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7 months 2 weeks ago

Well, as you know, I was blessed to do over a hundred events for my dear brother [Bernie Sanders]. And this is the first time I've had a chance to publicly endorse him again, but yes, indeed. I'll be in his corner that we're going to win this time. And it has to do with the Martin Luther King like criteria of assessing a candidate namely the issues of militarism, poverty, materialism, and racism, xenophobia in all of its forms that includes any kind of racism as you know against black people, brown people, yellow people, anybody, Arabs, Muslims, Jews, Palestinians, Kashmirians, Tibetans and so forth. So that there's no doubt that the my dear brother Bernie stands shoulders above any of the other candidates running in the Democratic primary when it comes to that Martin Luther King-like standards or criteria.

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Quoted in: Cornel West on Bernie, Trump, and Racism, The Intercept, Mehdi Hasan,
6 months 2 weeks ago

The development of the human mind has practically extinguished all feelings, except a few sporadic kinds, like sound, colors, smells, warmth, etc., which now appear to be disconnected and separate.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

All poetry is supposed to be instructive but in an unnoticeable manner; it is supposed to make us aware of what it would be valuable to instruct ourselves in; we must deduce the lesson on our own, just as with life.

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Letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter
3 months 3 weeks ago

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

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Letter to his Italian friend, Philip Mazzei
6 months 6 days ago

These are the visionary, mystical moments, when a man 'completes his partial mind'. His everyday conscious self is only a small part of the mind, like the final crescent of the moon. In moments of crisis, the full moon suddenly appears.

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p. 156
7 months 1 week ago

At one level, this movement on behalf of oppressed farm animals is emotional...Yet the movement is also the product of a deep intellectual ferment pioneered by the Princeton scholar Peter Singer...This idea popularized by Professor Singer - that we have ethical obligations that transcend our species - is one whose time appears to have come...What we're seeing now is an interesting moral moment: a grass-roots effort by members of one species to promote the welfare of others...animal rights are now firmly on the mainstream ethical agenda.

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Nicholas Kristof, "Humanity Even for Nonhumans," in The New York Times (8 April 2009).
7 months 3 weeks ago

I doubt not, but from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out.

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Book IV, Ch. 3, sec. 18
6 months 2 weeks ago

The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.

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The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man
4 months 1 week ago

It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough.

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De Brevitate Vitae ("On the Shortness of Life", trans. John W. Basore), Ch. 1
6 months 2 weeks ago

Facts, facts, facts,' cries the scientist if he wants to emphasize the necessity of a firm foundation for science. What is a fact? A fact is a thought that is true. But the scientist will surely not recognize something which depends on men's varying states of mind to be the firm foundation of science.

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Gottlob Frege (1956). "The thought: A logical inquiry" in: Peter Ludlow (1997) Readings in the Philosophy of Language. p. 27
4 months 2 weeks ago

To me, in these circumstances, that of "Hero-worship" becomes a fact inexpressibly precious; the most solacing fact one sees in the world at present. There is an everlasting hope in it for the management of the world. Had all traditions, arrangements, creeds, societies that men ever instituted, sunk away, this would remain. The certainty of Heroes being sent us; our faculty, our necessity, to reverence Heroes when sent: it shines like a polestar through smoke-clouds, dust-clouds, and all manner of down-rushing and conflagration.

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6 months 5 days ago

I have had a larger responsibility of human lives than ever man or woman had before. And I attribute my success to this - I never gave or took an excuse. Yes, I do see the difference now between me and other men. When a disaster happens, I act and they make excuses.

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Letter to Miss H. Bonham Carter, 1861. As quoted in The Gigantic Book of Teachers' Wisdom (2007) by Frank McCourt and Erin Gruwell, p. 410
7 months 3 weeks ago

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science. 

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Works and Days;
8 months 1 week ago

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives honorably and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

But to manipulate men, to propel them towards goals which you - the social reformer - see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

The essential is to cease being free and to obey, in repentance, a greater rogue than oneself. When we are all guilty, that will be democracy.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.

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6 months 2 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
7 months 2 weeks ago

A confession has to be part of your new life.

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p. 18e
5 months 3 weeks ago

The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem.

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First thoughts were "Google" and "Yahoo". Then I thought about the Cybertruck. I guess we should remember some things stay foolish.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The detour to ideality leads to coinciding with oneself, that is, to certainty, which remains the guide and guarantee of the whole spiritual adventure of being.

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The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 89
7 months 3 weeks ago

Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.

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Estelle, discovering that there are no mirrors in Hell, Act 1, sc. 5
8 months 3 weeks ago

Again, it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the unlimited ... and good to that of the limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult—to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult); for these reasons also, then, excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue; For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.

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5 months 1 week ago

The life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated - without haste, but without remorse.

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5 months 2 days ago

Our present-day neurochemical cocktail, we are asked to believe, is the medium through which alien realms of consciousness can be grasped and neutrally appraised from a third-person perspective. Empirical research suggests this optimism is at best naïve.

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Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, BLTC Research
5 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing like a little judicious levity.

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The Wrong Box, ch. 7 (1889).
5 months 2 weeks ago

The time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude, towards the nobler and showier sides of national life.

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Crabbed Age and Youth.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Christian Kings may erre in deducing a Consequence, but who shall Judge?

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The Third Part, Chapter 43, p. 330
6 months 1 week ago

Alexander is to a peasant proprietor what Don Juan is to a happily married husband.

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p. 78,
3 months 2 weeks ago

It is a base thing for the countenance to be obedient and to regulate and compose itself as the mind commands, and for the mind not to be regulated and composed by itself.

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VII, 37
6 months 4 weeks ago

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.

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Chapter II.
7 months 3 weeks ago

There are two famous labyrinths where our reason very often goes astray. One concerns the great question of the free and the necessary, above all in the production and the origin of Evil. The other consists in the discussion of continuity, and of the indivisibles which appear to be the elements thereof, and where the consideration of the infinite must enter in.

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Théodicée (1710)ː Préface
6 months 2 weeks ago

The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense.

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Pt. II, Ch. 16 : The Rights of Women
6 months 2 weeks ago

"You really should come to the house - one of these days we might die without having seen each other again." - "Since we have to die in any case, what's the use of seeing each other again?"

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Amid a multitude of projects, no plan is devised.

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Maxim 319
6 months 2 weeks ago

The modern state, in its essence and objectives, is necessarily a military state, and a military state necessarily becomes an aggressive state. If it does not conquer others it will itself be conquered, for the simple reason that wherever force exists, it absolutely must be displayed or put into action. From this again it follows that the modern state must without fail be huge and powerful; that is the indispensable condition for its preservation.

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6 months 1 week ago

Leibniz's theory on the subject as substantia ideans in the sense of a causative agent of decision and acts stands much closer to a materialist interpretation of history than does a philosophy which reduces the thinking subject to the role of subsuming protocol sentences under general propositions and deducing other sentences from them.

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p. 149.
7 months 3 weeks ago

Religion...is a man's total reaction upon life.

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Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"
6 months 6 days ago

Needless to say, I am not opposed to woman suffrage on the conventional ground that she is not equal to it. I see neither physical, psychological, nor mental reasons why woman should not have the equal right to vote with man. But that can not possibly blind me to the absurd notion that woman will accomplish that wherein man has failed. If she would not make things worse, she certainly could not make them better. To assume, therefore, that she would succeed in purifying something which is not susceptible of purification, is to credit her with supernatural powers. Since woman's greatest misfortune has been that she was looked upon as either angel or devil, her true salvation lies in being placed on earth; namely, in being considered human, and therefore subject to all human follies and mistakes. Are we, then, to believe that two errors will make a right? Are we to assume that the poison already inherent in politics will be decreased, if women were to enter the political arena?

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6 months 2 weeks ago

What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.

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Letter to Jean-Richard Bloch
4 months 1 week ago

Yes, so it is that knowledge itself must die in order to blossom forth again in death as will; the freedom of thought, belief, and conscience, these wonderful flowers of three centuries will sink back into the lap of mother earth so that a new freedom, the freedom will, will be nourished with its most noble juices.

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p. 19
6 months 2 weeks ago

Go thy way; and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee.

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8:13 (KJV) Said to the officer.

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