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5 months 2 weeks ago

It seems to me obvious that infants and many animals that do not in any ordinary sense have a language or perform speech acts nonetheless have Intentional states. Only someone in the grip of a philosophical theory would deny that small babies can literally be said to want milk and that dogs want to be let out or believe that their master is at the door.

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P. 5.
3 months 4 weeks ago

You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you. If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it is still the truth that had to said in the age of the Welfare State.

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Mises' letter to Ayn Rand praising Atlas Shrugged,(23 January 1958), quoted in Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (2007).
7 months 2 weeks ago

A company of solemn tyrants is impervious to all seductions.

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"Tyranny", 1764
6 months 2 weeks ago

Jews are angry and brutish people, vile and vulgar men, slaves worthy of the yoke [Talmudism] which you bear... Go, take back your books and remove yourselves from me. [ The Talmud ] taught the Jews to steal the goods of Christians, to regard them as savage beasts, to push them over the precipice... to kill them with impunity and to utter every morning the most horrible imprecations against them.

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See The Jews: A History, Second Edition, by John Efron, Steven Weitzman and Matthias Lehmann
4 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophy is said to have taken the 'linguistic turn' in this century. One hundred years ago, a philosopher would think in terms of mind, spirit, experience, consciousness; now the by-word is language.

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Chapter 2, Metaphysics and Metaphor, p. 26
7 months 3 weeks ago

The heathen really make their self-invented notions and dreams of God and idol. Ultimately, they put their trust in that which is nothing. So it is with all idolatry. For it happens not merely by erecting an image and worshipping it, but rather it happens in the heart. For the heart seeks help and consolation from creatures, saints, or devils. It neither cares for God, nor looks to Him for anything better than to believe that He is willing to help.

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"On Infant Baptism," Large Catechism
7 months 1 day ago

When he was wounded with an arrow in the ankle, and many ran to him that were wont to call him a god, he said smiling, "That is blood, as you see, and not, as Homer saith, 'such humour as distils from blessed gods.'"

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43 Alexander
8 months 1 week ago

Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other. 

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"Historical Murder", as translated by Anthony Bower
7 months 3 weeks ago

When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?

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Ch. 12 (tr. Donald M. Frame) , tr. David Wills, 2008
5 months 4 weeks ago

The materialists say, it is by means of a series of straight lines more or less perfect that one imagines the perfect straight line as an ideal limit. That is right, but the progression in itself necessarily contains what is infinite; it is in relation to the perfect straight line that one can say that such and such a straight line is less twisted than some other. ... Either one conceives the infinite or one does not conceive at all.

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p. 87
3 months 2 weeks ago

Profound and incommensurable is the worth of this flowing world: God clings to it and ascends, God feeds upon it and increases.

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1 month 1 week ago

Oh, Jeremy...your naive romanticism....today utility is found in convincing an ever-recalcitrant populace that murdering somebody simply because they believe something different isn't ok....

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Means at our disposal should be regarded as a bulwark against the many evils and misfortunes that can occur. We should not regard such wealth as a permission or even an obligation to procure for ourselves the pleasures of the world.

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E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 348
3 months 1 week ago

By a tranquil mind I mean nothing else than a mind well ordered.

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IV, 3
7 months 1 day ago

"These Macedonians," said he, "are a rude and clownish people, that call a spade a spade."

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39 Philip
4 months 3 weeks ago

I've learned from the Bhagavad Gita and other teachings of our culture to detach myself from the results of what I do, because those are not in my hands. The context is not in your control, but your commitment is yours to make, and you can make the deepest commitment with a total detachment about where it will take you. You want it to lead to a better world, and you shape your actions and take full responsibility for them, but then you have detachment. And that combination of deep passion and deep detachment allows me always to take on the next challenge because I don't cripple myself, I don't tie myself in knots. I function like a free being. I think getting that freedom is a social duty because I think we owe it to each other not to burden each other with prescription and demands. I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The great extension of our experience in recent years has brought light to the insufficiency of our simple mechanical conceptions and, as a consequence, has shaken the foundation on which the customary interpretation of observation was based.

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Niels Bohr, "Atomic Physics and the Description of Nature"
7 months 3 weeks ago

So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination. ..And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do no bring forth in the agitation.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

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p. 53.
7 months 1 week ago

Hitler never intended to defend 'the West' against Bolshevism but always remained ready to join 'the Reds' for the destruction of the West, even in the middle of the struggle against Soviet Russia.

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Part 3, Ch. 10
3 months 3 days ago

Fundamental ideas play the most essential role in forming a physical theory. Books on physics are full of complicated mathematical formulae. But thought and ideas, not formulae, are the beginning of every physical theory. The ideas must later take the mathematical form of a quantitative theory, to make possible the comparison with experiment.

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When at the beginning of the so-called modern age, at the Renaissance, the pagan sense of religion came to life again, it took the concrete form in the knightly ideal with its codes of conduct of love and honor. But it was a paganism Christianized, baptized. "Woman - la donna - was the divinity enshrined within those savage breasts. Whosoever will investigate the memorials of primitive times will find this ideal of woman in its full force and purity; the Universe is woman.

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6 months 6 days ago

Society ... can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens.

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p. 72
6 months 1 week ago

What will be the influence of communist society on the family? It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage - the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word "water" is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.

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Buddhism : The Religion of No-Religion
7 months 1 week ago

The rule of Big Money and its attendant culture of cupidity and mendacity has so poisoned our hearts, minds and souls that a dominant self-righteous neoliberal soulcraft of smartness, dollars and bombs thrives with little opposition.

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America is spiritually bankrupt. We must fight back together. The Guardian,
6 months 1 week ago

Whoever finishes a revolution only halfway, digs his own grave.

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Act I.
5 months 4 weeks ago

Morally, it is wrong to suppose the source of evil is outside oneself, that one is a vessel of holiness running over with virtue. Such a disposition is the best soil for a hateful and cruel fanaticism. It is as wrong to impute every wickedness to Jews, Freemasons, "intellectuals," as it is to blame all crimes on the bourgeoisie, the nobility, and the powers that were. No; the root of evil is in me as well, and I must take my share of the responsibility and the blame. That was true before the revolution and it is true still.

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p. 128
8 months 3 days ago

Much learning does not teach understanding.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

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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3 months 1 week ago

Constantly and, if it be possible, on the occasion of every impression on the soul, apply to it the principles of Physic, of Ethic, and of Dialectic.

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VIII, 13
5 months 3 weeks ago

Poems are magic ceremonies of language.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.

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Book I, Ch. 25
6 months 2 weeks ago

We are constantly railing against the passions; we ascribe to them all of man's afflictions, and we forget that they are also the source of all his pleasures ... But what provokes me is that only their adverse side is considered ... and yet only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small-minded.

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As translated in Diderot (1977) by Otis Fellows, p. 39
6 months 5 days ago

Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

You need to know at least one foreign language well enough so that you can read the best literature that that language has produced in the original, and so you carry on a reasonable conversation and have dreams in that language. There are several reasons why this is crucial, but the most important is perhaps this: you can never understand one language until you understand at least two.

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7 months 1 week ago

Each to each a looking-glass, Reflects his figure that doth pass. Every wayfarer he meets What himself declared repeats, What himself confessed records, Sentences him in his words; The form is his own corporal form, And his thought the penal worm. Yet shine forever virgin minds, Loved by stars and the purest winds, Which, o'er passion throned sedate, Have not hazarded their state; Disconcert the searching spy, Rendering to a curious eye The durance of a granite ledge To those who gaze from the sea's edge. It is there for benefit; It is there for purging light; There for purifying storms; And its depths reflect all forms; It cannot parley with the mean,- Pure by impure is not seen. For there's no sequestered grot, Lone mountain tarn, or isle forgot, But Justice, journeying in the sphere, Daily stoops to harbour there.

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Astræa
3 months 1 week ago

Many the lumps of frankincense on the same altar; one falls there early and another late, but it makes no difference.

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IV, 15
1 week 5 days ago

Oh, how far we've fallen....

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5 months 1 week ago

For him who loves labor, there is always something to do.

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Maxim 219
5 months 3 weeks ago

At the time of its initial publication, Public Administration helped to define this field of study and practice by introducing two major new emphases: an orientation toward human behavior and human relations in organizations, and an emphasis on the interaction between administration, politics, and policy. Without neglecting more traditional concerns with organization structure, Simon, Thompson, and Smithburg viewed administration in its behavioral and political contexts. The viewpoints they express still are at the center of public administration's concerns.

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Book abstract, 1991
7 months 3 weeks ago

They [theologians] will explain to you how Christ was formed in the Virgin's womb; how accident subsists in synaxis without domicile in place. The most ordinary of them can do this. Those more fully initiated explain further whether there is an instans in Divine generation; whether in Christ there is more than a single filiation; whether 'the Father hates the Son' is a possible proposition; whether God can become the substance of a woman, of an ass, of a pumpkin, or of the devil, and whether, if so, a pumpkin could preach a sermon, or work miracles, or be crucified. And they can discover a thousand other things to you besides these. They will make you understand notions, and instants, formalities, and quiddities, things which no eyes ever saw, unless they were eyes which could see in the dark what had no existence.

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as quoted by Froude ibid.,
6 months 1 week ago

In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The idea of a law of progress, or of an all but irresistible tendency to general improvement, is then merely a superstition, one of the tents of the modernist pseudo-religion of humanism. Even if such a law or tendency existed and were demonstrable, the liberal faith in progress would for Santayana be pernicious. For it leads to a corrupt habit of mind in which things are valued, not for their present excellence or perfection, but instrumentally, as leading to something better; and it insinuates into thought and feeling a sort of historical theodicy, in which past evil is justified as a means to present or future good. The idea of progress embodies a kind of time-worship (to adopt an expression used by Wyndham Lewis) in which the particularities of our world are seen and valued, not in themselves, but for what they might perhaps become, thereby leaving us destitute of the sense of the present and, at the same time, of the perspective of eternity.

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'Santayana's Alternative' (p.67-8)
6 months 1 week ago

I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope.

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6 months 1 week ago

Time with its continuity logically involves some other kind of continuity than its own. Time, as the universal form of change, cannot exist unless there is something to undergo change, and to undergo a change continuous in time, there must be a continuity of changeable qualities.

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