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3 weeks 4 days ago

The distinction of Fact and Theory is only relative. Brute animals have a practical knowledge of relations of space and force; but they have no knowledge of Geometry or Mechanicks.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

... happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination, resting on merely empirical grounds…

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4:418-19, p.29
4 months 1 week ago

There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.

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As quoted in The Mystery of Matter‎ (1965) edited by Louise B. Young, p. 113
5 months 3 days ago

For Christ is Joy and Sweetness to a broken heart. Christ is a Lover of poor sinners, and such a Lover that He gave Himself for us. Now if this is true, and it is true, then are we never justified by our own righteousness.

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Chapter 3, verse 20
1 month 1 week ago

Our feeling about every obligation depends in each case upon the spirit in which the benefit is conferred; we weigh not the bulk of the gift, but the quality of the good-will which prompted it.

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Line 6
3 months 1 week ago

Militarism, the destroyer of youth, the raper of women, the annihilator of the best in the race, the very mower of life.

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3 months 4 days ago

We distinguish diagrammatic from sentential paper-and-pencil representations of information by developing alternative models of information-processing systems that are informationally equivalent and that can be characterized as sentential or diagrammatic. Sentential representations are sequential, like the propositions in a text. Diagrammatic representations are indexed by location in a plane. Diagrammatic representations also typically display information that is only implicit in sentential representations and that therefore has to be computed, sometimes at great cost, to make it explicit for use. We then contrast the computational efficiency of these representations for solving several.illustrative problems in mathematics and physics.

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p. 65
4 months 3 weeks ago

Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.

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

I believe government, organized authority, or the State is necessary only to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only. As a promoter of individual liberty, human well-being and social harmony, which alone constitute real order, government stands condemned by all the great men of the world...I believe - indeed, I know - that whatever is fine and beautiful in the human expresses and asserts itself in spite of government, and not because of it.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.

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3 weeks 4 days ago

It is not by the consolidation or concentration, of powers, but by their distribution that good government is effected.

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Memoirs, Correspondence and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1829) edited by Thomas Jefferson Randolph, p. 70
4 months 3 weeks ago

We have two bits of evidence about the Somebody. One is the universe He has made. If we used that as our only clue, I think we should have to conclude that He was a great artist (for the universe is a very beautiful place), but also that He is quite merciless and no friend to man (for the universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place.) ...The other bit of evidence is that Moral Law which He has put in our minds. And this is a better bit of evidence than the other, because it is inside information. You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.

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Book I, Chapter 5, "We Have Cause to Be Uneasy"
4 months 3 weeks ago

Never aim at more precision than... required by the problem...

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3 weeks 3 days ago

Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves - that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The transition of the subject-object relation to that of the I-Thou implies a passage of consciousness to a new sphere of existence, viz, the interval, betweenness or Zwischen; and this is a passage from thought to Umfassung.

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The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 73
1 month 5 days ago

All characteristics of material things as they are presented to us in the acts of external perception (e.g. colour) are endowed with the separateness of spatial extension, but it is only when we build up a single connected real world out of all our experiences that the spatial extension, which is a constituent of every perception, becomes a part of one and the same all-inclusive space. ... every material thing can, without changing content, equally well occupy a position in Space different from its present one. This immediately gives us the property of the homogeneity of space which is the root of the conception, Congruence.

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Introduction
3 months 1 week ago

The people are asleep; they remain indifferent. They forge their own chains and do the bidding of their masters to crucify their Christs.

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(p. 304)

In art the best is good enough.

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Italian Journey
3 months 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
4 months 3 weeks ago

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

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L'Ingénu, ch.10 (1767) Quoted in The End, part 13 of A Series of Unfortunate Events
3 months 1 week ago

The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period. This division is not very different from Marx's concept of "human nature in general", to be distinguished from "human nature as modified in each historical period". The same distinction exists in Marx when he distinguishes between "constant" or "fixed" drives and "relative" drives. The constant drives "exist under all circumstances and ... can be changed by social conditions only as far as form and direction are concerned". The relative drives "owe their origin only to a certain type of social organization".

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Preserving seeks to secure the life that already is; safeguarding secures and reproduces the conditions of becoming, of living, of futurity, where the content of that life, that living, can be neither prescribed nor predicted, and where self-determination emerges as a potential.

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p. 94
5 months 3 days ago

We must not attach knowledge to the mind, we have to incorporate it there.

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Ch. 25
1 month 3 days ago

Christianity is at the very root of the evil that has corrupted the West. This is the truth, and it admits no doubt.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

It has never been in my power to study anything, - mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic.

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Letter to Victoria
3 months 2 weeks ago

Whatever be the substance which takes possession of such a soul, it will produce the same result, and will change into a pretext for not conforming to any concrete purpose. If it appears as reactionary or anti-liberal it will be in order to affirm that the salvation of the State gives a right to level down all other standards, and to manhandle one's neighbour, above all if one's neighbour is an outstanding personality. But the same happens if it decides to act the revolutionary; the apparent enthusiasm for the manual worker, for the afflicted and for social justice, serves as a mask to facilitate the refusal of all obligations, such as courtesy, truthfulness and, above all, respect or esteem for superior individuals. ... As regards other kinds of Dictatorship, we have seen only too well how they flatter the mass-man, by trampling on everything that appeared to be above the common level.

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Chapter XV: We Arrive At The Real Question
1 month 3 weeks ago

We share bodies with two eyes, ten fingers, ten toes; we share life on this earth; we share capitalist regimes of production and exploitation; we share common dreams of a better future.

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128
3 months 3 weeks ago

As the animus is partial to argument, he can best be seen at work in disputes where both parties know they are right. Men can argue in a very womanish way, too, when they are anima-possessed and have thus been transformed into the animus of their own anima.

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Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.29
3 months 1 week ago

Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer. This position will be characterized by some as "overoptimistic," "utopian," or "unrealistic." In order to appreciate the merits of such criticism a discussion of the ambiguity of hope and the nature of optimism and pessimism seems called for.

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p. 483
3 months 2 weeks ago

The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.

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E. Jephcott, trans., p. 17.
3 months 3 weeks ago

To have grazed every form of failure, including success.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Corrupt influence, which is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality, and of all disorder; which loads us, more than millions of debt; which takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our constitution.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

How is it possible that the poorer classes can remain healthy and have a reasonable expectation of life under such conditions? What can one expect but that they should suffer from continual outbreaks of epidemics and an excessively low expectation of life? The physical condition of the workers shows a progressive deterioration.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests of the desire to know-it involves suppression of hopes and fears, loves and hates, and the whole subjective emotional life, until we become subdued to the material, able to see it frankly, without preconceptions, without bias, without any wish except to see it as it is, and without any belief that what it is must be determined by some relation, positive or negative, to what we should like it to be, or to what we can easily imagine it to be.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

An old proverb fetched from the outward and visible world says: "Only the man that works gets the bread." Strangely enough this proverb does not aptly apply in that world to which it expressly belongs. For the outward world is subjected to the law of imperfection, and again and again the experience is repeated that he too who does not work gets the bread, and that he who sleeps gets it more abundantly than the man who works. In the outward world everything is made payable to the bearer, this world is in bondage to the law of indifference, and to him who has the ring, the spirit of the ring is obedient, whether he be Noureddin or Aladdin, and he who has the world's treasure, has it, however he got it.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Similarly, individual acts of aristocratic generosity do not eliminate pauperism; they perpetuate it.

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p. 219
3 months 3 weeks ago

Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive, that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.

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On Manners and Fashion
3 months 1 week ago

"What I believe" is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect. While it may be true that Herbert Spencer's formulation of liberty is the most important on the subject, as a political basis of society, yet life is something more than formulas. In the battle for freedom, as Ibsen has so well pointed out, it is the struggle for, not so much the attainment of, liberty, that develops all that is strongest, sturdiest and finest in human character.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Kant's philosophy shifts for the first time the whole of modern thought and being (Desein) into the clarity and transparency of the foundation (Begrundung). This determines every attitude toward knowledge since then, as well as the bounds (Abgrenzungen) and appraisals of the sciences in the nineteenth century up to the present time. Therein Kant towers so far above all who precede and follow that even those who reject him or go beyond him still remain entirely dependent upon him.

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p. 55-56
4 months 3 weeks ago

Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent: All are needed by each one, Nothing is fair or good alone.

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Each and All, st. 1
3 weeks 5 days ago

You are not free. Myriad invisible hands hold your hands and direct them. When you rise in anger, a great-grandfather froths at your mouth; when you make love, an ancestral caveman growls with lust; when you sleep, tombs open in your memory till your skull brims with ghosts.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Those who are humane achieve glory. Those who are inhumane suffer disgrace.

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2A:4
5 months 3 weeks ago

The newsmen were writing down sentences busily as Hoskins spoke to them. They did not understand and they were sure their readers would not, but it sounded scientific and that was what counted.

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3 weeks 1 day ago

Either all things proceed from one intelligent source and come together as in one body, and the part ought not to find fault with what is done for the benefit of the whole; or there are only atoms, and nothing else than a mixture and dispersion. Why, then, art thou disturbed? Say to this ruling faculty, Art thou dead, art thou corrupted, art thou playing the hypocrite, art thou become a beast, dost thou herd and feed with the rest?

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IX, 39
5 months 3 weeks ago

It seems to be my destiny to discourse on truth, insofar as I discover it, in such a way that all possible authority is simultaneously demolished. Since I am incompetent and extremely undependable in men's eyes, I speak the truth and thereby place them in the contradiction from which they can be extricated only by appropriating the truth themselves. A man's personality is matured only when he appropriates the truth, whether it is spoken by Balaam's ass or a sniggering wag or an apostle or an angel.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Not only must people know, they must see with their own eyes. Because they must be made to be afraid; but also because they must be the witnesses, the guarantors, of the punishment, and because they must to a certain extent take part in it.

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Chapter One, pp.58
3 months 1 week ago

Like a plague, the mad spirit is sweeping the country, infesting the clearest heads and staunchest hearts with the deathly germ of militarism.

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