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8 months 1 week ago

In brief, it is my thesis that human misery is the most urgent problem of a rational public policy and that happiness is not such a problem.

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p. 485
7 months 2 weeks ago

First of all, this prince is an idiot, and, secondly, he is a fool--knows nothing of the world, and has no place in it.

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Part 4, Chapter 5
8 months 2 weeks ago

A life devoted to science is therefore a happy life, and its happiness is derived from the very best sources that are open to dwellers on this troubled and passionate planet.

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Ch. 2: The Place of Science in a Liberal Education
7 months 1 week ago

Plants are Children of the Earth; we are Children of the Æther. Our Lungs are properly our Root; we live, when we breathe; we begin our life with breathing.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning.

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(p. 30)
7 months 1 week ago

Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one's own ratiocination and does not extend to that of other men. We come to the full possession of our power of drawing inferences the last of all our faculties, for it is not so much a natural gift as a long and difficult art.

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Illustrations of the Logic of Science First Paper - The Fixation of Belief", in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12
7 months 2 weeks ago

My Lords, to obtain empire is common; to govern it well has been rare indeed. To chastise the guilt of those who have been instruments of imperial sway over other nations by the high superintending justice of the sovereign state has not many striking examples among any people.

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Speech in opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings (16 February 1788), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Ninth (1899), p. 398
7 months 2 weeks ago

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

With Puritanism as the constant check upon American life, neither truth nor sincerity is possible. Nothing but gloom and mediocrity to dictate human conduct, curtail natural expression, and stifle our best impulses.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

In place of the bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, shall we have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

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Section 2, paragraph 72 (last paragraph).
2 weeks 3 days ago

It protects you from certitude while insisting it is certain. People have to die to maintain this willful ignorance....

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4 months 4 weeks ago

A great pilot can sail even when his canvas is rent.

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Line 3.
4 months 4 days ago

I lie on the beach like a crocodile and let myself be roasted by the sun. I never see a newspaper and don't give a damn for what is called the world.

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Letter to Max Born, 1918, from The Born-Einstein Letters: Friendship, Politics and Physics in Uncertain Times, Macmillan (2005 edition), pg 7.
7 months 1 week ago

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

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De Cive
8 months 2 weeks ago

Through laziness and cowardice a large part of mankind, even after nature has freed them from alien guidance, gladly remain immature. It is because of laziness and cowardice that it is so easy for others to usurp the role of guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor!

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8 months 2 weeks ago

But bounty and hospitality very seldom lead to extravagance; though vanity almost always does.

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Chapter III, Part V, p. 987.
8 months 3 weeks ago

The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

We do not only free God by battling and subduing the visible world about us; we also create God. "Open your eyes," God shouts; "I want to see! Prick up your ears, I want to hear! March in the front ranks: you are my head!"

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7 months 1 week ago

One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves.

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Jung and the Story of Our Time, Laurens van der Post
8 months 3 weeks ago

Rules necessary for definitions. Not to leave any terms at all obscure or ambiguous without definition; Not to employ in definitions any but terms perfectly known or already explained.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transforming being at home to being in the world. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space. They render time habitable.

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5 months 5 days ago

Suppose Odin to have been the inventor of Letters, as well as "magic," among that people! It is the greatest invention man has ever made! this of marking down the unseen thought that is in him by written characters. It is a kind of second speech, almost as miraculous as the first.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

The imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.

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Poetry and Imagination
8 months 2 weeks ago

Oh providence! Oh nature! Treasure of the poor, resource of the unfortunate. The person who feels, knows your holy laws and trusts them, the person whose heart is at peace and whose body does not suffer, thanks to you is not entirely prey to adversity.

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Second Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
4 months 1 week ago

I observe, that of late Chymistry begins, as indeed it deserves, to be cultivated by Learned Men who before despis'd it; and to be pretended to by many who never cultivated it, that they may be thought not to ignore it: Whence it is come to passe, that divers Chymical Notions about Matters Philosophical are taken for granted and employ'd, and so adopted by very eminent Writers both Naturalists and Physitians. Now this I fear may prove somewhat prejudicial to the Advancement of solid Philosophy: For though I am a great Lover of Chymical Experiments, and though I have no mean esteem of divers Chymical Remedies, yet I distinguish these from their Notions about the causes of things, and their manner of Generation.

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8 months 1 week ago

For man holds his ground only by surpassing himself, in the same sense in which it is said that one ceases to love if one does not love increasingly everyday.

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p. 238
8 months 2 weeks ago

Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Grey Life.

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6 months 1 week ago

Any artist should be grateful for a naïve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

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Foreword to The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom
7 months 2 weeks ago

These Lectures, conjoined with those which have already appeared under the titles of "The Characteristics of the Present Age," and "The Nature of the Scholar," in the latter of which the tone of thought that governs the present course is applied to a particular subject, form a complete scheme of popular instruction, of which the present work exhibits the highest and clearest summit; and, taken together, they are the result of a process of self-culture, unceasingly pursued during the last six or seven years of my life, with greater leisure and in riper maturity, by means of that Philosophy in which I have been a partaker for thirteen years, and which, although, I hope, it has changed many things in me, has nevertheless itself suffered no change whatever during that period.

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Preface
6 months 2 weeks ago

One of the great American tragedies is to have participated in a just war. It's been possible for politicians and movie-makers to encourage us we're always good guys. The Second World War absolutely had to be fought. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. But we never talk about the people we kill. This is never spoken of.

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Interviewed by Roger Friedman, "God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut", FoxNews.com
6 months 3 weeks ago

The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire. ... The Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear the figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate. The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

...this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky ways is-nothing.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.

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Chapter II
8 months 1 week ago

All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects that [the norm's] general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone's interests, and the consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation.

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p. 65
7 months 2 weeks ago

The foremost, or indeed the sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced as it were to a single principle.

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Book Four, Chapter IV.
7 months 1 week ago

All which a man loves, for which he leaves everything else but that, is his god, thus the glutton and drunkard has for his idol his own flesh, the fornicator has for his idol the harlot and the greedy has for his idol silver and gold, and so the same for every other sinner.

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Ch. 33
8 months 1 week ago

Technically speaking, since our complex societies are highly susceptible to interferences and accidents,they certainly offer ideal opportunities for a prompt disruption of normal activities. These disruptions can, with minimum expense, have considerably destructive consequences. Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.

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Habermas (2004) in: Giovanna Borradori (2004) Philosophy in a Time of Terror: : Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. p. 34
6 months 1 week ago

I am a pattern watcher.

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(p. 311)
7 months 1 week ago

What is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God.

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16:15 ESV
8 months 2 weeks ago

A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.

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Grey Eminence, 1940
8 months 2 weeks ago

Newton... (after having remarked that geometry only requires two of the mechanical actions which it postulates, namely, to describe a straight line and a circle) says: geometry is proud of being able to achieve so much while taking so little from extraneous sources. One might say of metaphysics, on the other hand: it stands astonished, that with so much offered it by pure mathematics it can effect so little. In the meantime, this little is something which mathematics indispensably requires in its application to natural science, which, inasmuch as it must here necessarily borrow from metaphysics, need not be ashamed to allow itself to be seen in company with the latter.

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Preface, Tr. Bax (1883) citing Isaac Newton's Principia
9 months 2 days ago

I am a Roman citizen.

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Against Verres [In Verrem], part 2, book 5, section 57; reported in Cicero, The Verrine Orations, trans. L. H. G. Greenwood (1935), vol. 2, p. 629
5 months 5 days ago

Cannot we understand how these men worshipped Canopus; became what we call Sabeans, worshipping the stars? Such is to me the secret of all forms of Paganism. Worship is transcendent wonder; wonder for which there is now no limit or measure; that is worship.

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5 months 5 days ago

The suffering man ought really 'to consume his own smoke'; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire, - which, in the metaphorical sense too, all smoke is capable of becoming!

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4 months 1 week ago

Take away your opinion, and there is taken away the complaint. Take away the complaint, and the hurt is gone.

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IV. 7, trans. George Long
5 months 5 days ago

If you are in a strait, a very good indication as to choice-perhaps the best you could get-is a book you have a great curiosity about. You are then in the readiest and best of all possible conditions to improve by that book.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The masses will burn it down first....or they'll just break away from the system. It won't be the techno feudalism the sadists dream of.....

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