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Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
5 months 1 week ago
The most formidable of all the...

The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments, or the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact.

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Chapter XVIII.
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
4 months 2 weeks ago
One has to do something new...

One has to do something new in order to see something new.

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J 1770
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
6 months 4 days ago
Whatever you do, He will make...

Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed him.

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Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5 months 5 days ago
All is in a man's hands...

All is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most. Variant translation: "Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most."

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
5 months ago
What will be the influence of...

What will be the influence of communist society on the family? It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage - the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
6 months 6 days ago
A man of intellect is like...

A man of intellect is like an artist who gives a concert without any help from anyone else, playing on a single instrument - a piano, say, which is a little orchestra in itself. Such a man is a little world in himself; and the effect produced by various instruments together, he produces single-handed, in the unity of his own consciousness. Like the piano, he has no place in a symphony; he is a soloist and performs by himself - in solitude, it may be; or if in the company with other instruments, only as principal; or for setting the tone, as in singing.

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
6 months 3 weeks ago
The way of the superior man...

The way of the superior man may be found, in its simple elements, in the intercourse of common men and women; but in its utmost reaches, it shines brightly through Heaven and Earth.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
4 months ago
Youth is wholly experimental. Letter to...

Youth is wholly experimental.

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Letter to a Young Gentleman Scribner's Magazine (September 1888).
Philosophical Maxims
L.P. Jacks
L.P. Jacks
2 months 2 days ago
Among the arts of expression one...

Among the arts of expression one is suited to this purpose, another to that. It is hard to express movement in stone or rest in music. It is harder still to express permanence in speech.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
7 months 5 days ago
Tolerance and apathy are the last...

Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society.

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Philosophical Maxims
Horace
Horace
5 months 3 weeks ago
Then take, good sir…

Then take, good sir, your pleasure while you may; With life so short 'twere wrong to lose a day.

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Book II, satire viii, line 96 (trans. Conington)
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
2 months 4 weeks ago
The idea of universal human dignity...

The idea of universal human dignity ultimately comes out of Christianity... the view that all human beings are equal in the sight of God because they have the capacity for moral choice. As Western thought developed in the 17th-18th centuries, this took on a secular form under thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Immanuel Kant or Georg Hegel, who argued that human equality is... based on human autonomy.

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11:12
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
4 months 2 days ago
Penitence follows….

Penitence follows hasty decisions.

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Maxim 961
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
4 months 2 weeks ago
No revolution can ever succeed as...

No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the MEANS used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the PURPOSES to be achieved. Revolution is the negation of the existing, a violent protest against man's inhumanity to man with all the thousand and one slaveries it involves. It is the destroyer of dominant values upon which a complex system of injustice, oppression, and wrong has been built up by ignorance and brutality. It is the herald of NEW VALUES, ushering in a transformation of the basic relations of man to man, and of man to society.

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
6 months 3 weeks ago
The superior man accords with the...

The superior man accords with the course of the Mean. Though he may be all unknown, unregarded by the world, he feels no regret. It is only the sage who is able for this.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
4 months 2 weeks ago
The aim is to replace economic...

The aim is to replace economic oligarchies by the State, which has a will-to-power of its own and is quite as little concerned with the public good; and a will-to-power, moreover, which is not economic but military and therefore much more dangerous to any good folk who have a taste for staying alive. And on the bourgeois side what on earth is the sense of objecting to State control in economic affairs if one accepts private monopolies which have all the economic and technical disadvantages of State monopolies and possibly some others as well?

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p. 230
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
7 months 5 days ago
Since the science of nature is...

Since the science of nature is conversant with magnitudes, motion, and time, each of which must necessarily be either infinite or finite...we should speculate the infinite, and consider whether it is or not; and if it is what it is. ...All those who appear to have touched on a philosophy of this kind... consider it as a certain principle of beings. Some, indeed, as the Pythagoreans and Plato, consider it, per se, not as being an accident to any thing else, but as having an essential subsistence... the Pythagoreans... consider the infinite as subsisting in sensibles; for they do not make number to be separate; and they assert that what is beyond the heavens is infinite; but Plato says that beyond the heavens there is not any body, nor ideas, because these are no where: he affirms, however, that the infinite is both in sensibles, and in ideas. ...Plato establishes two infinities, viz. the great and the small.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
4 months 4 days ago
The happiness of men consists in...

The happiness of men consists in life. And life is in labor.

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What Is To Be Done? (1886) Chap. XXXVIII
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
5 months 4 days ago
If there be an order in...

If there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. So that even were the order intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general mind. But the order is not intrinsically indifferent; and hence the fundamental reason why education should be a repetition of civilization in little.

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Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
5 months 2 weeks ago
It is only necessary to make...

It is only necessary to make war with five things; with the maladies of the body, the ignorances of the mind, with the passions of the body, with the seditions of the city and the discords of families.

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As quoted in The Biblical Museum: A Collection of Notes Explanatory, Homiletic, and Illustrative on the Holy Scriptures, Especially Designed for the Use of Ministers, Bible-students, and Sunday-school Teachers (1873) by James Comper Gray, Vol. V
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
6 months 3 days ago
As a rule, begin my lectures...

As a rule, begin my lectures on Scientific Method by telling my students that scientific method does not exist. ...having been ...the one and only professor of this non-existent subject within the British Commonwealth.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
4 months 2 weeks ago
Epochs do not rise from the...

Epochs do not rise from the dead.... [W]hereas you can make a replica of an ancient statue, there is no possible replica of an ancient state of mind. There can be no nearer approximation than that which a masquerade bears to real life. There may be understanding of the past, but there is a difference between the modern and the ancient reactions to the same stimuli.

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Ch. 9: "Science and Philosophy", p. 194
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
2 months 4 days ago
When governments fear the people, there...

When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.

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Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia. It first appears in 1914, in Barnhill, John Basil (1914). "Indictment of Socialism No. 3" (PDF). Barnhill-Tichenor Debate on Socialism. Saint Louis, Missouri: National Rip-Saw Publishing. pp. p. 34. Retrieved on 2008-10-16.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
3 months 2 weeks ago
M. Comte's philosophy, in practice, might...

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

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On the Physical Basis of Life
Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
3 months 1 week ago
So what is the alternative to...

So what is the alternative to traditional anthropocentric ethics? Antispeciesism is not the claim that "All Animals Are Equal", or that all species are of equal value, or that a human or a pig is equivalent to a mosquito. Rather the antispeciesist claims that, other things being equal, equally strong interests should count equally. Experiences that are subjectively negative or positive in hedonic tone to the same degree must count for the same.

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"The Antispeciesist Revolution", Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 26 Jul. 2013
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
4 months 2 days ago
Anyone can hold…

Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.

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Maxim 358
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
2 months 2 weeks ago
Who is everywhere….

Who is everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.

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Line 2.
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
4 months 2 days ago
I've always been careful never to...

I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.

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Interview: Tom Wolfe, TVOntario, August 1970
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
6 months 1 week ago
There is no wish more natural...

There is no wish more natural than the wish to know.

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Ch. 13
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
4 months 3 weeks ago
The nineteenth century, utilitarian throughout, set...

The nineteenth century, utilitarian throughout, set up a utilitarian interpretation of the phenomenon of life which has come down to us and may still be considered as the commonplace of everyday thinking. ... An innate blindness seems to have closed the eyes of this epoch to all but those facts which show life as a phenomenon of utility.

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p. 16
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
4 months ago
In anything fit to be called...

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.

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A Gossip on Romance, printed in Longman's Magazine (November 1882).
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
4 months 1 day ago
The world becomes full of organisms...

The world becomes full of organisms that have what it takes to become ancestors. That, in a sentence, is Darwinism.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
6 months 3 days ago
We may suppose that everyone has...

We may suppose that everyone has in himself the whole form of a moral conception.

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Chapter I, Section 9, pg. 50
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
5 months 1 day ago
The desire to die was my...

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
6 months 5 days ago
Wilt thou seal up the avenues...

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.

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Fragment
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
6 months 1 week ago
There is not a negro from...

There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.

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Chap. II.
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
4 months ago
I confess I have no great...

I confess I have no great notion of the use of books, except to amuse a railway journey; although, I believe, there are some very exact treatises on astronomy, the use of the globes, agriculture, and the art of making paper flowers. Upon the less apparent provinces of life I fear you will find nothing truthful.

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The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the Young Man in Holy Orders.
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
4 months 3 weeks ago
Today war seems to have undergone...

Today war seems to have undergone a change of meaning, insofar as it is not a war of religion but a war of interests, not a war of conflicting cultures or civilizations but a war of national areas, not a war of human beings but a technical struggle of machines one against another and all against the non-combatant population.

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Philosophical Maxims
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann
3 months 1 day ago
The facts we see depend on...

The facts we see depend on where we are placed, and the habits of our eyes.

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Ch. VI: "Stereotypes", p. 80
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
2 months 4 weeks ago
So this is something... we see...

So this is something... we see happening... in the war in Ukraine. A lot of people raise the question, "Why are Ukrainians resisting the Russian invasion as ferociously as they are?" and there's been a little bit of a debate over whether this is due to the fact that Ukrain is democratic, a liberal democracy, and Russia is not, or whether it's simply a fight over sovereignty... I think that that's a false dichotomy because you really don't fight for liberalism as an abstract principle. You fight for it as it is embedded in... your nation... From my... frequent visits to Ukraine... I believe... that's what's really going on, that Ukrainians want their sovereignty, but the reason they want it so desperately is that they want to have a free Ukraine and not Putin's Ukraine, not a... centralized dictatorship, and that's why they're willing to fight so tenaciously.

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25:44:00
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
6 months 5 days ago
It must not be supposed that...

It must not be supposed that the subjective elements are any less 'real' than the objective elements; they are only less important... because they do not point to anything beyond ourselves...

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An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics, 1927
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
7 months 5 days ago
The truth is always in the...

The truth is always in the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because as a rule the minority is made up of those who actually have an opinion, while the strength of the majority is illusory, formed of that crowd which has no opinion - and which therefore the next moment (when it becomes clear that the minority is the stronger) adopts the latter's opinion, which now is in the majority, i.e. becomes rubbish by having the whole retinue and numerousness on its side, while the truth is again in a new minority.

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Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
6 months ago
Every questioning is a seeking. Every...

Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness.

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Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
5 months 1 day ago
Everything turns on pain; the rest...

Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
4 months 3 weeks ago
Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these...

Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
2 months 3 weeks ago
Were we required to characterise this...

Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster.

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Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
5 months 1 week ago
I am beginning to feel that...

I am beginning to feel that I am growing old; soon, I shall have to eat mush like children. I shall no longer be able to speak, which will be a rather great advantage for others and but a small inconvenience for myself.... The time in which I count in years is gone; that in which I count in days is here.... I had thought that the fibers of the heart would grow callous with age, it's not at all the case. I am not sure that my sensitivity hasn't increased; everything moves me, affects me.... To fade out between a man feeling your pulse and another bothering your head; not to know where one comes from, why one came, where one is going ...

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Letter to his sister Denise, as quoted in Diderot, Reason and Resonance (1982) by Élisabeth de Fontenay, pp. 270-271
Philosophical Maxims
A. J. Ayer
A. J. Ayer
5 months 1 day ago
I saw a Divine Being. I'm...

I saw a Divine Being. I'm afraid I'm going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.

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National Post (3 March 2001).
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months 3 weeks ago
Egos appear by....
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Main Content / General
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
4 months 3 weeks ago
Leibniz's theory on the subject as...

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.
Philosophical Maxims
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