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1 month 3 weeks ago

"In situations of sparse resources along with degraded self-images and depoliticized sensibilities, one avenue for poor people is in existential rebellion and anarchic expression. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people."
- Cornel West

See biography for Cornel West:
https://civilsimian.com/Cornel-West

Read Cornel West's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/83/content

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6 months 1 day ago

We distinguish diagrammatic from sentential paper-and-pencil representations of information by developing alternative models of information-processing systems that are informationally equivalent and that can be characterized as sentential or diagrammatic. Sentential representations are sequential, like the propositions in a text. Diagrammatic representations are indexed by location in a plane. Diagrammatic representations also typically display information that is only implicit in sentential representations and that therefore has to be computed, sometimes at great cost, to make it explicit for use. We then contrast the computational efficiency of these representations for solving several.illustrative problems in mathematics and physics.

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p. 65
7 months 2 weeks ago

Enjoyment of the work consists in participation in the creative state of the artist.

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p. 117
6 months 2 weeks ago

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This famous statement has produced many paraphrases and variants: Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes. Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it. Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them. Those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them.

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There is a similar quote by Edmund Burke (in Revolution in France) that often leads to misattribution: "People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors."
7 months 1 week ago

When it comes to consideration of how to do well in running the city, which must proceed entirely through justice and soundness of mind.

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As quoted in Protagoras by Plato
5 months 1 week ago

Any ethics that needs religion is bad ethics, and any religion that tries to do so is bad religion. Of course, there are plenty of both around.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

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Letter to James Madison (30 January 1787); referring to Shays' Rebellion Lipscomb & Bergh ed. 6:65
6 months 2 weeks ago

A character is a completely fashioned will.

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(vollkommen gebildeter Wille).
4 months 2 weeks ago

It is our fatalest misery just now, not easily alterable, and yet urgently requiring to be altered, That no British man can attain to be a Statesman, or Chief of Workers, till he has first proved himself a Chief of Talkers: which mode of trial for a Worker, is it not precisely, of all the trials you could set him upon, the falsest and unfairest?

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4 months 2 weeks ago

All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

I said to the almond tree: "Speak to me of God."and the almond tree blossomed.

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The Fratricides
5 months 2 weeks ago

The university, in a society ruled by public opinion, was to have been an island of intellectual freedom where all views were investigated without restriction. ... But by consenting to play an active or "positive," a participatory role in society, the university has become inundated and saturated with the backflow of society's "problems." Preoccupied with questions of Health, Sex, Race, War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes. ... Any proposed reforms of liberal education which might bring the university into conflict with the whole of the U.S.A. are unthinkable. Increasingly, the people "inside" are identical in their appetites and motives with the people "outside" the university.

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p. 18
6 months 3 weeks ago

Around us knowledge has been extinguished, and recruitment of men of religion and men of law has ceased; that is to say, we have made Muslim society much more miserable, more disordered, more ignorant, and more barbarous than it had been before knowing us.

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Travail sur l'Algerie, Travels in Algeria p. 185
7 months 3 weeks ago

How you produce volume after volume the way you do is more than I can conceive. ...But you haven't to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts as I do. It is like walking through the densest brush wood.

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Letter to Henry James (ca. 1890) as quoted by Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2007) p. 297.
4 months 4 days ago

Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers - such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.

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Open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers' Congress (16 May 1967) "The Struggle Intensifies," Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, ed. Leopold Labedz
6 months 3 weeks ago

We are always on stage, even when we are stabbed in earnest at the end.

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Act II.
8 months 2 days ago

Seek first the virtues of the mind; and other things either will come, or will not be wanted.

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Book II, xxxi
7 months 3 weeks ago

Children are all foreigners.

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September 25, 1839
6 months 3 weeks ago

The pit of a theatre is the one place where the tears of virtuous and wicked men alike are mingled.

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8 months 1 week ago

Let the states of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection, and a happy order will prevail throughout heaven and earth, and all things will be nourished and flourish.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

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"Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus)"
6 months 1 day ago

Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!

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Chapter 4, Evidence, p. 31.
7 months 3 weeks ago

Every one knows that there are no real forests in England. The deer in the parks of the great are demurely domestic cattle, fat as London alderman.

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Vol. I, Ch. 27, pg. 803.
4 months 2 weeks ago

It is truly a lordly spectacle how this great soul takes in all kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, an Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets them all forth to us in their round completeness; loving, just, the equal brother of all. Novum Organum, and all the intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quite secondary order; earthy, material, poor in comparison with this. Among modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the same rank. Goethe alone, since the days of Shakspeare, reminds me of it. Of him too you say that he saw the object; you may say what he himself says of Shakspeare: 'His characters are like watches with dial-plates of transparent crystal; they show you the hour like others, and the inward mechanism also is all visible.'.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.

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p. 52e
4 months 1 week ago

The wise man is joyful, happy and calm, unshaken, he lives on a plane with the gods.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

To choose one sock from each of infinitely many pairs of socks requires the Axiom of Choice, but for shoes the Axiom is not needed.

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As quoted in Williams' Weighing the Odds: A Course in Probability and Statistics (2001), p. 498
5 months 2 weeks ago

To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage.

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Crabbed Age and Youth.
7 months 3 weeks ago

It is remarkable, that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or to acknowledge the personality of God. ... In reading a work on agriculture, we have to skip the author's moral reflections, and the words "Providence" and "He" scattered along the page, to come at the profitable level of what he has to say. What he calls his religion is for the most part offensive to the nostrils. ... There is more religion in men's science than there is science in their religion.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it.

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8 months 1 week ago

The members of Christ, many though they be, are bound to one another by the ties of charity and peace under the one Head, who is our Saviour Himself, and form one man. Often their voice is heard in the Psalms as the voice of one man; the cry of one is as the cry of all, for all are one in One.

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p.430
7 months 3 weeks ago

My purpose is to explain, not the meaning of words, but the nature of things.

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Part III, Def. XX
6 months 6 days ago

In the end, I am moved by causes and ideas that I can actually choose to support because they conform to values and principles that I believe in.

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p. 88
6 months 1 day ago

From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have the right ideas.

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Chapter 15, Inductive Logic, p. 139.
7 months 3 weeks ago

The second matter in which Mill's principles condemn existing legislation is homosexuality. If two adults voluntarily enter into such a relation, this is a matter which concerns them only, and in which, therefore, the community ought not to intervene. If it were still believed, as it once was, that the toleration of such behavior would expose the community to the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, the community would have every right to intervene. But it does not acquire a right to intervene merely on the ground that such conduct is thought wicked. The criminal law may rightly be invoked to prevent violence or fraud inflicted upon unwilling victims, but it ought not to be invoked when whatever damage there may be is suffered only by the agents-always assuming that the agents are adults.

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p. 139
4 months 1 week ago

The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars and revolutions is its anti-capitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties are eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise. It is an almost unchallenged dogma that capitalism is done for and that the coming of all-round regimentation of economic activities is both inescapable and highly desirable.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

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Section 4, paragraph 11 (last paragraph) Variant translation: Workers of the world, unite!
4 months 2 weeks ago

The capitalist call workers to the factory, for example, directing them to collaborate and communicate in production and giving them the means to do so. In the paradigm of immaterial production, in contrast, labor itself tends to produce the means of interaction, communication, and cooperation for production directly. Affective labor always directly constructs a relationship.

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147
7 months 3 weeks ago

I like a church, I like a cowl, I love a prophet of the soul, And on my heart monastic aisles Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles; Yet not for all his faith can see, Would I that cowled churchman be. Why should the vest on him allure, Which I could not on me endure?

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The Problem, st. 1
5 months 2 days ago

Given our anthropocentric bias, thinking of non-human vertebrates not just as equivalent in moral status to toddlers or infants, but as though they were toddlers or infants, is a useful exercise. Such reconceptualisation helps correct our lack of empathy for sentient beings whose physical appearance is different from "us". Ethically, the practice of intelligent "anthropomorphism" shouldn't be shunned as unscientific, but embraced insofar as it augments our stunted capacity for empathy. Such anthropomorphism can be a valuable corrective to our cognitive and moral limitations. This is not a plea to be sentimental, simply for impartial benevolence.

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Reprogramming Predators, BLTC Research, 2009
8 months 1 week ago

Those animals which are incapable of making binding agreements with one another not to inflict nor suffer harm are without either justice or injustice; and likewise for those peoples who either could not or would not form binding agreements not to inflict nor suffer harm.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

This is how one puts an end to totality. If all information can be found in each of its parts, the whole loses its meaning. It is also the end of the body, of this singularity called body, whose secret is precisely that it cannot be segmented into additional cells, that it is an indivisible configuration, to which its sexuation is witness (paradox: cloning will fabricate sexed beings in perpetuity, since they are similar to their model, whereas thereby sex becomes useless-but precisely sex is not a function, it is what makes a body a body, it is what exceeds all the parts, all the diverse functions of this body). Sex (or death: in this sense it is the same thing) is what exceeds all information that can be collected on a body. Well, where is all this information collected? In the genetic formula. This is why it must necessarily want to forge a path of autonomous reproduction, independent of sexuality and of death.

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"Clone Story," p. 97
6 months 1 week ago

The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.

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p. 133.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Even when labor is subjugated by capital it always necessarily maintains its own autonomy, and this ever more clearly true today with respect to the new immaterial, cooperative and collaborative forms of labor. This relationship is not isolated to the economic terrain but, as we will argue later, spills over into the biopolitical terrain of society as a hole, including military conflicts. In any case, we should recognize here that even in asymmetrical conflicts victory in terms of complete domination is not possible. All that can be achieved is a provisional and limited maintenance of control and order that must constantly be policed and preserved. Counterinsurgency is a full-time job.

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