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6 months 4 days ago

To give the monopoly of the home-market to the produce of domestic industry, in any particular art or manufacture, is in some measure to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, and must, in almost all cases, be either a useless or a hurtful regulation.

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Chapter II, p. 489.
1 month 4 weeks ago

If Providence erases, it is no doubt in order to write.

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Chapter II, p. 20
1 month 3 weeks ago

Granting, as Lenin wants, such absolute powers of a negative character to the top organ of the party, we strengthen, to a dangerous extent, the conservatism inherent in such an organ.

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5 months 1 week ago

Reason not with him, that will deny the principal truths!

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The way of the superior man may be compared to what takes place in traveling, when to go to a distance we must first traverse the space that is near, and in ascending a height, when we must begin from the lower ground.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

I do not believe in a God who maliciously or arbitrarily interferes in the personal affairs of mankind. My religion consists of a humble admiration for the vast power which manifests itself in that small part of the universe which our poor, weak minds can grasp!

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Science raises itself above all Ages and all Times, embracing and apprehending the ONE UNCHANGING TIME as the higher source of all Ages and Epochs, and grasping that vast idea in its free, unbounded comprehension.

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p. 11
6 months 2 weeks ago

If man of himself could in a perfect manner know all things visible and invisible, it would indeed be foolish to believe what he does not see. But our manner of knowing is so weak that no philosopher could perfectly investigate the nature of even one little fly.

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Prologue (trans. Joseph B. Collins)
3 months 3 weeks ago

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

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An Apology for Idlers.
2 months 3 weeks ago

In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.

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Ch. IV: "The Line of Least Resistance", p. 52
6 months 1 week ago

Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem.

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Book II, Ch. 37. Of the Resemblance of Children to their Brothers
4 months 3 weeks ago

I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Inflation is an increase in the quantity of money without a corresponding increase in the demand for money, i.e., for cash holdings.

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The Free Market and Its Enemies, speech to the Foundation for Economic Education
2 months 3 weeks ago

The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.

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Latter Day Pamphlet, No. 8.
5 months 4 weeks ago

Commoners are weightless. But he was a royal bon vivant who, no matter what, always weighed 125 kilos. I would be very surprised if he didn't have a few pounds left.

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A soldier in Argos, speaking of the dead King Agamemnon, Act 2
6 months 1 day ago

You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake; you must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand heap.

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January 25, 1858
2 months 3 weeks ago

No, the Great Man does not boast himself sincere, far from that; perhaps does not ask himself if he is so: I would say rather, his sincerity does not depend on himself; he cannot help being sincere! The great Fact of Existence is great to him. Fly as he will, he cannot get out of the awful presence of this Reality. His mind is so made; he is great by that, first of all. Fearful and wonderful, real as Life, real as Death, is this Universe to him. Though all men should forget its truth, and walk in a vain show, he cannot. At all moments the Flame-image glares in upon him; undeniable, there, there!-I wish you to take this as my primary definition of a Great Man. A little man may have this, it is competent to all men that God has made: but a Great Man cannot be without it.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

If there is something more excellent than the truth, then that is God; if not, then truth itself is God.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The capabilities (intellectual and material) of contemporary society are immeasurably greater than ever before-which means that the scope of society's domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than ever before. Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living.

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p. xliii
4 months 2 weeks ago

Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels, as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.

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6 months 4 days ago

The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes.

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Introduction and Plan of the Work, p. 1.
2 months 3 weeks ago

I am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men. ... I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.

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Conversations with Eckermann
6 months 1 day ago

It is a great art to saunter.

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April 26, 1841
5 months 4 weeks ago

Subject matters in general do not exist. There are no subject matters; no branches of learning-or, rather, of inquiry: there are only problems, and the urge to solve them.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

What is the first business of one who practices philosophy? To get rid of self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows.

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Book II, ch. 17, 1.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Logical analysis applied to mental phenomenon shows that there is but one law of mind, namely that ideas tend to spread continuously and to affect certain others which stand to them in a peculiar relation of affectibility. In this spreading they lose intensity, and especially the power of affecting others, but gain generality and become welded with other ideas.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Whenever you say anything good about East Germany, immediately somebody jumps up and says, "My God, you're a Stalinist..." I'm not defending everything about it, of course. But I laboured on the chapter that talks about the east. I fact-checked it; I had somebody else fact-check it. I knew that I was going to get a lot of flak for that. But in the beginning, East Germany did a better job. They just did.

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From an interview with Alex Clark, as cited in "Nazism, slavery, empire: can countries learn from national evil?", The Guardian
5 months 6 days ago

The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.

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Chapter V
3 months 1 week ago

The world's biggest power is the youth and beauty of a woman.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.

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p. 159
6 months 1 week 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
3 months 1 week ago

Like literature, philosophy is not distinguished from other subjects by a specific approach to a subject-matter independent of it. Chemistry deals with chemicals, biology with life and astronomy with very large, very distant objects. Philosophy can boast no such definite subject-matter.

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Chapter 4, Philosophy As Writing: The Case Of Hegel, p. 69

The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates.

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par. 17
6 months 3 weeks ago

The actor's realm is that of the fleeting.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?'"

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Tales of the Hasidim (1947), 1991 Ebook edition, p.251, as quoted in Jewish Currents.
5 months 4 weeks ago

The first statement of the two principles reads as follows. First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a)reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.

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Chapter II, Section 11, pg. 60
4 months 3 weeks ago

"There is no God," cry the masses more and more vociferously; and with the loss of God man loses his sense of values - is, as it were, massacred because he feels himself of no account.

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4 months 1 week ago

At the deepest level, the desire for complete union with God exhibits a narcissistic structure.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

I must avert here once again to my view of the opposition that exists between individuality and personality, notwithstanding the fact that the one demands the other. Individuality is, if I may so express it, the container or thing which contains, personality the content or thing contained, or I might say that my personality is in a certain sense my comprehension, that which I comprehend or embrace within myself - which is in a certain way the whole Universe - and that my individuality is my extension; the one my infinite, the other my finite.

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4 months 3 days ago

People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotherapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc. Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food.

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"The Precession of Simulacra," p. 13
2 months 1 week ago

Of all things nothing exists that is not by its substance the offspring of ocean. But why will you have me tell this to the vulgar? Although better to have been shrouded in silence, it nevertheless has been spoken; at all events I declare it, although all men will not readily receive the same.

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4 months 1 week ago

I do not regard the late Carl Sagan as any kind of authority. On the contrary, as this book will show, I regard him in many ways as a dubious publicity seeker and careerist, more concerned to maintain his reputation as the brilliant and sceptical representative of hard-headed science than to look squarely and honestly at the facts.

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In short, a bit of a crook. pp. xix-xx
3 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth, as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink, and wear.

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p. 252
2 months 2 weeks ago

To no creature besides man has been given wisdom, foresight, industry, and reflection.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; - unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them. The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.

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Hast thou named all the birds without a gun; Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk.

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Forbearance
4 months 3 weeks ago

"Relation" in its idiomatic usage denotes something direct and active, something dynamic and energetic. It fixes attention upon the way things bear upon one another, their clashings and unitings, the way they fulfill and frustrate, promote and retard, excite and inhibit one another. Intellectual relations subsist in propositions; they state the connection of terms with one another. In art, as in nature and in life, relations are modes of interaction.

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p. 139
4 months 4 weeks ago

The rights and duties of man thus simplified, it seems almost impertinent to attempt to illustrate truths that appear so incontrovertible: yet such deeply rooted prejudices have clouded reason, and such spurious qualities have assumed the name of virtues, that it is necessary to pursue the course of reason as it has been perplexed and involved in error, by various adventitious circumstances, comparing the simple axiom with casual deviations.Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices, which they have imbibed, they cannot trace how, rather than to root them out. The mind must be strong that resolutely forms its own principles; for a kind of intellectual cowardice prevails which makes many men shrink from the task, or only do it by halves. Yet the imperfect conclusions thus drawn, are frequently very plausible, because they are built on partial experience, on just, though narrow, views.

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Ch. 1
2 months 2 weeks ago

There is no reason why poverty should call us away from philosophy-no, nor even actual want. For when hastening after wisdom, we must endure even hunger. Men have endured hunger when their towns were besieged, and what other reward for their endurance did they obtain than that they did not fall under the conqueror's power? How much greater is the promise of the prize of everlasting liberty, and the assurance that we need fear neither God nor man! Even though we starve, we must reach that goal.

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