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5 months 3 weeks ago

To say that the activity of science and art helps humanity's progress, if by that activity we mean the activity which now calls itself by those names, is as though one said that the clumsy, obstructive splashing of oars in a boat moving down stream assists the boat's progress. It only hinders it... The proof of this is seen in the confession made by men of science that the achievements of the arts and sciences are inaccessible to the labouring masses on account of the unequal distribution of wealth.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Justice is what love looks like in public.

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Brother West (2009), p. 232
4 months 2 weeks ago

As we can not give a general definition of energy, the principle of the conservation of energy signifies simply that there is something which remains constant.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

"Instructors can impart only a fraction of the teaching. It is through your own devoted practice that the mysteries of the Art of Peace are brought to life."
- Morihei Ueshiba

See biography for Morihei Ueshiba:
https://civilsimian.com/Morihei-Ueshiba

Read Morihei Ueshiba's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/376/content

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

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5 months 3 days ago

Like other human freedoms, the freedoms embodied in market institutions are justified inasmuch as they meet human needs. Insofar as they fail to do this they can reasonably be altered. This is true not only of the rights that are involved in market institutions. It is true of all human rights.

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'Modus Vivendi' (p.36)
7 months 4 weeks ago

The public use of a man's reason must be free at all times, and this alone can bring enlightenment among men...

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3 months 3 weeks ago

That which makes the man no worse than he was makes his life no worse: it has no power to harm, without or within.

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IV, 8
4 months 1 week ago

Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.

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Lecture IX : On the Conduct of the Understanding
7 months 3 weeks ago

God said, I am tired of kings, I suffer them no more; Up to my ear the morning brings The outrage of the poor.

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Boston Hymn, st. 2
8 months ago

By this means all knowledge degenerates into probability; and this probability is greater or less, according to our experience of the veracity or deceitfulness of our understanding, and according to the simplicity or intricacy of the question.

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Part 4, Section 1
5 months 5 days ago

It's not that there are no differences between human and non-human animals, any more than there are no differences between black people and white people, freeborn citizens and slaves, men and women, Jews and gentiles, gays or heterosexuals. The question is rather: are they morally relevant differences? This matters because morally catastrophic consequences can ensue when we latch on to a real but morally irrelevant difference between sentient beings.

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"The Abolitionist Project", Talks given at the FHI (Oxford University) and the Charity International Happiness Conference, 2007
6 months 3 weeks ago

What is the use of all knowledge, if one does not act in accordance with it? This remark implies that knowledge is regarded as a means to action, and the latter as the real end. One could put the question the other way round and ask: How can we possibly act well without knowing what the Good is? This way of expressing it would regard knowledge as conditioning action. But both expressions are one-sided, and the truth is that both, knowledge as well as action, are in the same way inseparable elements of rational life.

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Consequences of the Difference p. 75
6 months 3 weeks ago

I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

I am a mariner of Odysseus with heart of fire but with mind ruthless and clear.

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Toda Raba
3 months 3 weeks ago

Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity, but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat.

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The Junius Pamphlet
3 months 3 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
5 months 2 weeks ago

All of us need an identity which unites us with our neighbours, our countrymen, those people who are subject to the same rules and the same laws as us, those people with whom we might one day have to fight side by side to protect our inheritance, those people with whom we will suffer when attacked, those people whose destinies are in some way tied up with our own.

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Rivers of Blood BBC2 documentary
5 months 2 weeks ago

I never yet touched a fig leaf that didn't turn into a price tag.

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Humboldt's Gift (1975), p. 159
5 months 3 weeks ago

For me any of the little gestures I make are all tentative probes. That's why I feel free to make them sound as outrageous or extreme as possible. Until you make it extreme, the probe is not very efficient.

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Marshall McLuhan: the man and his message, edited by George Sanderson and Frank MacDonald, Fulcrum, 1989, p. 32
6 months 2 weeks ago

To understand this for sense it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or a logician, but that he should be mad. On the proposition that the volume generated by revolving the region under 1/x from 1 to infinity has finite volume.

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Quoted in Mathematical Maxims and Minims by N. Rose
8 months 4 days ago

My whole heart and soul are stirred and incensed against the Turks and Mohammed, when I see this intolerable raging of the Devil. Therefore I shall pray and cry to God, nor rest until I know that my cry is heard in heaven.

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Statement while being confined to residence at Coburg, as quoted in History of the Christian Church, (1910) by Philip Schaff, Vol. VII
7 months 3 weeks ago

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumour, and survival a thing beyond the bounds of possibility.

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Themes and Variations, 1950
6 months 3 weeks ago

The Whigs of this day have before them, in this Appeal, their constitutional ancestors: They have the doctors of the modern school. They will choose for themselves. The author of the Reflections has chosen for himself. If a new order is coming on, and all the political opinions must pass away as dreams, which our ancestors have worshipped as revelations, I say for him, that he would rather be the last (as certainly he is the least) of that race of men, than the first and greatest of those who have coined to themselves Whig principles from a French die, unknown to the impress of our fathers in the constitution.

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p. 476
5 months 3 weeks ago

We are swiftly moving at present from an era where business was our culture into an era when culture will be our business. Between these poles stand the huge and ambiguous entertainment industries.

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(p. 384)
6 months 3 weeks ago

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are. If we had the right sense of our position in the world, if to compare were inseparable from to live, the revelation of our infinitesimal presence would crush us. But to live is to blind ourselves to our own dimensions. . . .

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7 months 3 weeks ago

So far as living instruments of labour are concerned, for instance horses, their reproduction is timed by nature itself. Their average lifetime as instruments of labour is determined by the laws of nature. As soon as this term has expired they must be replaced by new ones. A horse cannot be replaced piecemeal; it must be replaced by another horse.

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Vol. II, Ch. VIII, p. 174.
6 months 1 week ago

The more reified the world becomes, the thicker the veil cast upon nature, the more the thinking weaving that veil in its turn claims ideologically to be nature, primordial experience.

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p. 7
6 months 4 days ago

If reason is both transcendent and immanent, then philosophy, as culture-bound reflection and argument about eternal questions, is both in time and eternity. We don't have an Archimedean point; we always speak the language of a time and place; but the rightness and wrongness of what we say is not just for a time and a place.

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Why reason can't be naturalized
7 months 3 days ago

If you believe in the future life and, instead of preparing for it, sell it in order to buy this world, then that is folly! You do not normally sell two things for one; how can you give up an endless life for a limited number of days.

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IV. The True Nature of Prophecy and the Compelling Need of All Creation for it, p. 67.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Christian Kings may erre in deducing a Consequence, but who shall Judge?

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The Third Part, Chapter 43, p. 330
6 months 1 week ago

If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man. The cultivation of any branch of science - of chemistry, of physics, of geometry, of philology - may be a work of differentiated specialization, and even so, only within very narrow limits and restrictions; but philosophy, like poetry, is a work of integration and synthesis, or else it is merely pseudo-philosophical erudition.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Nature paints the best part of a picture, carves the best parts of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.

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Art
7 months 3 weeks ago

What do you think of the aspect of the money market? ... This time, by the by, the thing has assumed European dimensions such as have never been seen before, and I don't suppose we'll be able to spend much longer here merely as spectators. The very fact that I've at last got round to setting up house again and sending for my books seems to me to prove that the 'mobilisation' of our persons is AT HAND.

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Letter to Friedrich Engels (26 September 1856), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 40. Letters 1856-59 (2010), pp. 71-72
6 months 4 days ago

Even if we consider not words by themselves but rules deciding what words may appropriately be produced in certain contexts - even if we consider, in computer jargon, programs for using words - unless those programs themselves refer to something extra-linguistic there is still no determinate reference that those words possess. This will be a crucial step in the process of reaching the conclusion that the Brain-in-a-Vat Worlders cannot refer to anything external at all (and hence cannot say that they are Brain-in-a-Vat Worlders).

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Chap. 1 : Brains in a vat
6 months 1 week ago

What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine - they are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine - they are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior, jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.

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Letter (5 May 1855), published in Florence Nightingale : An Introduction to Her Life and Family (2001), edited by Lynn McDonald, p. 141
8 months 5 days ago

Cleanness of body was ever deemed to proceed from a due reverence to God.

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Book II
8 months 4 days ago

God the Almighty has made our rulers mad; they actually think they can do-and order their subjects to do-whatever they please. And the subjects make the mistake of believing that they, in turn, are bound to obey their rulers in everything.

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p. 83
7 months 3 weeks ago

Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.

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Quotation and Originality
7 months 3 weeks ago

There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being solemn experiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. ... The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.

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Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"
6 months 1 week ago

The supreme effort of the avant-guard is onward, ever onward.

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Light and Shadows in the Life of an Avant-Guard
5 months 1 week ago

Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.

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(p116)
7 months 3 weeks ago

A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide.

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As quoted in Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Information (2008) edited by Alois Pichler and Herbert Hrachovec, p. 140
7 months 4 weeks ago

The scene should be gently open'd, and his entrance made step by step, and the dangers pointed out that attend him from several degrees, tempers, designs, and clubs of men. He should be prepared to be shocked by some, and caress'd by others; warned who are like to oppose, who to mislead, who to undermine him, and who to serve him. He should be instructed how to know and distinguish them; where he should let them see, and when dissemble the knowledge of them and their aims and workings.

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Sec. 94
8 months ago

The ancient Egyptians had a superstitious antipathy to the sea; a superstition nearly of the same kind prevails among the Indians; and the Chinese have never excelled in foreign commerce.

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Chapter V, p. 402.

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