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"New friends, however, will not be the same." No, nor will you yourself remain the same; you change with every day and every hour.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

A common monetary standard will be established, with the consent of the various governments, by which industrial transactions will be greatly facilitated. Three spheres made respectively of gold, silver, and platinum, and each weighing fifty grammes, would differ sufficiently in value for the purpose. The sphere should have a small flattened base, and on the great circle parallel to it the Positivist motto would be inscribed. At the pole would be the image of the immortal Charlemagne, the founder of the Western Republic, and round the image his name would be engraved, in its Latin form, Carolus; that name, respected as it is by all nations of Europe alike, would be the common appellation of the universal monetary standard.

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p. 430
6 months 6 days ago

Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can.

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Preface (p. vii)
6 months 5 days ago

Strength of body is nobility in beasts of burden, strength of character is nobility in men.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.

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Preface
4 months 2 weeks ago

Idolatry is a more dangerous crime because it is apt by the authority of Kings & under very specious pretenses to insinuate it self into mankind. Kings being apt to enjoyn the honour of their dead ancestors: & it seeming very plausible to honour the souls of Heroes & Saints & to believe that they can heare us & help us & are mediators between God & man & reside & act principally in the temples & statues dedicated to their honour & memory? And yet this being against the principal part of religion is in scripture condemned & detested above all other crimes. The sin consists first in omitting the service of the true God.

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Of Idolatry
2 months 2 weeks ago

I am endeavouring in a general way to explain the laws of double refraction on this hypothesis, but have not yet arrived at any results sufficiently decisive to be communicated.

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7 months 5 days ago

Recompense hatred with justice, and recompense kindness with kindness.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

But voice is a certain sound of that which is animated; for nothing inanimate emits a voice; but they are said to emit a voice from similitude, as a pipe, and a lyre, and such other inanimate things, have extension, modulation, and dialect; for thus it appears, because voice, also, has these.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.

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Authority and the Individual, 1949
6 months 2 weeks ago

Why do I think that we, the intellectuals, are able to help? Simply because we, the intellectuals, have done the most terrible harm for thousands of years. Mass murder in the name of an idea, a doctrine, a theory, a religion - that is all our doing, our invention: the invention of the intellectuals. If only we would stop setting man against man - often with the best intentions - much would be gained. Nobody can say that it is impossible for us to stop doing this.

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3 months 1 week ago

Beginning in the 1970s, however, the techniques and organizational form of industrial production shifted toward smaller and more mobile labor units and more flexible structures of production, a shift often labeled as a move from Fordist to post-Fordist production.

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82
6 months 5 days ago

Wealth and poverty do not lie in a person's estate, but in their souls.

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iv. 34
4 months 2 weeks ago

Feelings, the most diverse, very strong and very weak, very significant and very worthless, very bad and very good, if only they infect the reader, the spectator, the listener, constitute the subject of art.

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5 months 1 week ago

Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.

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Matthew 7:13-14 (NKJV) (Also Luke 13:24)
7 months 5 days ago

Only after Winter comes do we know that the pine and the cypress are the last to fade.

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5 months 1 week ago

So long as it is not possible to produce so much that there is enough for all, with more left over for expanding the social capital and extending the forces of production - so long as this is not possible, there must always be a ruling class directing the use of society's productive forces, and a poor, oppressed class. How these classes are constituted depends on the stage of development.

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5 months 1 week ago

One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

I thank God that this refreshing childhood vision still lives inside me in all its fullness of color and sound. This is what keeps my mind untouched by wastage, keeps it from withering and running dry. It is the sacred drop of immortal water which prevents me from dying. When I wish to speak of the sea, woman, or God in my writing, I gaze down in my breast and listen carefully to what the child within me says. He dictates to me; and if it sometimes happens that I come close to these great forces of the sea, woman, and God, approach them by means of words and depict them, I owe it to the child who still lives within me. I become a child again to enable myself to view the world always for the first time, with virgin eyes.

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The Son, Ch. 4, p. 49
3 months 1 week ago

Putin told the Financial Times that liberalism has become an "obsolete" doctrine. While it may be under attack from many quarters today, it is in fact more necessary than ever. It is more necessary because it is fundamentally a means of governing over diversity, and the world is more diverse than it ever has been. Democracy disconnected from liberalism will not protect diversity, because majorities will use their power to repress minorities.

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Emphasis in original.
6 months 2 weeks ago

... no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.

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Section 10 : Of Miracles Pt. 1
6 months 3 weeks ago

It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.

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7 months 1 week ago

At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. This must not be forgotten. This must be clung to because the whole consequence of a life can depend on it. The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter, these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

When the man governed by self-interest, the god of this world, does not renounce it but merely refines it by the use of reason and extends it beyond the constricting boundary of the present, he is represented (Luke XVI, 3-9) as one who, in his very person [as servant], defrauds his master [self- interest] and wins from him sacrifices in behalf of "duty."

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Book IV, Part 1, Section 2, "The Christian religion as a natural religion"
5 months 1 week ago

I don't understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Half our days we pass in the shadow of the earth; and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Beat a dog once and you only have to show him the whip.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.

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Preface, A vii
3 months 1 week ago

Liberalism is... a protection of human autonomy.

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11:06
5 months 1 week ago

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

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5 months 1 week ago

Existing is plagiarism.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Existence precedes and rules essence.

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Part 4, chapter 1
5 months 1 week ago

My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

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5 months 1 week ago

The way in which a society organizes the life of its members ... is one "project" of realization among others. But once the project has become operative in the basic institutions and relations, it tends to become exclusive and to determine the development of the society as a whole.

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p. xlviii
3 months 6 days ago

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The deadliest enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within their borders. And from these internal enemies civilization is always in need of being saved. The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks.

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Robert Gould Shaw: Oration upon the Unveiling of the Shaw Monument
4 months 1 week ago

I am extremely pleased by Daniel Fincke's article, which says exactly what I SHOULD have said and, to my regret, didn't make sufficiently clear in my Reason Rally speech. The best way to summarise it would be to modify the quotation from Johann Hari. Johann said, "I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous beliefs". From now on, my version will be, "I respect you too much to accept that you really believe anything so ridiculous as you claim. Please either defend those beliefs and explain why they are not ridiculous, or else declare that you do not hold them and publicly disown the church to which you claim loyalty."

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comment on Daniel Fincke (2 April 2012), "In Defense of Dawkins's Reason Rally Speech", RichardDawkins.net, retrieved on 1 May 2012
7 months ago

All things must needs be borne on through the calm void moving at equal rate with unequal weights.

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Book II, lines 238-239 (tr. Bailey)
3 months 1 week ago

Wine is a mixture of moisture and light.

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As quoted in Lorenzo Magalotti's Scientific and Scholarly Letter
6 months 2 weeks ago

Genet is a man-failure: he wills the impossible in order to derive from the tragic grandeur of this defeat the assurance that there is something other than the possible.

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p. 213
2 months 1 week ago

I consider, that as generally as Chymists are wont to appeal to Experience, and as confidently as they use to instance the several substances separated by the Fire from a Mixt Body, as a sufficient proof of their being its component Elements: Yet those differing Substances are many of them farr enough from Elementary simplicity, and may be yet look'd upon as mixt Bodies, most of them also retaining, somewhat... of the Nature of those Concretes whence they were forc'd.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

Jung believed that he was proceeding scientifically, but most Freudians remain convinced that he was inventing his own underground realm, rather as Tolkien invented Middle Earth. There is at least an element of truth in this view.

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p. 126
3 months 6 days ago

Man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer: it is the noble People that makes the noble Government; rather than conversely.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Our Constitution, by its separation of powers and its system of checks and balances, acts as a restraint upon efficiency by denying exclusive power to any branch of government. The logic of governmental efficiency, unchecked, runs straight on, not only to dictatorship, but also to torture, assassination, and other abominations.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

For my own part, not believing in universal selfishness, I have no difficulty in admitting that Communism would even now be practicable among the elite of mankind, and may become so among the rest.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility or the ensigns of a new order are in Europe.

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As quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson, by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine,
4 months 4 weeks ago

And this in turn makes it plain that the Right Man problem is a problem of highly dominant people. Dominance is a subject of enormous importance to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals - or human beings - seems to be amazingly constant. Bernard Shaw once asked the explorer H. M. Stanley how many other men could take over leadership of the expedition if Stanley himself fell ill; Stanley replied promptly: "One in twenty." "Is that exact or approximate?" asked Shaw. "Exact." And biological studies have confirmed this as a fact. For some odd reason, precisely five per cent - one in twenty - of any animal group are dominant - have leadership qualities. During the Korean War, the Chinese made the interesting discovery that if they separated out the dominant five per cent of American prisoners of war, and kept them in separate compound, the remaining ninety-five per cent made no attempt to escape.

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p. 216
5 months 1 week ago

And as in other things, so in men, not the seller, but the buyer determines the Price.

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The First Part, Chapter 10, p. 42

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