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Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
3 months 2 weeks ago
As all those have shown who...

As all those have shown who have discussed civil institutions, and as every history is full of examples, it is necessary to whoever arranges to found a Republic and establish laws in it, to presuppose that all men are bad and that they will use their malignity of mind every time they have the opportunity; and if such malignity is hidden for a time, it proceeds from the unknown reason that would not be known because the experience of the contrary had not been seen, but time, which is said to be the father of every truth, will cause it to be discovered.

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Book 1, Ch. 3
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 4 days ago
When the evolutionary process shifts from...

When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.

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(p. 180)
Philosophical Maxims
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann
3 days ago
Ours is a problem in which...

Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.

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Ch. IV: "The Golden Rule and After", p. 105.
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 4 weeks ago
Whoever drinks from my mouth will...

Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 weeks 3 days ago
Universality is....
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Main Content / General
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
3 months 2 weeks ago
...God commanded in the law ....

...God commanded in the law [Deut. 22:22-24] that adulterers be stoned . . . The temporal sword and government should therefore still put adulterers to death . . . Where the government is negligent and lax, however, and fails to inflict the death penalty, the adulterer may betake himself to a far country and there remarry if he is unable to remain continent. But it would be better to put him to death, lest a bad example be set . . .

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Philosophical Maxims
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva
2 weeks 6 days ago
Principles of Earth Democracy, #10: Earth...

Principles of Earth Democracy, #10: Earth Democracy connects people in circles of care, cooperation, and compassion instead of dividing them through competition and conflict, fear and hatred. In the face of a world of greed, inequality, and overconsumption, Earth Democracy globalizes compassion, justice, and sustainability.

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(p. 11)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
1 month 4 weeks ago
Of all Discourse, governed by desire...

Of all Discourse, governed by desire of Knowledge, there is at last an End, either by attaining, or by giving over.

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The First Part, Chapter 7, p. 30
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
3 months 2 weeks ago
To say that the cross emblazoned...

To say that the cross emblazoned with the papal coat of arms, and set up by the indulgence preachers, is equal in worth to the cross of Christ is blasphemy.

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Thesis 79
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 1 week ago
[The career a young man should...

The career a young man should choose should be] one that is most consonant with our dignity, one that is based on ideas of whose truth we are wholly convinced, one that offers us largest scope in working for humanity and approaching that general goal towards which each profession offers only one of the means: the goal of perfection ... If he works only for himself he can become a famous scholar, a great sage, an excellent imaginative writer [Dichter], but never a perfected, a truly great man.

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in Karl Marx and World Literature (1976) by S. S. Prawer, p. 2.
Philosophical Maxims
Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
1 month 3 weeks ago
Barthes's discovery and articulation of the...

Barthes's discovery and articulation of the "new" liberatory category of perception and deciphering, semiotic-mythology, belongs to the praxis of his heroic mythologist, alone. This unfortunate theoretical strategy makes the articulation of a coalitional consciousness in social struggle impossible to imagine or enact. ... His terminologies appropriate the technologies of the oppressed for use by academic classes.

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Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, p. 201
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 2 days ago
Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning...

Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
3 weeks 4 days ago
It is odd that the last...

It is odd that the last twenty-five years which have witnessed the greatest progress ever made in physical science-the greatest victories ever achieved by mind over matter-should have produced hardly a volume that will be remembered in 1900.

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Journal entry (9 March 1850), quoted in Thomas Macaulay, The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay: Volume 5, January 1849-December 1855, ed. Thomas Pinney (1981), p. 99
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
3 months 5 days ago
If the inner psychic ground of...

If the inner psychic ground of our individual appearance were not always the same, there could be no science of psychology, which qua science relies on a psychic "inside we are all alike," just as the science of physiology and medicine relies on the sameness of our inner organs. The monstrous sameness and pervasive ugliness so highly characteristic of the findings of modern psychology, and contrasting so obviously with the enormous variety and richness of overt human conduct, witness to the radical difference between the inside and the outside of the human body.

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pp. 34-35
Philosophical Maxims
Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri
2 days ago
Perhaps some day soon we will...

Perhaps some day soon we will have arrived at the point when we can look back with irony at the barbaric old times when in order to be free we had to keep our own brothers and sisters slaves or to be equal we were constrained to inhuman sacrifices of freedom.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 1 week ago
I wish to suggest that a...

I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving.

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pp. 486-7
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 1 week ago
Capital is dead labor, that vampire-like,...

Capital is dead labor, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

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Vol. I, Ch. 10, Section 1, p. 257.
Philosophical Maxims
Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte
2 months 1 week ago
The first condition of unity is...

The first condition of unity is a subjective principle; and this principle in the Positive system is the subordination of the intellect to the heart: Without this the unity that we seek can never be placed on a permanent basis, whether individually or collectively. It is essential to have some influence sufficiently powerful to produce convergence amid the heterogeneous and often antagonistic tendencies of so complex an organism as ours.

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p. 24
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
1 month 3 weeks ago
Our habitual experience is a complex...

Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.

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Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 6.
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
3 months 1 week ago
It strikes everyone in beginning to...

It strikes everyone in beginning to form an acquaintance with the treasures of Indian literature, that a land so rich in intellectual products and those of the profoundest order of thought..."

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quoted in De Riencourt, Amaury The Soul of India Harper & Brothers Publishers New York 1960 p. 301
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
4 months 1 week ago
How absurd men are! They never...

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech. Either/Or Part I, Swenson Translation p. 19 Variations include: People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought, which they avoid. People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

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Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
3 weeks 4 days ago
To have been a Sovereign, yet...

To have been a Sovereign, yet the champion of liberty,-a revolutionary leader, yet the supporter of social order, is the peculiar glory of William. Till his accession the British Constitution was in its Chaos. It had contained, from a very remote period, the simple elements of an harmonious government. But they were in a state not of amalgamation, but of conflict,-not of equilibrium but of alternate elevation and depression. The tyranny of Charles the first produced civil war and anarchy. Tyranny had now again produced resistance and revolution. And, but for the wisdom of the new King, it seems probable that the same cycle of misery would have been again described.

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'Essay on the Life and Character of King William III' (1822), written for the Greaves Historical Prize at Cambridge, quoted in The Times Literary Supplement (1 May 1969), p. 469
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 2 weeks ago
Its first ethical precept is the...

Its first ethical precept is the identity of means used and aims sought. The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and wellbeing. Unless this be the essential aim of revolution, violent social changes would have no justification. For external social alterations can be, and have been, accomplished by the normal processes of evolution. Revolution, on the contrary, signifies not mere external change, but internal, basic, fundamental change. That internal change of concepts and ideas, permeating ever-larger social strata, finally culminates in the violent upheaval known as revolution.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
3 months 1 week ago
Wherever there is great property, there...

Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality.

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Chapter I, Part II, p. 770.
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
3 months 2 days ago
The most thought provoking…

The most thought provoking thing in our thought provoking time is that we are still not thinking.

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What is Called Thinking? (1951-1952), as translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
2 months 2 weeks ago
Use examples; that such as thou...

Use examples; that such as thou teachest may understand thee the better!

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Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
3 months 1 week ago
The more we devote ourselves to...

The more we devote ourselves to observing animals and their behaviour, the more we love them, on seeing how gready they care for their young; in such a context, we cannot even contemplate cruelty to a wolf. Leibnitz put the grub he had been observing back on the tree with its leaf, lest he should be guilty of doing any harm to it. It upsets a man to destroy such a creature for no reason, and this tenderness is subsequently transferred to man.

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Part II, pp. 212-213
Philosophical Maxims
Parmenides
Parmenides
2 months 3 weeks ago
There is one story left, one...

There is one story left, one road: that it is. And on this road there are very many signs that, being, is uncreated and imperishable, whole, unique, unwavering, and complete.

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Frag. B 8.1-4, quoted by Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics, 144
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
1 month 4 weeks ago
Technical progress and more comfortable living...

Technical progress and more comfortable living permit the systematic inclusion of libidinal components into the realm of commodity production and exchange. But no matter how controlled the mobilization of instinctual energy may be (it sometimes amounts to a scientific management of libido), no matter how much it may serve as a prop for the status quo-it is also gratifying to the managed individuals, just as racing the outboard motor, pushing the power lawn mower, and speeding the automobile are fun.

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p. 75
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 6 days ago
Ignore death up to the last...

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?

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Philosophical Maxims
Étienne de La Boétie
Étienne de La Boétie
1 day ago
Men accept servility…

Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

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Part 3
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
3 weeks 1 day ago
Logical consequences are the scarecrows of...

Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.

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Philosophical Maxims
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
3 months 2 weeks ago
I am firmly convinced, therefore, that...

I am firmly convinced, therefore, that to set up a republic which is to last a long time, the way to set about it is to constitute it as Sparta and Venice were constituted; to place it in a strong position, and so to fortify it that no one will dream of taking it by a sudden assault; and, on the other hand, not to make it so large as to appear formidable to its neighbors. It should in this way be able to enjoy its form of government for a long time. For war is made on a commonwealth for two reasons: to subjugate it, and for fear of being subjugated by it.

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Book 1, Ch. 6 (as translated by LJ Walker and B Crick)
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
3 months 1 week ago
There is needed, no doubt, a...

There is needed, no doubt, a body of servants (ministerium) of the invisible church, but not officials (officiales), in other words, teachers but not dignitaries, because in the rational religion of every individual there does not yet exist a church as a universal union (omnitudo collectiva).

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Book IV, Part 1, Section 1, "The Christian religion as a natural religion"
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
2 months 1 week ago
Gaiety - a quality of ordinary...

Gaiety - a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

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"Diseases"
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
1 month 4 days ago
When reason rules, money is a...

When reason rules, money is a blessing.

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Maxim 50
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
2 months 2 days ago
The bourgeoisie is charitable out of...

The bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards its gifts as a business matter, makes a bargain with the poor, saying: "If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. You shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen."

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Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
1 month 4 weeks ago
It is not society's fault that...

It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

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Ch. IV: The Aristocratic Ideal
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
3 months 1 day ago
A real subjection is born mechanically...

A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behavior, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations.

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Part Four, Complete and austere institutions
Philosophical Maxims
chanakya
chanakya
2 weeks 2 days ago
Don't judge the future of a...

Don't judge the future of a person based on his present conditions, because time has the power to change black coal to shiny diamond.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
Just now
A scientist worthy….

A scientist worthy of the name, above all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same nature. ...we work not only to obtain the positive results which, according to the profane, constitute our one and only affection, as to experience this esthetic emotion and to convey it to others who are capable of experiencing it.

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"Notice sur Halphen," Journal de l'École Polytechnique (Paris, 1890), 60ème cahier, p. 143.
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
4 months 4 days ago
Then the case is the same...

Then the case is the same in all the other arts for the orator and his rhetoric; there is no need to know the truth of the actual matters, but one merely needs to have discovered some device of persuasion which will make one appear to those who do not know to know better than those who know.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 2 weeks ago
"What I believe" is a process...

"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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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 2 days ago
Each of us must pay for...

Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 month 2 days ago
For the first half of geological...

For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.

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Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
1 month 3 weeks ago
Pragmatism ... reflects with almost disarming...

Pragmatism ... reflects with almost disarming candor the spirit of the prevailing business culture, the very same attitude of 'being practical' as counter to which philosophical meditation as such was conceived.

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p. 52.
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 4 weeks ago
Blessed is the lion which becomes...

Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man; and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, and the lion becomes man. (7) This saying has been interpreted by some as referring to such anger as consumes a man…(rather than is consumed by him, through his reason and love), 'til that man is the lion of Anger. Other more mystical interpretations might also be found or devised that have merit.

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
1 day ago
On the more conservative side... Liberalism...

On the more conservative side... Liberalism has been associated with... the right to own private property... one of the most fundamental individual rights that is protected in true liberal societies, and that right is... what made possible the modern economic world. As any economist would tell you, without secure property rights and contract enforcement, you don't get investment and therefore economic growth.

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13:44
Philosophical Maxims
Lucretius
Lucretius
3 months 3 weeks ago
O pitiable minds of men...

O pitiable minds of men, O blind intelligences! In what gloom of life, in how great perils is passed all your poor span of time! not to see that all nature barks for is this, that pain be removed away out of the body, and that the mind, kept away from care and fear, enjoy a feeling of delight!

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Book II, lines 14-19 (tr. Rouse)
Philosophical Maxims
Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte
2 months 1 week ago
It lays down, as is generally...

It lays down, as is generally known, that our speculations upon all subjects whatsoever, pass necessarily through three successive stages: a Theological stage, in which free play is given to spontaneous fictions admitting of no proof; the Metaphysical stage, characterized by the prevalence of personified abstractions or entities; lastly, the Positive stage, based upon an exact view of the real facts of the case.

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p. 36
Philosophical Maxims
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