profounder learning in the orthodox doctrines of the British constitution, or in what were called English liberties. You remember also that our lawyers were then all Whigs. But when his black-letter text, and uncouth, but cunning learning got out of fashion, and the honeyed Mansfieldism of Blackstone became the students' hornbook, from that moment, that profession (the nursery of our Congress) began to slide into toryism, and nearly all the young brood of lawyers now are of that hue. They suppose themselves, indeed, to be Whigs, because they no longer know what Whigism or republicanism means.

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Letter to James Madison (February 17, 1826), quoted in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. XVI (1905; 1907), p. 156
5 months 3 weeks ago

...what the freedom is that I love, and that to which I think all men intitled. It is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish Liberty. As if every Man was to regulate the whole of his Conduct by his own will. The Liberty I mean is social freedom. It is that state of things in which Liberty is secured by the equality of Restraint; A Constitution of things in which the liberty of no one Man, and no body of Men and no Number of men, can find Means to trespass on the liberty of any Person, or any description of Persons in the Society. This kind of liberty is indeed but another name for Justice, as ascertained by wise Laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions.

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Letter to Charles-Jean-François Depont (November 1789), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), p. 42
5 months 1 week ago

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.

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"Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit"
5 months 2 weeks ago

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.

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The Legend of the Baal-Shem (1955),1995 edition, p. 36
5 months 3 weeks ago

But as to our country and our race, as long as the well compacted structure of our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion-as long as the British Monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the State, shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers, as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land-so long as the mounds and dykes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France.

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pp. 52-53
3 months 4 days ago

In our opinion, the task of a far-sighted policy of the Third Reich ought to have been that of seeking every possible means to obtain at least the neutrality of the western nations so as to have free hands for a devestating attack exclusively against the Soviet Union-but that would have required the shrewdness and genius of a Metternich.

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pp. 81-82
5 months 1 week ago

The unbeliever walks for a quadrillion miles, yet one moments of reality makes up for it.

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Chapter Seven, The Great Synthesis…
6 months 3 weeks ago

The harm that is done by a religion is of two sorts, the one depending on the kind of belief which it is thought ought to be given to it, and the other upon the particular tenets believed. As regards the kind of belief: it is thought virtuous to have faith-that is to say, to have a conviction which cannot be shaken by contrary evidence. Or, if contrary evidence might induce doubt, it is held that contrary evidence must be suppressed.

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preface xxiii
5 months 3 weeks ago

Cast your eyes on the journals of parliament. It is for fear of losing the inestimable treasure we have, that I do not venture to game it out of my hands for the vain hope of improving it. I look with filial reverence on the constitution of my country, and never will cut it in pieces, and put it into the kettle of any magician, in order to boil it, with the puddle of their compounds, into youth and vigour. On the contrary, I will drive away such pretenders; I will nurse its venerable age, and with lenient arts extend a parent's breath.

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Speech in the House of Commons against William Pitt's motion for parliamentary reform (7 May 1782), quoted in The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke ...: Miscellaneous speeches, letters, and fragments, Vol. VI (1890), p. 153
2 months 2 weeks ago

I do not think that religion is the most important element. We are held together rather by a body of tradition, handed down from father to son, which the child imbibes with his mother's milk. The atmosphere of our infancy predetermines our idiosyncrasies and predilections.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

In the human reality, all existence that spends itself in procuring the prerequisites of existence is thus an "untrue" and unfree existence. Obviously this reflects the not at all ontological condition of a society based on the proposition that freedom is incompatible with the activity of procuring the necessities of life, that this activity is the "natural" function of a specific class, and that cognition of the truth and true existence imply freedom from the entire dimension of such activity. ... Society still is organized in such a way that procuring the necessities of life constitutes the full-time and life-long occupation of specific social classes, which are therefore unfree and prevented from a human existence. In this sense, the classical proposition according to which truth is incompatible with enslavement by socially necessary labor is still valid.

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pp. 127-128
5 months 1 week ago

Since the war began, miles of paper and oceans of ink have been used to prove the barbarity, the cruelty, the oppression of Prussian militarism. Conservatives and radicals alike are giving their support to the Allies for no other reason than to help crush that militarism, in the presence of which, they say, there can be no peace or progress in Europe. But though America grows fat on the manufacture of munitions and war loans to the Allies to help crush Prussians the same cry is now being raised in America which, if carried into national action, would build up an American militarism far more terrible than German or Prussian militarism could ever be, and that because nowhere in the world has capitalism become so brazen in its greed and nowhere is the state so ready to kneel at the feet of capital.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

For Genet, Beauty will be the offensive weapon that will enable him to beat the just on their own ground: that of value.

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p. 405
4 months 5 days ago

Any plea ... for institutionalized risk-assessment, beefed-up bioethics panels, academic review bodies, worse-case scenario planning, more intensive computer simulations, systematic long-term planning and the institutionalized study of existential risks is admirable. But so is urgent action to combat the global pandemic of suffering. "The easiest pain to bear is someone else's"

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Objections, No 34
5 months 1 week ago

We are really no longer ourselves a part of nature at the moment when we notice, when we recognize, that we are a part of nature.

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Probleme der Moralphilosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996), p. 154; as quoted in Andrew Bowie, Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 94
5 months 3 weeks ago

Raise your eyes and count the small gang of your oppressors who are only strong through the blood they suck from you and through your arms which you lend them unwillingly.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

I am firmly convinced, as I have already said, that to effect any great social improvement, it is sympathy rather than self-interest, the sense of duty rather than the desire for self-advancement, that must be appealed to. Envy is akin to admiration, and it is the admiration that the rich and powerful excite which secures the perpetuation of aristocracies.

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Ch. 21 : Conclusion
4 months 4 weeks ago

Descartes may have made a lot of mistakes, but he was right about this: you cannot doubt the existence of your own consciousness. That's the first feature of consciousness, it's real and irreducible. You cannot get rid of it by showing that it's an illusion in a way that you can with other standard illusions.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

If I compare arithmetic with a tree that unfolds upward into a multitude of techniques and theorems while its root drives into the depths, then it seems to me that the impetus of the root.

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Gottlob Frege, Montgomery Furth (1964). The Basic Laws of Arithmetic: Exposition of the System. p. 10
2 months 3 weeks ago

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

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24 June 1813
2 months 3 weeks ago

But we, O blockhead, with dogged spite and armored loveshall force those deaf dark powers to grow ears and hear us!I know that God is earless, eyeless, and heartless too,a brainless Dragon Worm that crawls on earth and hopesin anguish and then in secret that we'll give him soul,for then he, too, may sprout ears, eyes, to match his growth,but God is clay in my ten fingers, and I mould him!

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Odysseus to Kentaur, Book VIII, line 829
5 months 2 weeks ago

In the state of nature, Profit is the measure of Right.

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De Cive

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