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7 months 2 weeks ago

The entire process seems simple and natural, i.e., possesses the naturalness of a shallow rationalism.

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Vol. II, Ch. III, p. 95.
5 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
5 months 3 weeks ago

There's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

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from Postscript on the Societies of Control
7 months 1 day ago

To one commending an orator for his skill in amplifying petty matters, Agesilaus said, "I do not think that shoemaker a good workman that makes a great shoe for a little foot."

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Of Agesilaus the Great
7 months 1 week ago

A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.

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King Aegistheus, Act 2
6 months 1 week ago

Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Don't think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

What once sprung from earth sinks back into the earth.

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Book II, lines 999-1000 (tr. Bailey)
6 months 1 week ago

As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and aesthetic ideals? It's all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?

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6 months 1 week ago

Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum. And here they will break out into their native music, and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns, and they mope and wallow like dogs!

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p. 165
8 months 1 week ago

It seemed to him [Euphemius] it would be a brilliant notion to call in an outside force to fight on his behalf. This same brilliant notion has occurred to participants in civil wars uncounted times in history and it has ended in catastrophe just about every time, since those called in invariably take over for themselves. Of all history's lessons, this seems to be the plainest, and the most frequently ignored.

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7 months 4 days ago

O Fortune, cruellest of heavenly powers, why make such game of this poor life of ours?

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Book II, satire viii, line 61 (trans. Conington)
3 months 2 weeks ago

In the middle ages of Christianity opposition to the State opinions was hushed. The consequence was, Christianity became loaded with all the Romish follies. Nothing but free argument, raillery & even ridicule will preserve the purity of religion.

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Notes on Religion (October 1776), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 2, p. 256
5 months 1 week ago

The university, in a society ruled by public opinion, was to have been an island of intellectual freedom where all views were investigated without restriction. ... But by consenting to play an active or "positive," a participatory role in society, the university has become inundated and saturated with the backflow of society's "problems." Preoccupied with questions of Health, Sex, Race, War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes. ... Any proposed reforms of liberal education which might bring the university into conflict with the whole of the U.S.A. are unthinkable. Increasingly, the people "inside" are identical in their appetites and motives with the people "outside" the university.

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p. 18
7 months 2 weeks ago

When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.

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Theory of Knowledge, 1913
4 months 1 week ago

The multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude - as Marx would say, a vampire regime of accumulated dead labor that survives only by sucking off the blood of the living.

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62
3 months 3 weeks ago

The de-eroticization of the world, a companion to its disenchantment ... seems to result from a combination of causes-our democratic regime and its tendencies toward leveling and self-protection, a reductionist-materialist science that inevitably interprets eros as sex, and the atmosphere generated by "the death of God" and of the subordinate god, Eros.

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p. 15.
8 months 1 week ago

We all have a weakness for beauty.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

They men have corrupted this order by making profane things what they should make of holy things, because in fact, we believe scarcely any thing except which pleases us.

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7 months 1 week ago

"And yet, it was not, not now, she that really counted. Or if she counted (and, oh, gloriously she did) it was for another's sake. The earth and stars and sun, all that was or will be, existed for his sake. And he was coming. The most dreadful, the most beautiful, the only dread and beauty there is, was coming. The pillars on the far side of the pool flushed with his approach. I cast down my eyes."

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Orual
5 months 2 weeks ago

Whatever it may be, animals have always had, until our era, a divine or sacrificial nobility that all mythologies recount. Even murder by hunting is still a symbolic relation, as opposed to an experimental dissection. Even domestication is still a symbolic relation, as opposed to industrial breeding. One only has to look at the status of animals in peasant society. And the status of domestication, which presupposes land, a clan, a system of parentage of which the animals are a part, must not be confused with the status of the domestic pet-the only type of animals that are left to us outside reserves and breeding stations-dogs, cats, birds, hamsters, all packed together in the affection of their master. The trajectory animals have followed, from divine sacrifice to dog cemeteries with atmospheric music, from sacred defiance to ecological sentimentality, speaks loudly enough of the vulgarization of the status of man himself.

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"The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses," p. 134
6 months 5 days ago

I have always thought that clarity is a form of courtesy that the philosopher owes; moreover, this discipline of ours considers it more truly a matter of honor today than ever before to be open to all minds ... This is different from the individual sciences which increasingly [interpose] between the treasure of their discoveries and the curiosity of the profane the tremendous dragon of their closed terminology.

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p. 19
5 months 3 weeks ago

Instead of wishing to see more doctors made by women joining what there are, I wish to see as few doctors, either male or female, as possible. For, mark you, the women have made no improvement - they have only tried to be men and they have only succeeded in being third-rate men.

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Letter to John Stuart Mill (12 September 1860), published in Florence Nightingale on Society and Politics, Philosophy, Science, Education (2003) edited by Lynn McDonald
8 months 2 weeks ago

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

I am grateful for what I am & have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence. Well, anything for variety. I am ready to try this for the next 1000 years, & exhaust it. How sweet to think of! My extremities well charred, and my intellectual part too, so that there is no danger of worm or rot for a long while. My breath is sweet to me. O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it - for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.

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Letter to Harrison Gray Otis Blake (6-7 December 1856), as published in The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau (1958)
7 months 4 weeks ago

What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.

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As quoted in Quote, Unquote (1977) by Lloyd Cory, p. 197
6 months 2 weeks ago

Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man...

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Part 3, Chapter ?
6 months ago

The collective is the object of all idolatry, this it is which chains us to the earth. In the case of avarice: gold is of the social order. In the case of ambition: power is of the social order. Science and art are full of the social element also. And love? Love is more or less of an exception: that is why we can go to God through love, not through avarice and ambition.

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p. 121
6 months 1 day ago

True science teaches, above all, to doubt and be ignorant.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

I observe that a very large portion of the human race does not believe in God and suffers no visible punishment in consequence. And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that he would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt his existence.

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Bertrand Russell's Best: Silhouettes in Satire (1958), "On Religion".
7 months 1 week ago

An intolerant sect has no right to complain when it is denied an equal liberty. ... A person's right to complain is limited to principles he acknowledges himself.

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p. 217
7 months 1 week ago

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

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Book III, Chapter 10, "Hope"
6 months 1 week ago

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves.

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"Patriotism", p. 126
6 months 1 day ago

And the soul, my soul at least, longs for something else, not absorption, not quietude, not peace, not appeasement, it longs ever to approach and never to arrive, it longs for the never-ending longing, for an eternal hope which is eternally renewed but never wholly fulfilled. And together with all this, it longs for an eternal lack of something and an eternal suffering. A suffering, a pain, thanks to which it grows without ceasing in consciousness and longing. Do not write upon the gate of heaven that sentence which Dante placed over the threshold of hell, Lasciate ogni speranza! [Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate: All hope abandon, ye who enter in] Do not destroy time!

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6 months 1 week ago

We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another. What I then propose to do is, briefly stated, to test saintliness by common sense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the religious life commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity . ... It is but the elimination of the humanly unfit, and the survival of the humanly fittest, applied to religious beliefs; and if we look at history candidly and without prejudice, we have to admit that no religion has ever in the long run established or proved itself in any other way. Religions have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.

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Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
6 months 2 weeks ago

To the Deity must be left the task of infinite perfection, while to us poor, weak, incapable mortals, there was no rule of conduct so safe as experience.

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Speech in the House of Commons (6 May 1791), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXIX (1817), column 388
8 months 1 day ago

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

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To Varro, in Ad Familiares IX, 4
3 months 2 weeks ago

To the existence of banks of discount for cash... there can be no objection, because there can be no danger of abuse, and they are a convenience both to merchants and individuals. I think they should even be encouraged, by allowing them a larger than legal interest on short discounts, and tapering thence, in proportion as the term of discount is lengthened, down to legal interest on those of a year or more. Even banks of deposit, where cash should be lodged, and a paper acknowledgment taken out as its representative, entitled to a return of the cash on demand, would be convenient for remittances, travelling persons, etc. But, liable as its cash would be to be pilfered and robbed, and its paper to be fraudulently re-issued, or issued without deposit, it would require skilful and strict regulation.

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ME 13:431
3 months 2 weeks ago

With respect to the new Government, nine or ten States will probably have accepted by the end of this month. The others may oppose it. Virginia, I think, will be of this number. Besides other objections of less moment, she will insist on annexing a bill of rights to the new Constitution, i.e. a bill wherein the Government shall declare that, 1. Religion shall be free; 2. Printing presses free; 3. Trials by jury preserved in all cases; 4. No monopolies in commerce; 5. No standing army. Upon receiving this bill of rights, she will probably depart from her other objections; and this bill is so much to the interest of all the States, that I presume they will offer it, and thus our Constitution be amended, and our Union closed by the end of the present year.

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Letter to Mr. Dumas
7 months 4 days ago

At times the world sees straight, but many times the world goes astray.

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Book II, epistle i, line 63
6 months ago

The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market.

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E. Jephcott, trans., p. 9
7 months 1 week ago

At best the principles that economists have supposed the choices of rational individuals to satisfy can be presented as guidelines for us to consider when we make our decisions.

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Chapter IX, Section 84, p. 558
7 months 2 weeks ago

Every really able man, in whatever direction he work,-a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter,-if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be.

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Immortality

The mind, like the body, has its contagious diseases and its scurvy. …We catch everything from those with whom we come in contact; their gestures, their accent, etc.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

I greatly doubt whether the men who become pirate chiefs are those who are filled with retrospective terror of their fathers, or whether Napoleon, at Austerlitz, really felt that he was getting even with Madame Mère. I know nothing of the mother of Attila, but I rather suspect that she spoilt the little darling, who subsequently found the world irritating because it sometimes resisted his whims.

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Ch. 2: Leaders and Followers

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