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1 month 2 weeks ago

I have stated that the constitutions of our several States vary more or less in some particulars. But there are certain principles in which all agree, and which all cherish as vitally essential to the protection of the life, liberty, property, and safety of the citizen:

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1 month 2 weeks ago

You have your brush, you have your colours, you paint paradise, then, in you go.

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As quoted in Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 2, No. 2, Nikos Kazantzakis
2 months 1 week ago

"No man in this fashionable London of yours," friend Sauerteig would say, "speaks a plain word to me. Every man feels bound to be something more than plain; to be pungent withal, witty, ornamental. His poor fraction of sense has to be perked into some epigrammatic shape, that it may prick into me;-perhaps (this is the commonest) to be topsyturvied, left standing on its head, that I may remember it the better! Such grinning inanity is very sad to the soul of man. Human faces should not grin on one like masks; they should look on one like faces! I love honest laughter, as I do sunlight; but not dishonest: most kinds of dancing too; but the St.-Vitus kind not at all! A fashionable wit, ach Himmel, if you ask, Which, he or a Death's- head, will be the cheerier company for me? pray send not him!"

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4 months 1 week ago

Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain without being uncovered.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Hitch your wagon to a star.

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Civilization
3 months 2 weeks ago

The state monopolizes violence by calling its critics "violent". Hence, we should be wary about those who claim that violence is necessary to curb or check violence; those who praise the forces of law, including the police and the prisons, as the final arbiters. To oppose violence is to understand that violence does not always take the form of the blow.

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p. 63
4 months 2 weeks ago

Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute.

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Book II, ch. 4 (trans. Constance Garnett) The Elder Zossima, speaking to Mrs. Khoklakov
2 months 1 week ago

"Genius" (which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all).

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Life of Fredrick the Great, Bk. IV, ch. 3 (1858-1865). Sometimes misreported as "Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains";
4 months 4 weeks ago

As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.

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Attribution to Pythagoras by Ovid, as quoted in The Extended Circle: A Dictionary of Humane Thought (1985) by Jon Wynne-Tyson, p. 260; also in Vegetarian Times, No. 168 (August 1991), p. 4
1 month 2 weeks ago

The system becomes more coherent as it is further extended. The elements which we require for explaining a new class of facts are already contained in our system. Different members of the theory run together, and we have thus a constant convergence to unity. In false theories, the contrary is the case.

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Part II Of Knowledge, Book XI Of the Construction of Science, Chap. 5 Of Certain Characteristics of Scientific Induction
5 months 2 weeks ago

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting.

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Ch. 16
2 months 1 week ago

All the problems that disturb us today-the cutting down of forests and the erosion of the soil; the emancipation of woman and the limitation of the family; the conservatism of the established, and the experimentalism of the unplaced, in morals, music, and government; the corruptions of politics and the perversions of conduct; the conflict of religion and science, and the weakening of the supernatural supports of morality; the war of the classes, the nations, and the continents; the revolutions of the poor against the economically powerful rich, and of the rich against the politically powerful poor; the struggle between democracy and dictatorship, between individualism and communism, between the East and the West-all these agitated, as if for our instruction, the brilliant and turbulent life of ancient Hellas. There is nothing in Greek civilization that does not illuminate our own.

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Preface, P.18
2 months 1 week ago

Hitherto men have speculated vaguely on the unity of universes; it is now about to be demonstrated by reasoning from the passional world to material, guided by the analogy which exists between the two.

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L'attraction passioneé, Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier, p. 54
6 months 1 week ago

If you would govern a state of a thousand chariots (a small-to-middle-size state), you must pay strict attention to business, be true to your word, be economical in expenditure and love the people. You should use them according to the seasons.

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4 months ago

The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but that of the privileged class; the class which robs and exploits the masses, and controls their lives from the cradle to the grave. No less pathetic is it that so few people realize that preparedness never leads to peace, but that it is indeed the road to universal slaughter.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

As the Genesis story teaches, knowledge cannot save us from ourselves. If we know more than before, it means only that we have greater scope to enact our fantasies. But - as the Genesis myth also teaches - there is no way we can rid ourselves of what we know. If we try to regain a state of innocence, the result can only be a worse madness. The message of Genesis is that in the most vital areas of human life there can be no progress, only an unending struggle with our own nature.

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An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (pp. 79-80)
4 months 1 week ago

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness. The symbol of art is seen again in the magic flute of the Great God Pan which makes the young goats frisk at the edge of the grove. All modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instill youthfulness into an ancient world.

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"Art a Thing of No Consequence"
4 months 2 days ago

Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.

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Ch. 29, June 10, 1943.
1 month 2 weeks ago

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

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Letter From Thomas Jefferson to the Rev. James Madison, 19 July 1788
5 months 3 weeks ago

Whence we see spiders, flies, or ants entombed and preserved forever in amber, a more than royal tomb.

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Historia Vitæ et Mortis; Sylva Sylvarum, Cent. i. Exper. 100, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed.
6 months 2 weeks ago

"The real saint", Baudelaire pretends to think, "is he who flogs and kills people for their own good." His argument will be heard. A race of real saints is beginning to spread over the earth for the purposes of confirming these curious conclusions about rebellion.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

A robot, the man had said, is logical but not reasonable.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

I hold in fact(1) That small portions of space are in fact of a nature analogous to little hills on a surface which is on the average flat; namely, that the ordinary laws of geometry are not valid in them.(2) That this property of being curved or distorted is continually being passed on from one portion of space to another after the manner of a wave.(3) That this variation of the curvature of space is what really happens in that phenomenon which we call the motion of matter, whether ponderable or etherial.(4) That in the physical world nothing else takes place but this variation, subject possibly to the law of continuity.

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Abstract
4 months 2 weeks ago

The world must be romanticized. In this way the originary meaning may be found again.

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As quoted in The Experience of the Foreign : Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany (1992) by Antoine Berman Variant translation: Romanticize the world.
4 months 1 week ago

I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

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14:06
2 months 1 week ago

And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing over us. It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched; many men have died; all men must die,-the last exit of us all is in a Fire-Chariot of Pain. But it is to live miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated, girt in with a cold universal Laissez-faire: it is to die slowly all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, Infinite Injustice, as in the accursed iron belly of a Phalaris' Bull! This is and remains forever intolerable to all men whom God has made. Do we wonder at French Revolutions, Chartisms, Revolts of Three Days? The times, if we will consider them, are really unexampled.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Saying is one thing and doing is another.

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Ch. 31
2 months 2 days ago

"You will have less money." Yes, and less trouble. "Less influence." Yes, and less envy.

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2 months 1 week ago

If... it be supposed that another way of measuring time is adopted... enunciation of the law would be... translated into another language... much less simple. So that the definition implicitly adopted by the astronomers may be summed up..: Time should be so defined that the equations of mechanics may be as simple as possible... [i.e.,] there is not one way of measuring time more true... only more convenient.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

'Our kingdom go' is the necessary and unavoidable corollary of 'Thy kingdom come.' For the more there is of self, the less there is of God.

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Chapter VI - Mortification, Non-Attachment, Right Livelihood
6 months 2 days ago

Everything has two handles, the one by which it may be carried, the other by which it cannot. If your brother acts unjustly, don't lay hold on the action by the handle of his injustice, for by that it cannot be carried; but by the opposite, that he is your brother, that he was brought up with you; and thus you will lay hold on it, as it is to be carried.

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(43).
1 month 2 weeks ago

How many together with whom I came into the world are already gone out of it.

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VI, 56
4 months 1 week ago

The medieval peasant prior to the 13th century does not compare himself to the feudal lord, nor does the artisan compare himself to the knight. ... From the king down to the hangman and the prostitute, everyone is "noble" in the sense that he considers himself as irreplaceable. In the "system of free competition," on the other hand, the notions on life's tasks and their value are not fundamental, they are but secondary derivations of the desire of all to surpass all the others. No "place" is more than a transitory point in this universal chase.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 56
2 months 3 days ago

There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin than the Nazis were.

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4 months 1 week ago

Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated. 

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As quoted in Communications and History : Theories of Knowledge, Media and Civilization (1988) by Paul Heyer, p. 125
5 months 1 week ago

He who abhors and shuns the light of the Sun, He who refuses to behold with respect the living creation of God, He who leads the good to wickedness, He who makes the meadows waterless and the pastures desolate, He who lets fly his weapon against the innocent, An enemy of my faith, a destroyer of Thy principles is he, O Lord!

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Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 32, 10.
3 months 6 days ago

I would not give up the keys to the granary, because I know that, by doing so, I should turn scarcity into a famine.

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Sullivan, p. 266
1 month 2 weeks ago

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.-That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

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1 month 1 week ago

Every legal constitution is the product of a revolution. In the history of classes, revolution is the act of political creation, while legislation is the political expression of the life of a society that has already come into being. Work for reform does not contain its own force independent from revolution. During every historic period, work for reforms is carried on only in the direction given to it by the impetus of the last revolution and continues as long as the impulsion from the last revolution continues to make itself felt. Or, to put it more concretely, in each historic period work for reforms is carried on only in the framework of the social form created by the last revolution. Here is the kernel of the problem.

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Ch. 8
5 months 2 weeks ago

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

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An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics, 1927
1 month 2 weeks ago

Philosophers who have wanted to banish the ghost from the machine have usually sought to do so by showing that truths about behavior can sometimes, and in some sense, logically implicate truths about mental states. In so doing, they have rather strongly suggested that the exorcism can be carried through only if such a logical connection can be made out. ... Once it has been made clear that the choice between dualism and behaviorism is not exhaustive, a major motivation for the defense of behaviorism is removed: we are not required to be behaviorists simply in order to avoid being dualists.

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Fodor (1986) "Why Paramecia Don't Have Mental Representations," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10: 3-23. cited in: Bradley Rives "Jerry A. Fodor (1935 - )" Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Oct. 25, 2010
5 months 3 weeks ago

I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.

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Book III, Ch. 13. Of Experience
1 month 1 week ago

Much reading after a certain age diverts the mind from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theaters is apt to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.

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as quoted in Diderot and the Encyclopædists (1897) by John Morley, p. 92.
3 months 6 days ago

Wherever literature consoles sorrow, or assuages pain,-wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep,-there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal influence of Athens.

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p. 179
4 months 3 weeks ago

The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it.

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Chapter IV, Part I.

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