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Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
5 months 2 weeks ago
There is nothing so eternally adhesive...

There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
2 months 2 weeks ago
In anything fit to be called...

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.

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A Gossip on Romance, printed in Longman's Magazine (November 1882).
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
3 weeks 1 day ago
With respect to modern languages, French,...

With respect to modern languages, French, as I have before observed, is indispensible. Next to this the Spanish is most important to an American. Our connection with Spain is already important and will become daily more so. Besides this the antient part of American history is written chiefly in Spanish.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
2 weeks 4 days ago
The abyss of endless time that...

The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of all those applauding hands. The people who praise us-how capricious they are, how arbitrary. And the tiny region in which it all takes place.

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(Hays translation) IV, 4
Philosophical Maxims
Susan Neiman
Susan Neiman
2 months 1 week ago
French schoolchildren can be proud to...

French schoolchildren can be proud to become citizens of the country that gave the world the Declaration of the Rights of Man; need they be told that it was disregarded a few years after it inspired the revolution in Haiti, whose leader, Toussaint Louverture, was consigned to death in a French prison?

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 3 weeks ago
Be quiet! Anyone can spit in...

Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.

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Act 1
Philosophical Maxims
Emperor Julian
Emperor Julian
1 month 1 day ago
Who then is the Mother of...

Who then is the Mother of the Gods? She is the Source of the Intelligible and Creative Powers, which direct the visible ones; she that gave birth to and copulated with the mighty Jupiter: she that exists as a great goddess next to the Great One, and in union with the Great Creator; she that is dispenser of all life; cause of all birth; most easily accomplishing all that is made; generating without passion; creating all that exists in concert with the Father; herself a virgin, without mother, sharing the throne of Jupiter, the mother in very truth of all the gods; for by receiving within herself the causes of all the intelligible deities that be above the world, she became the source to things the objects of intellect.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
1 week 5 days ago
I believe with Schopenhauer: We...

I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act as if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being. I know that philosophically a murderer is not responsible for his crime; nevertheless, I must protect myself from unpleasant contacts. I may consider him guiltless, but I prefer not to take tea with him.

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Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
3 months 1 week ago
The French symbolists had a special...

The French symbolists had a special term to express their love for things that had lost their objective significance, namely, 'spleen.' The conscious, challenging arbitrariness in the choice of objects, its 'absurdity' and 'perverseness,' as if by a silent gesture discloses the irrationality of utilitarian logic, which it then slaps in the face in order to demonstrate its inadequacy with regard to human experience. And while making it conscious, by this shock, of the fact that it forgets the subject, the gesture simultaneously expresses the subject's sorrow over his inability to achieve an objective order. Twentieth-century society is not troubled by such inconsistencies. For it, meaning can be achieved in only one way-service for a purpose.

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p. 38.
Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
3 months 5 days ago
Catastrophic fatality abruptly switches over into...

Catastrophic fatality abruptly switches over into salvation.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 3 weeks ago
The conviction that it is important...

The conviction that it is important to believe this or that, even if a free inquiry would not support the belief, is one which is common to almost all religions and which inspires all systems of state education. The consequence is that the minds of the young are stunted and are filled with fanatical hostility both to those who have other fanaticisms, and, even more virulently, to those who object to all fanaticisms.

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preface xxiii
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 2 weeks ago
What thinkest thou, Simon? of whom...

What thinkest thou, Simon? of whom do the kings of the earth take custom or tribute? of their own children, or of strangers?

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17:25 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
2 months 2 weeks ago
Adversity shows whether we have friends,...

Adversity shows whether we have friends, or only the shadows of friends.

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Maxim 35
Philosophical Maxims
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
3 months 1 week ago
Being, in whose name Heidegger's philosophy...

Being, in whose name Heidegger's philosophy increasingly concentrates itself, is for him-as a pure self-presentation to passive consciousness-just as immediate, just as independent of the mediations of the subject as the facts and the sensory data are for the positivists. In both philosophical movements thinking becomes a necessary evil and is broadly discredited. Thinking loses its element of independence. The autonomy of reason vanishes: the part of reason that exceeds the subordinate reflection upon and adjustment to pre-given data. With it, however, goes the conception of freedom and, potentially, the self-determination of human society.

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p. 9
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
4 months 3 weeks ago
If you say that this is...

If you say that this is absurd, that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such person know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding up before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing intrinsically absurd.

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"What Makes a Life Significant?"
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
3 months 2 weeks ago
Be ye therefore ready also: for...

Be ye therefore ready also: for the Son of man cometh at an hour when ye think not.

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12:40
Philosophical Maxims
Susan Neiman
Susan Neiman
2 months 1 week ago
Statues are not about history. We...

Statues are not about history. We don't memorialize each piece of history. We memorialize things that we want to value and things that we want our children to walk by and say "This person embodied the values that I care about." Therefore, statues are about values not about history.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months 1 week ago
Life is a business...
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Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
5 months 3 weeks ago
It is as useless for a...

It is as useless for a person to want first of all to decide the externals and after that the fundamentals as it is for a cosmic body, thinking to form itself, first of all to decide the nature of its surface, to what bodies it should turn its light, which its dark side, without first letting the harmony of centrifugal and centripetal forces realize its existence and letting the rest come of itself. One must learn to know oneself before knowing anything else (gnothi seauton). Not until a person has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning.

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
5 months 1 day ago
Neither did the dispensation of God...

Neither did the dispensation of God vary in the times after our Saviour came into the world; for our Saviour himself did first show His power to subdue ignorance, by His conference with the priests and doctors of the law, before He showed His power to subdue nature by His miracles. And the coming of this Holy Spirit was chiefly figured and expressed in the similitude and gift of tongues, which are but vehicula scientiæ.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
3 months 4 days ago
Truths dead and forgotten long ago,...

Truths dead and forgotten long ago, conceptions of the world and its people, covered with mould, even during the times of our grandmothers, are being hammered into the heads of our young generation.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
3 months 1 week ago
And he arrives at the cogito...

And he arrives at the cogito ergo sum, which St. Augustine had already anticipated... "I think therefore I am," can only mean "I think, therefore I am a thinker"; this being of "I am," which is deduced from "I think," is merely a knowing; this being is a knowledge, but not life. And the primary reality is not that I think, but that I live, for those also live who do not think. Although this living may not be a real living. God! what contradictions when we seek to join in wedlock life and reason!

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
4 months 2 weeks ago
The constitution of madness as mental...

The constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.

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Preface to 1961 edition
Philosophical Maxims
William Whewell
William Whewell
3 weeks ago
The Science of Hydrostatics depends upon...

The Science of Hydrostatics depends upon the Fundamental Principle that 'fluids press equally in all directions'. This Principle necessarily results from the conception of a Fluid, as a body of which the parts are perfectly moveable in all directions. For since the Fluid is a body, it can transmit pressure; and the transmitted pressure is equal to the original pressure, in virtue of the Axiom that Reaction is equal to Action. That the Fundamental Principle is not derived from experience, is plain both from its evidence and from its history.

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Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
3 months 4 days ago
Women dream till they have no...

Women dream till they have no longer the strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet which are their life, without which they could not have lived; those dreams go at last. All their plans and visions seem vanished, and they know not where; gone, and they cannot recall them. They do not even remember them. And they are left without the food of reality or of hope. Later in life, they neither desire nor dream, neither of activity, nor of love, nor of intellect. The last often survives the longest. They wish, if their experiences would benefit anybody, to give them to someone. But they never find an hour free in which to collect their thoughts, and so discouragement becomes ever deeper and deeper, and they less and less capable of undertaking anything.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 2 weeks ago
Crime in full glory consolidates authority...

Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.

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Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 3 weeks ago
What we call Man's power over...

What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
3 months 2 weeks ago
The precarious ontological link between Logos...

The precarious ontological link between Logos and Eros is broken, and scientific rationality emerges as essentially neutral.

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p. 147
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 3 weeks ago
What would we really know the...

What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; - show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; - and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.

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par. 40
Philosophical Maxims
Leszek Kołakowski
Leszek Kołakowski
1 month 2 weeks ago
The abolition of the market means...

The abolition of the market means not only that the consumers-that is all members of society-are robbed of virtually all choice of consumption and all influence over production; it also means that the information and communication are monopolized by the State, as they too need a vast material base in order to operate. The abolition of the market means, then, that both material and intellectual assets would be totally rationed. To say nothing of the inefficiency of production convincingly demonstrated in the history of communism, this economy requires an omnipotent police state. Briefly: the abolition of the market means a gulag society.

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"The Self-Poisoning of the Open Society"
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
4 months 3 weeks ago
Our Traders in Men (an unnatural...

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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Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
2 weeks 4 days ago
There is a limit to the...

There is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don't use it to free yourself it will be gone and never return.

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(Hays translation) II, 4
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 3 weeks ago
The only government that I recognize-and...

The only government that I recognize-and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army - is that power that establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice.

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
5 months 1 day ago
It is not the pleasure of...

It is not the pleasure of curiosity, nor the quiet of resolution, nor the raising of the spirit, nor victory of wit, nor faculty of speech that are the true ends of knowledge, but it is a restitution and reinvesting, in great part, of man to the sovereignty and power, for whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names, he shall again command them.

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Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature (ca. 1603), in Works, Vol. I, p. 83; The Works of Francis Bacon (1819), Vol. 2, p. 133
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
5 months 4 days ago
I would have written…

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

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Provincial Letters: Letter XVI (4 December 1656)
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
4 months 4 weeks ago
The Clergy is the greatest hindrance...

The Clergy is the greatest hindrance to faith.

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58
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
2 weeks 4 days ago
Whatsoever any man either doth or...

Whatsoever any man either doth or saith, thou must be good; not for any man's sake, but for thine own nature's sake; as if either gold, or the emerald, or purple, should ever be saying to themselves, Whatsoever any man either doth or saith, I must still be an emerald, and I must keep my colour.

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VII, 12
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
3 weeks 1 day ago
We shall divert through our own...

We shall divert through our own Country a branch of commerce which the European States have thought worthy of the most important struggles and sacrifices, and in the event of peace... we shall form to the American union a barrier against the dangerous extension of the British Province of Canada and add to the Empire of liberty an extensive and fertile Country thereby converting dangerous Enemies into valuable friends.

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Philosophical Maxims
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
2 months 3 weeks ago
Science fiction is like other writing....

Science fiction is like other writing. It is just novels and short stories with machines.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
1 month 2 weeks ago
We can not... escape the conclusion...

We can not... escape the conclusion that the rule of reasoning by recurrence is irreducible to the principle of contradiction. ...Neither can this rule come to us from experience... This rule, inaccessible to analytic demonstration and to experience, is the veritable type of the synthetic a priori judgment. On the other hand, we can not think of seeing in it a convention, as in some of the postulates of geometry. ...it is only the affirmation of the power of the mind which knows itself capable of conceiving the indefinite repetition of the same act when once this act is possible. The mind has a direct intuition of this power, and experience can only give occasion for using it and thereby becoming conscious of it.

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Ch. I. (1905) Tr. George Bruce Halstead
Philosophical Maxims
Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold J. Toynbee
2 months 4 days ago
Right and wrong are the same...

Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims.

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Foreword to The Transformation of Palestine
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 3 weeks ago
I don't deserve a share in...

I don't deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people - all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumors. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 3 weeks ago
It seems to me that science...

It seems to me that science has a much greater likelihood of being true in the main than any philosophy hitherto advanced (I do not, of course, except my own). In science there are many matters about which people are agreed; in philosophy there are none. Therefore, although each proposition in a science may be false, and it is practically certain that there are some that are false, yet we shall be wise to build our philosophy upon science, because the risk of error in philosophy is pretty sure to be greater than in science. If we could hope for certainty in philosophy, the matter would be otherwise, but so far as I can see such a hope would be chimerical.

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Logical Atomism, 1924
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
3 months 5 days ago
Upper middle-class upbringing has rooted out...

Upper middle-class upbringing has rooted out any element of what might appear to be self-assertion or egoism; good manners is to be like everyone else. So the male of the species becomes accustomed to suppress any stirring of impatience or originality. Shaw once said you can't learn to skate without making a fool of yourself; the British middle-class attitude seems to be that, in that case, you hadn't better skate at all. The result seems to be considerably more oppressive than being brought up in a Jewish ghetto or a west side slum.

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p. 112, An integrity born of hope: Notes on Christopher Isherwood
Philosophical Maxims
Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg
2 weeks 4 days ago
For Lenin, the difference between the...

For Lenin, the difference between the Social Democracy and Blanquism is reduced to the observation that in place of a handful of conspirators we have a class-conscious proletariat. He forgets that this difference implies a complete revision of our ideas on organization and, therefore, an entirely different conception of centralism and the relations existing between the party and the struggle itself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
3 months 1 week ago
By freedom he meant a condition...

By freedom he meant a condition in which men were not prevented from choosing both the object and the manner of their worship. For him only a society in which this condition was realised could be called fully human. Its realisation was an ideal which Mill regarded as more precious than life itself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
5 months 1 week ago
To those whose talents are...

To those whose talents are above mediocrity, the highest subjects may be announced. To those who are below mediocrity, the highest subjects may not be announced.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold J. Toynbee
2 months 4 days ago
It is a paradoxical but profoundly...

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.

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Vol. 7 (1954). Also in Civilization on Trial (1957 ) p. 247
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
4 months 4 weeks ago
When you see a person squirming...

When you see a person squirming in the clutches of the Law, say to him: "Brother, get things straight. You let the Law talk to your conscience. Make it talk to your flesh.

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Chapter 2, Verse 19
Philosophical Maxims
Polybius
Polybius
1 month 2 weeks ago
For what gives my work its...

For what gives my work its peculiar quality, and what is most remarkable in the present age, is this. Fortune has guided almost all the affairs of the world in one direction and has forced them to incline towards one and the same end; a historian should likewise bring before his readers under one synoptical view the operations by which she has accomplished her general purpose.

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Philosophical Maxims
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