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5 months 2 weeks ago

The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic. In the context of this study the crucial question is whether the hypothesis of a quasi-autistic or of low-grade schizophrenic disturbance would help us to explain some of the violence spreading today.

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p. 395
3 months 2 weeks ago

I have always done things in my own way, which is at once the way that comes naturally to me, that is honest, sincere, genuine, and unforced; but also perverse, although you must remember that this word means per (through) verse (poetry), out-of-the-way and wayward, which is surely towards the way, and that to be queer-to "follow your own weird"-is wholeheartedly to accept your karma, or fate, or destiny, and thus to be odd in the service of God, "whose service," as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer declares, "is perfect freedom."

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p. xiii
6 months 1 week ago

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

His Religion is not an easy one: with rigorous fasts, lavations, strict complex formulas, prayers five times a day, and abstinence from wine, it did not "succeed by being an easy religion." As if indeed any religion, or cause holding of religion, could succeed by that! It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense, - sugar-plums of any kind, in this world or the next! In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler.

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7 months 1 week ago

...You could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up - a line which I often thought was a very plausible one - that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.

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"The Moral Arguments for Deity"
7 months 1 week ago

If this labourer were in possession of his own means of production, and was satisfied to live as a labourer, he need not work beyond beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day.

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Vol. I, Ch. 11, pg. 336.
5 months 4 weeks ago

Works of art express space as opportunity for movement and action.

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p. 217
5 months 3 weeks ago

What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.

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"Le monde où l'on catche"
3 months 3 weeks ago

This spirit thrusts itself forward, confident of commendation and esteem. It is superior to all, monarch of all it surveys; hence it should be subservient to nothing, finding no task too heavy, and nothing strong enough to weigh down the shoulders of a man.

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7 months 1 week ago

Of corruption, the principal and direct use is, to engage the representatives of the people to betray their trust, and sell themselves and the people to the universal corrupter-the monarch, in his capacity of corrupter-general.

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Constitutional Code (written between 1820 and 1832), quoted in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. XVII (1841), p. 76
7 months 2 days ago
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Essence of Ground
6 months 3 days ago

To be or not to be is not the question where transcendence is concerned. The statement of being's other, of the otherwise than being, claims to state a difference over and beyond that which separates being from nothingness - the very difference of the beyond, the difference of transcendence.

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Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974) Chapter I, Section 1.
5 months 2 weeks ago

The average mind is slow in grasping a truth, but when the most thoroughly organized, centralized institution, maintained at an excessive national expense, has proven a complete social failure, the dullest must begin to question its right to exist. The time is past when we can be content with our social fabric merely because it is "ordained by divine right," or by the majesty of the law.

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5 months 5 days ago

The "interface" of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism - a formula for blitz and metamorphosis.

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(p. 161)
6 months 3 days ago

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The work of charity, of the love of God, is to endeavor to to liberate God from brute matter, to endeavor to give consciousness to everything, to spiritualize or universalize everything; it is to dream that the very rocks may find a voice and work in accordance with the spirit of this dream; it is to dream that everything that exists may become conscious, that the Word may become life.

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7 months 1 week ago

The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.

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1839
7 months 1 week ago

Despotic government supports itself by abject civilization, in which debasement of the human mind, and wretchedness in the mass of the people, are the chief criterions. Such governments consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise of intellectual faculty is not his privilege; that he has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them; and they politically depend more upon breaking the spirit of the people by poverty, than they fear enraging it by desperation.

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Means by Which the Fund Is to Be Created
5 months 2 weeks ago

Since the war began, miles of paper and oceans of ink have been used to prove the barbarity, the cruelty, the oppression of Prussian militarism. Conservatives and radicals alike are giving their support to the Allies for no other reason than to help crush that militarism, in the presence of which, they say, there can be no peace or progress in Europe. But though America grows fat on the manufacture of munitions and war loans to the Allies to help crush Prussians the same cry is now being raised in America which, if carried into national action, would build up an American militarism far more terrible than German or Prussian militarism could ever be, and that because nowhere in the world has capitalism become so brazen in its greed and nowhere is the state so ready to kneel at the feet of capital.

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4 months 1 day ago

Sociology is the science which has the most methods and the least results.

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Part I. Ch. 1 : The Selection of Facts, p. 19
6 months 2 weeks ago

Reason not with him, that will deny the principal truths!

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6 months 3 days ago

Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

If the awareness of our limitations begins to limit or to dim our value consciousness as well-as happens, for instance, in old age with regard to the values of youth-then we have already started the movement of devaluation which will end with the defamation of the world and all its values. Only a timely act of resignation can deliver us from this tendency toward self-delusion.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 59
1 month 3 weeks ago

"Not only can logos be seen in absolutely all animals, but in many of them it has the groundwork for being perfected."
- Porphyry

See biography for Porphyry:
https://civilsimian.com/Porphyry

Read Porphyry's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/103/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Our institutions and conditions rest upon deep-seated ideas. To change those conditions and at the same time leave the underlying ideas and values intact means only a superficial transformation, one that cannot be permanent or bring real betterment. It is a change of form only, not of substance, as so tragically proven by Russia.

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6 months 4 days ago

Sleep is for the inhabitants of Planets only. In another time, Man will sleep and wake continually at once. The greater part of our Body, of our Humanity itself, yet sleeps a deep sleep.

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7 months 1 week ago

Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debaucher of sentiment?

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p. 236
7 months 3 weeks ago

Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you.

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1:28:29 English Latin Latin: Sed cum omnibus prodesse non possis, his potissimum consulendum est, qui pro locorum et temporum vel quarumlibet rerum opportunitatibus constrictius tibi quasi quadam sorte iunguntur.
7 months 6 days ago

Many conservative writers have contended that the tendency to equality in modern social movements is the expression of envy. In this way they seek to discredit this trend, attributing it to collectively harmful impulses.

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Chapter IX, Section 82, p. 538
6 months 1 week ago

My poor opinion is, that the closest connexion between Great Britain and Ireland, is essential to the well being, I had almost said, to the very being, of the two Kingdoms. ... I think indeed that Great Britain would be ruined by the separation of Ireland; but, as there are degrees even in ruin, it would fall the most heavily on Ireland. By such a separation Ireland would be the most completely undone Country in the world; the most wretched, the most distracted and, in the end, the most desolate part of the habitable Globe.

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Letter to an unknown correspondent (February 1797), quoted in R. B. McDowell (ed.)
7 months 1 week ago

Since the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastical, high-flown or exaggerated notion. It is a complement to the unwritten code of the civil and international law, necessary for the public rights of mankind in general and thus for the realization of perpetual peace.

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Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, 1795
6 months 1 week ago

As for me, I am deeply a democrat; this is why I am in no way a socialist. Democracy and socialism cannot go together. You can't have it both ways.

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Notes for a Speech on Socialism (1848).
3 months 3 weeks ago

Why should I not regard this as desirable-not because the fire, burns me, but because it does not overcome me?

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7 months 1 week ago

A great deal of capital, which appears to-day in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children.

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Vol. I, Ch. 31, pg. 829.
3 months 2 weeks ago

All men and women have passions, natural desires and noble ambitions, and also a conscience; they have sex, hunger, fear, anger, and are subject to sickness, pain, suffering and death. Culture consists in bringing about the expression of these passions and desires in harmony.

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p. 20
7 months 2 weeks ago

Christ ought to be preached with this goal in mind - that we might be moved to faith in him so that he is not just a distant historical figure but actually Christ for you and me.

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p. 69
6 months 3 weeks ago

Verily we know nothing. Truth is buried deep.

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(Another translation: "Of truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well." Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers R.D. Hicks, Ed.)
7 months 2 weeks ago

I suppose the body to be nothing but a statue or machine made of earth, which God forms with the explicit intention of making it as much as possible like us.

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Descartes, René (1662). Le Homme (The Treatise on Man), XI:119, CSM I:99 in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Descartes and the Pineal Gland - 2.1 "The Treatise of Man".
1 month 1 week ago

I think only weirdos are driven by immortality these days.....

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6 months 4 days ago

Fate and temperament are the names of a concept.

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As quoted in Demian (1972) by Hermann Hesse, trans. W.J. Strachan
6 months 1 week ago

What is Europe really but a sterile trunk which owes everything to oriental grafts?

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Letter of 18 December 1806 to Windischmann, quoted by Rene Gerard, L'Orient et la pensée romantique allemande, Paris 1963,, p. 213. quoted in Poliakov, L. (1974).
4 months 2 days ago

The Left's identity politics poses a threat to free speech and to the kind of rational discourse needed to sustain a democracy... The focus on lived experience by identity groups prioritizes the emotional world of the inner self over the rational examination of issues in the outside world and privileges sincerely held opinions over a process of reasoned deliberation that may force one to abandon prior opinions.

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Against Identity Politics (14 August 2018), Foreign Affairs
5 months 2 days ago

Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment.

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Pt. I, ch. II.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Press on, therefore, as you have begun; perhaps you will be led to perfection, or to a point which you alone understand is still short of perfection.

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6 months 3 days ago

Here and there it happened in my practice that a patient grew beyond himself because of unknown potentialities, and this became an experience of prime importance to me. I had learned in the meanwhile that the greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They must be so because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.

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The Secret of the Golden Flower, ibid.

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