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3 months 3 weeks ago

An ignorant doctor is the aide-de-camp of death.

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1 month 4 days ago

If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so. The trick is to want the right things, then science will provide you with the most effective methods of achieving them.

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1 month 1 week ago

One is ashamed to say how little is needed for all men to be delivered from those calamities which now oppress them; it is only needful not to lie.

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Ch. 17
3 months 1 week ago

If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as "spiritual life," "God," "soul," "cross," etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.

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June 15, 1844
3 months 1 week ago

Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.

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3 months 1 week ago

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress of humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or even mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

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"The Emotional Factor"
2 months 4 days ago

The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.

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Quoted in Essays in Zoosemiotics (1990) by Thomas A. Sebeok
3 months 1 week ago

Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.

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As quoted in Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 239 Point Counter Point (New York: The Modern Library, 1928), Chapter XVII, p. 263
2 months 1 week ago

I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where the profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.

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Chapter III, Part I.
1 month 6 days ago

People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.

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ARTnews annual, Volume 31, Art Foundation, 1966, p. 56
3 weeks ago

The way out of this violent cycle is to deepen democracy-to bring decisions that directly affect people's lives as close as possible to where people are and to where they can take responsibility.

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3 months 1 week ago

Earth laughs in flowers to see her boastful boys Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs; Who steer the plough, but can not steer their feet Clear of the grave.

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Hamatreya

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.

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A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
2 months 2 weeks ago

Friends share all things.

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As quoted in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, "Pythagoras", Sect. 10
3 months 1 week ago

By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manip­ulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms- elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest-will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitari­anism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slo­gans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial-but democracy and free­dom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of sol­diers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.

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Chapter 3, p. 25
2 months 4 days ago

The woman is increasingly aware that love alone can give her full stature, just as the man begins to discern that spirit alone can endow his life with its highest meaning. Fundamentally, therefore, both seek a psychic relation to the other, because love needs the spirit, and the spirit love, for their fulfillment.

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p. 185

There is a class of writers who are ever boasting of the progress of civilization and of the human mind in modern times. If we were to credit their pretensions, we should be led to believe that the science of society had reached its highest degree of perfection, because old metaphysical and economic theories have been somewhat refined upon.In answer to their boasts of social progress, it is not sufficient to refer to the deeply-rooted social evils which exist, and which prey upon our boasted civilized social order. We will mention but a single one, the frightful increase of national debts and of taxation.

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The Theory of Social Organization. Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier
1 month 1 day ago

Tocqueville predicted that in democratic countries the public would demand larger and larger doses of excitement and increasingly stronger stimulants from its writers. He probably did not expect that public to dramatize itself so extensively, to make the world scene everybody's theatre, or, in the developed countries, to take to alcohol and drugs in order to get relief from the horrors of ceaseless intensity, the torment of thrills and distractions. A great many writers have done little more than meet the mounting demand for thrills. I think that this demand has, in the language of marketing, peaked.

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The Distracted Public
1 month 6 days ago

Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.

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Letter to Clare Westcott, November 26 1975. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 514
2 months ago

The philosopher ... subjects experience to his critical judgment, and this contains a value judgment - namely, that freedom from toil is preferable to toil, and an intelligent life is preferable to a stupid life. It so happened that philosophy was born with these values. Scientific thought had to break this union of value judgment and analysis, for it became increasingly clear that the philosophic values did not guide the organisation of society.

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p. 126
4 months 1 week ago
The advantage of a bad memory is that one can enjoy the same good things for the first time several times.
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3 months 1 week ago

It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expence, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expence, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.

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Chapter III, p. 381.
1 month 4 weeks ago

Ressentiment is always to some degree a determinant of the romantic type of mind. At least this is so when the romantic nostalgia for some past era (Hellas, the Middle Ages, etc.) is not primarily based on the values of that period, but on the wish to escape from the present. Then all praise of the "past" has the implied purpose of downgrading present-day reality.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 68
2 months 1 week ago

If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

Strictly speaking, the mass, as a psychological fact, can be defined without waiting for individuals to appear in mass formation. In the presence of one individual we can decide whether he is "mass" or not. The mass is all that which sets no value on itself - good or ill - based on specific grounds, but which feels itself "just like everybody," and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else.

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Chap.I: The Coming Of The Masses
3 months 1 week ago

He chooses the most feared, most hated man in order to worship him as a god, feeling sure that he is alone in perceiving the god's secret virtues.

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p. 165
2 months 4 weeks ago

Good breeding in cattle depends on physical health, but in men on a well-formed character.

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Freeman (1948), p. 151

One of the problems... both on the left and the right is that the... individual autonomy protected by liberalism tends to take more and more extreme versions... and... becomes self-undermining.

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13:24
3 months 3 weeks ago

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.

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XI, 14

In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour.

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Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), p. 54
3 months 1 week ago

Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. 

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To his young son from the Yosemite Valley on
3 months 3 weeks ago

If they have entered into the spirit if these rules, and if the rules have made sufficient impression on them to become rooted and established in their minds, they will feel how much difference there is between what is said here and what a few logicians may perhaps have written by chance approximating to it in a few passages of their works.

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2 months 4 days ago

The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.

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"The Concept of Freedom".
2 weeks 3 days ago

What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one... It's this in-between that I'm calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one - which is really the realm of the artist.

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Every Time We Say Goodbye in Sight and Sound [London]
3 months 1 week ago

As if our birth had at first sundered things, and we had been thrust up through into nature like a wedge, and not till the wound heals and the scar disappears, do we begin to discover where we are, and that nature is one and continuous everywhere.

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3 months 1 week ago

The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, "words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.

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"The Acquisition of Ideas"
3 months 1 week ago

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

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Those Barren Leaves, 1925
3 months 1 week ago

A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be Uranus, or it may be in the shutter.

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July 10-12, 1841

Be afraid of the Chinese. I mean, the Chinese shoot down satellites in space; they hack into Google's computers; the Osama bin Laden people can't make their underwear blow up.

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On The Colbert Report (2 May 2011), answering the question of who Americans should be scared of now that bin Laden is dead
3 months 1 week ago

Theologian: But what is to love? Philosopher: To be delighted by the happiness of another.

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Confessio philosophi, 1673
1 month 6 days ago

While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world.

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(p. 21)
1 month 3 weeks ago

Cézanne's painting is strictly painting, and its value is immense; but Van Gogh's painting has the Outsider's characteristic: it is a laboratory refuse of a man who treated his own life as an experiment in living; it faithfully records moods and developments of vision on the manner of a Bildungsroman.

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p. 103
3 months 3 weeks ago

Show that you know this only, how you may never either fail to get what you desire or fall into what you avoid.

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Book II, ch. 1, 37
1 month 4 days ago

We don't need fossils - the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution.

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The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009) (p. 164)
2 months 4 weeks ago

My enemy is not the man who wrongs me, but the man who means to wrong me.

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1 month 1 day ago

Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.

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Humboldt's Gift (1975), p. 265
2 months 1 week ago

It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise!

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Part 4, Chapter 5
3 months 1 week ago

Every one is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Every one knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if we lived habitually with a sort of cloud weighing on us, below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half-awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.

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The Energies of Men
3 months 3 days ago

The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. It's matrix-If you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being elliptical in order to come more quickly to my principle theme-is the determination of Being as presence in all sense of this word.

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Structure, Sign and Play
1 month 3 weeks ago

Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.

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p. 75

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