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4 months 1 week ago

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

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"What is Culture?" (p. 2)
6 months 1 week ago

Hearken with your ears to these best counsels,Reflect upon them with illumined judgment.Let each one choose his creed with that freedom of choice each must have at great events.

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Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 30, 2.
6 months 3 weeks ago

We refuse to have our conscience bound by any work or law, so that by doing this or that we should be righteous, or leaving this or that undone we should be damned.

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Chapter 2
5 months 2 weeks ago

Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Before a science can develop principles, it must possess concepts. Before a law of gravitation could be formulated, it was necessary to have the notions of "acceleration" and "weight."

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p. 43.
6 months 2 weeks ago

A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.

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Aristocracy
6 months 2 weeks ago

His obedience is real since he really and truly fulfills his mission, since he runs real risks in order to carry out the beloved's orders. But, on the other hand, it is imaginary because he submits only to a creature of his mind.

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p. 152
6 months 1 week ago

Bernie Sanders is...an anti-racist in his heart. Two, he's old-school. He's like me. He doesn't know the buzzwords. He doesn't endorse reparations, one moment in the last 30 years, silent on it. He has the consistency over the years decade after decade and therefore it's true in his language, in his rhetoric. There are times in which he doesn't... use the same kind of buzzwords. But when it comes to his fight against racism, going to jail in Chicago as a younger brother and he would go to jail again. He and I would go to jail together again in terms of fighting against police brutality. So in that sense, I would just tell my brothers and sisters, but especially my chocolate ones that they shouldn't be blinded by certain kinds of words they're looking for, that in the end, he is a long distance runner in the struggle against white supremacy.

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Quoted in: Cornel West on Bernie, Trump, and Racism, The Intercept, Mehdi Hasan
6 months 3 weeks ago

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

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Section I, Chap. I
3 months 1 week ago

Time and Space ... It is not nature which imposes them upon us, it is we who impose them upon nature because we find them convenient.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

III. Every tax ought to be levied at the time, or in the manner, in which it is most likely to be convenient for the contributor to pay it.

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Chapter II Part II, p. 893.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.

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Do What You Will, 1929
5 months 3 weeks ago

Seeing therefore they are both [heat and pain] immediately perceived at the same time, and the fire affects you only with one simple, or uncompounded idea, it follows that this same simple idea is both the intense heat immediately perceived, and the pain; and consequently, that the intense heat immediately perceived, is nothing distinct from a particular sort of pain.

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Philonous to Hylas
6 months 2 weeks ago

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

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5 months 1 day ago

It is the private dominion over things that condemns millions of people to be mere nonentities, living corpses without originality or power of initiative, human machines of flesh and blood, who pile up mountains of wealth for others and pay for it with a gray, dull and wretched existence for themselves. I believe that there can be no real wealth, social wealth, so long as it rests on human lives - young lives, old lives and lives in the making.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The words of malicious slander should not be allowed to enter the ear. A defensive voice should not be allowed to come out of the mouth. The want to gravely injure people should not be allowed to exist in the heart. If this is accomplished, though there be people who cynically expose others, they would be without people who would align with them.

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Book 1; Self-culfivation
3 months 3 weeks ago

The British state has defaulted on its core functions while attempting to remake society.

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New Statesman, 9 October 2024
6 months 3 weeks ago

Upstart greatness is everywhere less respected than ancient greatness.

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Chapter I, Part II, p. 773.
2 months 1 week ago

The most beautiful fate of a physical theory is to point the way to the establishment of a more inclusive theory, in which it lives on as a limiting case.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

One may discover the root of a Hindoo religion in his own private history, when, in the silent intervals of the day or night, he does sometimes inflict on himself like austerities with a stern satisfaction.

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Snakes in the Ganga, 2022
7 months 2 weeks ago

The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity, a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

I don't want to sound callous. I mean, even if I have nothing to offer, that doesn't matter, because that still doesn't mean that what anybody else has to offer therefore has to be true.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Might there not be a connection between the attempt to eradicate religion and the loss of freedom? It is unlikely that Mao, who launched his assault on the people and culture of Tibet with the slogan "Religion is poison," would have agreed that his atheist world-view had no bearing on his policies.

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2 months 1 week ago

We shall, therefore, assume the complete physical equivalence of a gravitational field and a corresponding acceleration of the reference system.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.

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H 10 Variant translation: He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage - he won't encounter many rivals.
2 months 2 weeks ago

What matter and opportunity [for thy activity] art thou avoiding? For what else are all these things, except exercises for the reason, when it has viewed carefully and by examination into their nature the things which happen in life? Persevere then until thou shalt have made these things thy own, as the stomach which is strengthened makes all things its own, as the blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.

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X, 31
5 months 2 weeks ago

A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

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3 months 1 week ago

Finally, and... somewhat belatedly, there is the growing of a left that... has now been energized and is increasingly vocal... in certain quarters of the cultural community, in the arts and the universities, in Hollywood, in the media... where in some versions it also engages in a kind of illiberal... politics.

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20:21
6 months 2 weeks ago

Most men do not feel in themselves the competence required for leading their group to victory, and therefore seek out a captain who appears to possess the courage and sagacity necessary for the achievement of supremacy. Even in religion this impulse appears. Nietzsche accused Christianity of inculcating a slave-morality, but ultimate triumph was always the goal. "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."

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Ch. 2: Leaders and Followers
5 months 4 days ago

The recognition of human wretchedness is difficult for whoever is rich and powerful because he is almost invincibly led to believe that he is something. It is equally difficult for the man in miserable circumstances because he is almost invincibly led to believe that the rich and powerful man is something.

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p. 216
7 months 2 weeks ago

Trantor could win even such a war, but perhaps not without paying a price that would make victory only a pleasanter name for defeat.

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3 months 4 days ago

The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 114
7 months 3 weeks ago
It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.
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7 months 2 weeks ago

I believe that every human being with a physically normal brain can learn a great deal and can be surprisingly intellectual. I believe that what we badly need is social approval of learning and social rewards for learning.We can all be members of the intellectual elite and then, and only then, will a phrase like "America's right to know" and, indeed, any true concept of democracy, have any meaning.

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3 months 3 days ago

To preserve the life of citizens, is the greatest virtue in the father of his country.

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The quote is from a Roman tragedy Octavia; Act 2, Line 444, where Seneca advises Nero against carrying out his tyrannical plans. Seneca's attribution to the play is generally discredited by modern scholarship.
6 months 2 weeks ago

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture for wild beasts to fight in.

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Letter addressed to "un premier commis" [name unknown] (20 June 1733), from Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: Correspondance [Garnier frères, Paris, 1880], vol. I, letter # 343 (p. 354)
6 months 3 weeks ago

A wise man never loses anything, if he has himself.

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Ch. 38. Of Solitude, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
6 months 2 weeks ago

War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances ... that no human wisdom can calculate the end. Prospects on the Rubicon

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London: J. Debrett, 1787
6 months 2 weeks ago

Why did it occur to anyone to believe in only one God? And conversely why did it ever occur to anyone to believe in many gods? To both these questions we must return the same answer: Because that is how the human mind happens to work. For the human mind is both diverse and simple, simultaneously many and one. We have an immediate perception of our own diversity and of that of the outside world. And at the same time we have immediate perceptions of our own oneness.

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"One and Many," p. 12
2 months 2 weeks ago

Keep this thought handy when you feel a bit of rage coming on - it isn't manly to be enraged. Rather, gentleness and civility are more human, and therefore manlier. A real person doesn't give way to anger and discontent, and such a person has strength, courage, and endurance - unlike the angry and complaining. The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength.

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XI 11.18.5b:41
2 months 2 weeks ago

The socialist system of society should only be, and can only be, an historical product, born out of the school of its own experiences, born in the course of its realization, as a result of the developments of living history, which - just like organic nature of which, in the last analysis, it forms a part - has the fine habit of always producing along with any real social need the means to its satisfaction, along with the task simultaneously the solution. However, if such is the case, then it is clear that socialism by its very nature cannot be decreed or introduced by ukase. It has as its prerequisite a number of measures of force - against property, etc. The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive, cannot. New Territory. A thousand problems. Only experience is capable of correcting and opening new ways.

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Chapter Six, "The Problem of Dictatorship"
6 months 2 weeks ago

It may be expedient but it is not just that some should have less in order that others may prosper.

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Chapter I, Section 3, pg. 15
6 months 2 weeks ago

We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself withersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.

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Wealth
4 months 3 weeks ago

Just acquiring this amount of "education" will not, by itself, make you an educated person, even less will it give you what Oakeshott calls "judgment." But if the manner of instruction is adequate, the student should be able to acquire this much knowledge in a way that combines intellectual openness, critical scrutiny, and logical clarity. If so, learning will not stop when the student leaves the university.

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5 months 1 week ago

Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.

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John 20:17 (KJV)
2 months 2 weeks ago

Consider thyself to be dead, and to have completed thy life up to the present time; and live according to nature the remainder which is allowed thee. Variant: Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what's left and live it properly.

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VII, 56
4 months 2 weeks ago

There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the ear.

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Pt. II, ch. III.
4 months 3 weeks ago

The behaviour of individuals is the tool with which the organisation achieves its targets.

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p. 108.

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