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2 months 3 weeks ago

A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.

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Wage Labour and Capital (December 1847), in Marx Engels Selected Works, Volume I, p. 163.
2 months 3 weeks ago

I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

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Books
1 month 1 week ago

Sudden Glory, is the passion which maketh those Grimaces called LAUGHTER.

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The First Part, Chapter 6, p. 27 (italics and spelling as per text)
1 month 1 week ago

Often it is only after immense intellectual effort, which may have continued over centuries, that humanity at last succeeds in achieving knowledge of a concept in its pure form, by stripping off the irrelevant accretions which veil it from the eye of the mind.

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Translation J. L. Austin (Oxford, 1950) as quoted by Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (1972) Vol. 1, p. 56.
1 month 3 days ago

I agree as to the doubtful value of competitive examination. The qualities which you really want, viz., self-control, self-reliance, habits of accurate thought, integrity and what you generally call trustworthiness, are not decided by competitive examination, which test little else than the memory.

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Letter to Lord Stanley (May 17, 1857), published in Florence Nightingale on Wars and the War Office: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale. Vol. 15 (2011), edited by Lynn McDonald, p. 265.
1 month 1 week ago

To the degree to which they correspond to the given reality, thought and behavior express a false consciousness, responding to and contributing to the preservation of a false order of facts. And this false consciousness has become embodied in the prevailing technical apparatus which in turn reproduces it.

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p. 145
1 month 1 week ago

... Nietzsche's ideas and plans: for example, the idea of giving up the whole wretched academic world to form a secular monastic community.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The guillotine takes life almost without touching the body, just as prison deprives of liberty or a fine reduces wealth. It is intended to apply the law not so to a real body capable of feeling pain as to a juridical subject, the possessor, among other rights, of the right to exist it had to have the abstraction of the law itself.

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pp. 13, Chapter One The Body of the Condemned
1 month 2 weeks ago

Facing a landscape annihilated by the light, to remain serene supposes a temper I do not have. The sun is my purveyor of black thoughts; and summer the season when I have always reconsidered my relations with this world and with myself, to the greatest prejudice of both.

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1 month 1 week ago

Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it. All wrong translations, all absurdities in geometry problems, all clumsiness of style, and all faulty connection of ideas in compositions and essays, all such things are due to the fact that thought has seized upon some idea too hastily, and being thus prematurely blocked, is not open to the truth.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.

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Chapter x, Part II, p. 168.
1 month 4 days ago

The haste of day rules over the night as empty form.

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3 months 3 days ago

This right which you have, is not founded any more than his upon any quality or any merit in yourself which renders you worthy of it. Your soul and your body are, of themselves, indifferent to the state of boatman or that of duke; and there is no natural bond that attaches them to one condition rather than to another.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

If a man own land, the land owns him.

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Wealth
2 months 2 weeks ago

It is not the same thing. You are perhaps not lying, but you are not telling the truth.

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Act 1
3 months 2 weeks ago

Of all the books I have ever worked on, I think Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare gave me the most pleasure, day in, day out. For months and months I lived and thought Shakespeare, and I don't see how there can be any greater pleasure in the world, any pleasure, that is, that one can indulge in for as much as ten hours without pause, day after day indefinitely.

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I do not believe that civilizations have to die...Civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

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In "Prophet of Hope & Fear" [Review of A Study of History, Vols. 7-10] TIME (18 October 1954) p. 108
1 month 3 weeks ago

I intend no Monopoly, but a Community in Learning; I study not for my own sake only, but for theirs that study not for themselves.

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Section 3
1 month 3 days ago

I never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.

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Letter to a friend, quoted in The Life of Florence Nightingale Vol. II (1914) by Edward Tyas Cook, p. 406

I mean to lead a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily - like a hermit crab. But I do not. I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity. My husband and five children must make their way in the world. The life I have chosen as a wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

What is Nature? An encyclopedical, systematic Index or Plan of our Spirit. Why will we content us with the mere catalogue of our Treasures? Let us contemplate them ourselves, and in all ways elaborate and use them.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Things are not so painful and difficult of themselves, but our weakness or cowardice makes them so.

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Ch. 14, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
2 months 2 weeks ago

I have known only one person in my life who claimed to have seen a ghost. It was a woman; and the interesting thing is that she disbelieved in the immortality of the soul before seeing the ghost and still disbelieves after having seen it. She thinks it was a hallucination. In other words, seeing is not believing. This is the first thing to get clear in talking about miracles.

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"Miracles" (1942), p. 25

The existence of the mind-independent environment beyond one's world-simulation is a theoretical inference, not an empirical observation.

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Postscript to review of Michael Lockwood's Mind, Brain and the Quantum, BLTC Research, Dec. 2016
2 weeks ago

Much of junk culture has a core of crisis - shoot-outs, conflagrations, bodies weltering in blood, naked embracers or rapist-stranglers. The sounds of junk culture are heard over a ground bass of extremism. Our entertainments swarm with specters of world crisis. Nothing moderate can have any claim to our attention.

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A Second Half Life (1991), p. 326
2 months 3 weeks ago

And the final event to himself has been, that, as he rose like a rocket, he fell like the stick.

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On Edmund Burke's reactions to the American and French revolutions.
1 month 4 days ago

The pornographic face says nothing. It has no expressivity or mystery.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you.

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Book IV, Chapter 8, "Is Christianity Hard or Easy?"
1 month 1 week ago

Marx explains the alienation of labor as exemplified in, first, the relation of the worker to the product of his labor and, second, the relation of the worker to his own activity. P. 276

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1 month 4 days ago

Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

How did they meet? By chance, like everybody ... Where did they come from? From the nearest place. Where were they going? Do we know where we are going?

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Prologue
2 months 2 weeks ago

One always dies too soon - or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

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Inès, Act 1, sc. 5
3 months 3 weeks ago

The science which has to do with nature clearly concerns itself for the most part with bodies and magnitudes and their properties and movements, but also with the principles of this sort of substance, as many as they may be.

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1 month 3 days ago

books are only what we want them to be; rather, what we read into them.

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1 month 3 days ago

The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but that of the privileged class; the class which robs and exploits the masses, and controls their lives from the cradle to the grave. No less pathetic is it that so few people realize that preparedness never leads to peace, but that it is indeed the road to universal slaughter.

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A philosophy without heart and a faith without intellect are abstractions from the true life of knowledge and faith. The man whom philosophy leaves cold, and the man whom real faith does not illuminate, may be assured that the fault lies in them, not in knowledge and faith. The former is still an alien to philosophy, the latter an alien to faith.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Shallow men believe in luck.

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Worship
2 months 1 week ago

Remember Bostrom's definition of existential risk, which refers to the annihilation not of human beings, but of "Earth-originating intelligent life." The replacement of our species by some other form of conscious intelligent life is not in itself, impartially considered, catastrophic. Even if the intelligent machines kill all existing humans, that would be...a very small part of the loss of value that Parfit and Bostrom believe would be brought about by the extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life. The risk posed by the development of AI, therefore, is not so much whether it is friendly to us, but whether it is friendly to the idea of promoting wellbeing in general, for all sentient beings it encounters, itself included.

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Chapter 15: Preventing Human Extinction (p. 176)
2 months 3 weeks ago

The child must be brought up free (that he allow others to be free). He must learn to endure the restraint to which freedom subjects itself for its own preservation (experience no subordination to his command). Thus he must be disciplined. This precedes instruction. Training must continue without interruption. He must learn to do without things and to be cheerful about it. He must not be obliged to dissimulate, he must acquire immediate horror of lies, must learn so to respect the rights of men that they become an insurmountable wall for him. His instruction must be more negative. He must not learn religion before he knows morality. He must be refined, but not spoiled (pampered). He must learn to speak frankly, and must assume no false shame. Before adolescence he must not learn fine manners ; thoroughness is the chief thing. Thus he is crude longer, but earlier useful and capable.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 3
2 months 3 weeks ago

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

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December 20, 1822
1 month 3 weeks ago

The tyranny of Mrs. Grundy is worse than any other tyranny we suffer under.

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On Manners and Fashion
2 months 3 weeks ago

Man is a rational animal - so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents. Often paraphrased as "It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this."

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2 weeks 5 days ago

Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.

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"The Care and Feeding of Communication Innovation", Dinner Address to Conference on 8 mm Sound Film and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, 8 November 1961
2 months 3 weeks ago

A metaphysics of morals is therefore indispensably necessary, not merely because of a motive to speculation - for investigating the source of the practical basic principles that lie a priori in our reason - but also because morals themselves remain subject to all sorts of corruption as long as we are without that clue and supreme norm by which to appraise them correctly...

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Physicians have this advantage: the sun lights their success and the earth covers their failures.

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Ch. 37
1 month 1 week ago

Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.

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The First Part, Chapter 13, p. 62
1 month 3 weeks ago

My Lords, to obtain empire is common; to govern it well has been rare indeed. To chastise the guilt of those who have been instruments of imperial sway over other nations by the high superintending justice of the sovereign state has not many striking examples among any people.

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Speech in opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings (16 February 1788), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Ninth (1899), p. 398
3 months 2 weeks ago

The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity, a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.

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1 month 5 days ago

Scientists, animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless, constitute an interesting subject for study.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Two Chinamen visiting Europe went to the theatre for the first time. One of them occupied himself with trying to understand the theatrical machinery, which he succeeded in doing. The other, despite his ignorance of the language, sought to unravel the meaning of the play. The former is like the astronomer, the latter the philosopher.

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Vol. 2 "On Various Subjects" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale

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