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7 months 2 weeks ago

The safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

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Letter XII
7 months 2 weeks ago

[Mortals] say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death.

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Ch. 9

Error is the price we pay for progress.

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6 months 1 week ago

We are firmly convinced that the most imperfect republic is a thousand times better than the most enlightened monarchy. In a republic, there are at least brief periods when the people, while continually exploited, is not oppressed; in the monarchies, oppression is constant. The democratic regime also lifts the masses up gradually to participation in public life--something the monarchy never does. Nevertheless, while we prefer the republic, we must recognise and proclaim that whatever the form of government may be, so long as human society continues to be divided into different classes as a result of the hereditary inequality of occupations, of wealth, of education, and of rights, there will always be a class-restricted government and the inevitable exploitation of the majorities by the minorities. The State is nothing but this domination and this exploitation, well regulated and systematised.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Can anyone be proved innocent, if it be enough to have accused him?

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Julian, at the trial of Numerius, governor of Gallia Narbonensis, who was accused of embezzlement. Reported in Ammianus, Res gestae, bk. 18, ch. 1, sec. 4
7 months 2 weeks ago

The law of simplicity and naïveté applies to all fine art, for it is compatible with what is most sublime. True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself; that is, it consists in his correctly distinguishing between what is necessary and what is superfluous. On the other hand, one should never sacrifice clearness, to say nothing of grammar, for the sake of being brief. To impoverish the expression of a thought, or to obscure or spoil the meaning of a period for the sake of using fewer words shows a lamentable want of judgment.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt; And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

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Brahma, st. 3
7 months 2 weeks ago

Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.

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Letter to W. Bracke, 5 May 1875
6 months ago

Plagued by Western habits of either-or, dualistic thinking, we all may fail to understand that race, class and gender interconnect to sustain a corporate ruling class. In the language of African-American essayist bell hooks, they are interlocking systems of oppression. Neither Latina nor Anglo women should yield to the temptation of making a hierarchy of oppressions where battles are fought over whether racism is "worse" than sexism, or class oppression is "deeper" than racism, etc. Instead of hierarchies we need bridges which, after all, exist to make two ends meet.

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Elizabeth Martinez, De Colores Means All of Us
3 months 1 week ago

There are some mixt bodies, from which it has not been yet made appear, that any degree of fire can separate either salt, or sulphur, or mercury, much less all the three. The most obvious instance of this truth is gold, which is a body so fixed, and wherein the elementary ingredients (if it have any) are so firmly united to each other, that we find not in the operations, wherein gold is exposed to the fire, how violent soever, that it does discernably so much as lose of its fixedness or weight, so far is it from being dissipated into those principles, whereof one at least is acknowledged to be fugitive enough.

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7 months 1 week ago

Critical social science attempts to determine when theoretical statements grasp invariant regularities of social action as such and when they express ideologically frozen relations of dependence that can in principle be transformed.

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p. 310 as cited in: Dominick LaCapra (1983) Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language. p. 170
6 months 3 days ago

Do you think that God will punish them for not practicing a religion which he did not reveal to them?

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No. 35. (Usbek writing to Gemchid)
6 months 2 days ago

Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive.

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p. 123
3 months 3 weeks ago

This is a personal testimony, a testimony of my own experience of thought and life. It is not intended to be objective and makes no claim to establish eternal truths. In fact I rather despise claims to objectivity in philosophy; the point of view is the thing. I should have liked to call it "A Lyrical Philosophy," using the word "lyrical" in the sense of being a highly personal and individual outlook...

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Preface
8 months 2 weeks ago
He who humbleth himself wants to be exalted.
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7 months 2 weeks ago

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

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"The Will to Believe" p. 10
5 months 4 weeks ago

Power is not opposed to freedom. It is precisely freedom that distinguishes power from violence or coercion.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated.

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par. 35
3 months 2 weeks ago

One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them.

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Letter to George Washington (1796); published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 20 Vols., Washington, D.C., (1903-04), 9:341
5 months 2 weeks ago

My car and my adding machine understand nothing: they are not in that line of business.

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5 months 2 days ago

M. Comte's philosophy, in practice, might be compendiously described as Catholicism minus Christianity.

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On the Physical Basis of Life
7 months 2 weeks ago

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

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Civilization
5 months 6 days ago

Far less import than your belief of whether god exists is what you think your belief entails. Does it direct your behaviour by rules and commandments that are set out before you or does it require you to think them through yourself? Does it require you to try to make sense of the world, or does it give up on sense itself? And I think these are the crucial distinctions. Not whether you add belief in a god to them.

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3 months 1 week ago

In the morning, when thou art sluggish at rousing thee, let this thought be present; "I am rising to a man's work."

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Meditations. v. 1.
8 months 1 day ago

When I, who conduct this inquiry, love something, then three things are found: I, what I love, and the love itself. There are, therefore three things: the lover, the beloved and the love.

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(Cambridge: 2002), Book 9, Chapter 2, Section 2, p. 26
8 months 2 weeks ago
It is mere illusion and pretty sentiment to expect much from mankind if he forgets how to make war. And yet no means are known which call so much into action as a great war, that rough energy born of the camp, that deep impersonality born of hatred, that conscience born of murder and cold-bloodedness, that fervor born of effort of the annihilation of the enemy, that proud indifference to loss, to one's own existence, to that of one's fellows, to that earthquake-like soul-shaking that a people needs when it is losing its vitality.
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6 months 2 weeks ago

Once it's been proved to you that you're descended from an ape, it's no use pulling a face; just accept it. Once they've proved to you that a single droplet of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow human beings and consequently that all so-called virtues and duties are nothing but ravings and prejudices, then accept that too, because there's nothing to be done.

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Part 1 Chapter 3 (tr. ?)
7 months 2 weeks ago

Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification. I do not, indeed, consider the Epicureans to have been by any means faultless in drawing out their scheme of consequences from the utilitarian principle. To do this in any sufficient manner, many Stoic, as well as Christian elements require to be included. But there is no known Epicurean theory of life which does not assign to the pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments, a much higher value as pleasures than to those of mere sensation.

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Ch. 2
7 months 2 weeks ago

Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The Science of Hydrostatics depends upon the Fundamental Principle that 'fluids press equally in all directions'. This Principle necessarily results from the conception of a Fluid, as a body of which the parts are perfectly moveable in all directions. For since the Fluid is a body, it can transmit pressure; and the transmitted pressure is equal to the original pressure, in virtue of the Axiom that Reaction is equal to Action. That the Fundamental Principle is not derived from experience, is plain both from its evidence and from its history.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Remorse sleeps during a prosperous period but wakes up in adversity. 

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Variant translations: Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity. Remorse goes to sleep during a prosperous period and wakes up in adversity.
5 months 2 days ago

Science has taught... me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile. My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonise with my aspirations.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

This misplacing hath caused a deficience, or at least a great improficience in the sciences themselves. For the handling of final causes, mixed with the rest in physical inquiries, hath intercepted the severe and diligent inquiry of all real and physical causes, and given men the occasion to stay upon these satisfactory and specious causes, to the great arrest and prejudice of further discovery. For this I find done not only by Plato, who ever anchoreth upon that shore, but by Aristotle, Galen, and others which do usually likewise fall upon these flats of discoursing causes.

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Book VII, 7
7 months 6 days ago

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.

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Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).
3 weeks 3 days ago

This could have been said better. Yes, good government should preserve universal human rights.....

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4 months 1 day ago

Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your betters.

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Line 11 This can be related to other expressions on the ethics of reciprocity, often referred to as the variants of the Golden Rule.
8 months 3 days ago

I have always been of the opinion that infamy earned by doing what is right is not infamy at all, but glory.

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Speech I
7 months 2 weeks ago

If we must absolutely mention this state of affairs, I suggest that we call ourselves "absent", that is more proper.

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Estelle, refusing to use the word "dead", Act 1, sc. 5
6 months 1 week ago

The Creation was the first act of sabotage.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.

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The German Ideology, International Publishers, ed. Chris Arthur, p. 103.
5 months 4 weeks ago

Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts. He has to have a frame of orientation which permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another danger which is specifically human: that of becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind.

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The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology (1968), p. 61
8 months 1 week ago

It was the addition of status that brought the little things: a more comfortable seat here, a better cut of meat there, a shorter wait in line at the other place. To the philosophical mind, these items might seem scarcely worth any great trouble to acquire.Yet no one, however philosophical, could give up those privileges, once acquired, without a pang. That was the point.

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5 months 1 week ago

A woman loves to be obeyed at first, although afterwards she finds her pleasure in obeying.

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The Suicide Club, Story of the Physician and the Saratoga Trunk.
3 months 3 weeks ago

The divergent scales of values scream in discordance, they dazzle and daze us, and in order that it might not be painful we steer clear of all other values, as though from insanity, as though from illusion, and we confidently judge the whole world according to our own home values. Which is why we take for the greater, more painful and less bearable disaster not that which is in fact greater, more painful and less bearable, but that which lies closest to us. Everything which is further away, which does not threaten this very day to invade our threshold - with all its groans, its stifled cries, its destroyed lives, even if it involves millions of victims - this we consider on the whole to be perfectly bearable and of tolerable proportions.

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7 months 3 weeks 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
6 months 1 week ago

Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Undeterred by this examination, the French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led beyond the ideas of the entire old world order. The revolutionary movement which began in 1789 in the Cercle Social, which in the middle of its course had as its chief representatives Leclerc and Roux, and which finally with Babeuf's conspiracy was temporarily defeated, gave rise to the communist idea which Babeuf's friend Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1830. This idea, consistently developed, is the idea of the new world order.

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Chapter 6, 3

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