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11 months 1 week ago

Canned laughter: After some supposedly funny or witty remark you can hear the laughter and applause included in the soundtrack of the show itself - here we have the exact counterpart of the Chorus in classical tragedy; it is here that we have to look for 'living Antiquity.' That is to say, why this laughter? The first possible answer - that it serves to remind us when to laugh - is interesting enough, because it implies the paradox that laughter is a matter of duty and not of some spontaneous feeling; but this answer is not sufficient because we do not usually laugh. The only correct answer would be that the Other - embodied in the television set - is relieving us even of our duty to laugh - is instead laughing for us. So even if, tired from a hard days stupid work, all evening we did nothing but gaze drowsily into the television screen, we can say afterwards that objectively, through the medium of the other, we had a really good time.

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3 months 1 day ago

Among Latin writers, the acceptations of the word nature are so many, that I remember, one author reckons up no less than fourteen or fifteen. Hence we see how easy 'tis for the generality of men, without excepting those who write of natural things, to impose upon others and themselves, in the use of a word so apt to be mis-employ'd. ..the very great ambiguity of this term, and the promiscuous use made of it, without sufficiently attending to its different significations, render many of the expressions wherein 'tis employ'd either unintelligible, improper, or false.

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Sect. 1
3 months 1 week ago

Now, as to universal love and mutual aid, they are beneficial and easy beyond a doubt. It seems to me that the only trouble is that there is no superior who encourages it. If there is a superior who encourages it, promoting it with rewards and commendations, threatening its reverse with punishments, I feel people will tend toward universal love and mutual aid like fire tending upward and water downwards - it will be unpreventable in the world.

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Book 4; Universal Love III
3 months 5 days ago

The fundamental terms of a system of Nomenclature may "be conveniently borrowed from casual or arbitrary circumstances.

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5 months 5 days ago

The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens ... Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere.

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As quoted in Tolstoy (1988) by A. N. Wilson, p. 146
6 months 3 weeks ago

With a greedy man thou shouldst not be a partner, and do not trust him with the leadership.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

So near at hand is freedom, and is anyone still a slave?

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6 months 6 days ago

It is the function of a judge not to make but to declare the law, according to the golden mete-wand of the law and not by the crooked cord of discretion.

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Preface to Brissot's Address
7 months 4 days ago

Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal.... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

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Letter VIII
3 months 5 days ago

The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen, in his person and property, and in their management. Try by this, as a tally, every provision of our constitution, and see if it hangs directly on the will of the people. Reduce your legislature to a convenient number for full, but orderly discussion. Let every man who fights or pays, exercise his just and equal right in their election.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Evil destroyeth itself.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality.

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Chapter one, The Country of the Blind
5 months 3 weeks ago

Moreover, nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed; the tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation, or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the soul, to assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked by it, can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune's image.

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p. 193
5 months 4 weeks ago

Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.

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Mark 13:31, KJV
7 months 5 days ago

We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.

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Lecture III, "The Reality of the Unseen"
5 months 2 weeks ago

Modem mainstream economic theory bravely assumes that people make their decisions in such a way as to maximize their utility. Accepting this assumption enables economics to predict a great deal of behavior (correctly or incorrectly) without ever making empirical studies of human actors.

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Simon (1990) "Invariants of Human Behavior" in: Annu. Rev. Psychol. 41: p. 6.

The only knowledge that can truly orient action is knowledge that frees itself from mere human interests and is based in Ideas-in other words knowledge that has taken a theoretical attitude.

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p. 301
7 months 3 weeks ago

The texts about the future life fall into, since demonstrative scholars do not agree whether to take them in their apparent meaning or interpret them allegorically. Either is permissible. But it is inexcusable to deny the fact of a future life altogether.

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4 weeks ago

Had to go over my YouTube videos to remove the videos where I conflate the epistemological foundation of the a priori / a posteriori distinction with ontological expectations. This is what self-reflection looks like....

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7 months 4 days ago

To whomever gives a kiss or a blowRender a kiss or blow, but to whomever gives when you are unable to return, offer all the hatred in your hear, for you were slaves and he enslaves you.

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Acts 8 & 9
3 months 3 weeks ago

His Religion is not an easy one: with rigorous fasts, lavations, strict complex formulas, prayers five times a day, and abstinence from wine, it did not "succeed by being an easy religion." As if indeed any religion, or cause holding of religion, could succeed by that! It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense, - sugar-plums of any kind, in this world or the next! In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler.

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6 months 6 days ago

They think of the philosopher as holding the ideal or subjective in one hand and the real or objective in the other and then have him strike the palms of his hands together so that one abrades the other. The product of this abrasion is the Absolute.

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P. 12
6 months 1 week ago

What most astonishes me in the United States, is not so much the marvelous grandeur of some undertakings, as the innumerable multitude of small ones.

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Book Two, Chapter XIX.

Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 131
7 months 1 week ago

Is it reasonable to assume a purposiveness in all the parts of nature and to deny it to the whole?

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Seventh Thesis
7 months 3 weeks ago

The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.

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Tractates on the Gospel of John; tractate XII on John 3:6-21, and 13
5 months 3 weeks ago

In the subjectivist view, when 'reason' is used to connote a thing or idea rather than an act, it refers exclusively to the relation of such an object or concept to a purpose, not to the object or concept itself. It means that the thing or the idea is good for something else. There is no reasonable aim as such, and to discuss the superiority of one aim over another in terms of reason becomes meaningless. From the subjective approach, such a discussion is possible only if both aims serve a third and higher one, that is, if they are means, not ends.

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p. 6.
7 months 1 week ago

Good and strong will. Mechanism must precede science (learning). Also in morals and religion? Too much discipline makes one narrow and kills proficiency. Politeness belongs, not to discipline, but to polish, and thus comes last.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 9
7 months 5 days ago

A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration.

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Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
6 months 1 day ago

The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.

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The particularity (Jeweiligkeit) of the places and their manifoldness are grounded in space, and the particularity of the time points is grounded in time. That basic characteristic of the thing, that essential determination of the thingness of the thing to be this one (je dieses), is grounded in the essence of space and time. Our question "What is a thing?" includes, therefore, the questions "What is space?" and "What is time?" It is customary The particularity (Jeweiligkeit) os the places.

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p. 16
3 months 6 days ago

The bodies breathe, feed, store up strength, and then in an erotic moment are shattered, are spent and drained utterly, that they may bequeath their spirit to their sons. What spirit? The drive upward!

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7 months 4 days ago

Generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriative choice of being. It is up to existential psychoanalysis to compare and classify them. Ontology abandons us here; it has merely enabled us to determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibilities, and the value which haunts it.

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3 months 5 days ago

Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, prophane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame, or blame...

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The First Part, Chapter 8, p. 34
7 months 5 days ago

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

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Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 1952
4 months 2 days ago

The newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.

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What Modern Liberty Means, p. 47. Essay first published in The Atlantic (November 1919).
7 months 5 days ago

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

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Part IV: America,Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey, 1926
7 months 5 days ago

Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.

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p. 158
5 months 1 day ago

A woman can earn her pardon for a good year of disobedience by a single adroit submission.

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The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the Bandbox.
3 months 1 day ago

Doubtless, it shews the wisdom of God, to have so fram'd things at first, that there can seldom or never need any extraordinary interposition of his power; or the employing from, time to time, an intelligent overseer, to regulate, assist, and control the motions of matter.

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Sect.1.
4 months 1 week ago

The modern world inherits the Christian view in which salvation is played out in history. In Christian myth human events follow a design known only to God; the history of humankind is an ongoing story of redemption. This is an idea that informs virtually all of western thought - not least when it is intensely hostile to religion. From Christianity onwards, human salvation would be understood (at least in the west) as involving movement through time. All modern philosophies in which history is seen as a process of human emancipation - whether through revolutionary change or incremental improvement - are garbled versions of this Christian narrative, itself a garbled version of the original message of Jesus.

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The Faith of Puppets: The Revelation of Philip K. Dick (p. 60)
3 months 4 days ago

Poverty is a crime. I do not mean that it is a crime to be poor. Murder is a crime; but it is not a crime to be murdered; and a man who is in poverty, I look upon, not as a criminal in himself, so much as the victim of a crime for which others, as well perhaps as himself, are responsible.

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The Crime of Poverty, 1885
3 months 3 weeks ago

Alas, the Hero from of old has had to cramp himself into strange shapes: the world knows not well at any time what to do with him, so foreign is his aspect in the world!

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The object of preaching is, constantly to remind mankind of what mankind are constantly forgetting; not to supply the defects of human intelligence, but to fortify the feebleness of human resolutions.

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"The Judge That Smites Contrary to the Law: A Sermon Preached...March 28, 1824", in The Works of the Rev. Sydney Smith (1860) p. 428

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