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4 months 1 week ago

For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

It is said that God is always on the side of the big battalions.

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Letter to François-Louis-Henri Leriche (6 February 1770) Note: In his Notebooks (c.1735-c.1750)
4 months 1 week ago

I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope.

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2 months 4 days ago

Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific development as a process of accretion.

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5 months 1 week ago

A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense.

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p. 44e
3 months 4 weeks ago

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

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Ch. 1: "The Origins of Modern Science", p. 6
5 months 2 weeks ago

Those who have been inspired to action by the doctrine of the class war will have acquired the habit of hatred, and will instinctively seek new enemies when the old ones have been vanquished. But in actual fact the psychology of the working man in any of the Western democracies is totally unlike that which is assumed in the Communist Manifesto. He does not by any means feel that he has nothing to lose but his chains, nor indeed is this true. The chains which bind Asia and Africa in subjection to Europe are partly riveted by him. He is himself part of a great system of tyranny and exploitation. Universal freedom would remove, not only his own chains, which are comparatively light, but the far heavier chains which he has helped to fasten upon the subject races of the world.

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Ch. VI: International Relations
5 months 3 weeks ago

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.

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Book I, Ch. 20
5 months 2 weeks ago

All the better; they do not force me to do anything that I would not have done of my own accord if I did not dread scandal. But since they want it that way, I enter gladly on the path that is opened to me, with the consolation that my departure will be more innocent than was the exodus of the early Hebrews from Egypt.

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Statement after his excommunication from Jewish society, attributed by Lucas, in The Oldest Biography of Spinoza (1970) by A. Wolf; also in Spinoza: A Life (1999) by Steven Nadler
5 months 2 weeks ago

We used to think that Hitler was wicked when he wanted to kill all the Jews, but what Kennedy and Macmillan and others both in the East and in the West pursue policies which will probably lead to killing not only all the Jews but all the rest of us too. They are much more wicked than Hitler and this idea of weapons of mass extermination is utterly and absolutely horrible and it is a thing which no man with one spark of humanity can tolerate and I will not pretend to obey a government which is organising the massacre of the whole of mankind. I will do anything I can to oppose such Governments in any non-violent way that seems likely to be fruitful, and I should exhort all of you to feel the same way. We cannot obey these murderers. They are wicked and abominable. They are the wickedest people that ever lived in the history of man and it is our duty to do what we can.

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On Civil Disobedience, April 15th, 1961
3 months 3 weeks ago

Behind man lies the abyss, nothingness; the Outsider knows this; it is his business to sink claws of iron into life to grasp it tighter than the indifferent bourgeois, to build, to Will, in spite of the abyss.

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Chapter Seven, The Great Synthesis…
2 months 3 weeks ago

As Gandhi taught, freedom can be reclaimed only by refusing to cooperate with unjust, immoral laws. The fight for truth-employing the principles of civil disobedience, nonviolence, and noncooperation-is not just our right as free citizens of free societies. It is our duty as citizens of the earth.

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(p184)
2 months 6 days ago

He who outrages benevolence is called a ruffian: he who outrages righteousness is called a villain. I have heard of the cutting off of the villain Chow, but I have not heard of the putting of a ruler to death.

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1B:8, In relation to righteousness and the overthrow of the tyrannous King Zhou of Shang, as translated by Sir Robert Kennaway Douglas, China (1904), p. 8
5 months 4 weeks ago

Men are eager to tread underfoot what they have once too much feared.

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Book V, line 1140 (tr. Rouse)
5 months 2 weeks ago

Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.

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The Civil War in France : "The Third Address", May 1871
5 months 2 weeks ago

In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.

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Vol. III, Ch. L, Illusions Created by Competition, p. 866.
6 months 2 days ago

Natural inclinations are present in things from God, who moves all things. So it is impossible for the natural inclinations of a species to be toward evil in itself. But there is in all perfect animals a natural inclination toward carnal union. Therefore it is impossible for carnal union to be evil in itself.

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III, 126, 3
4 months 6 days ago

Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.

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12:48
4 months 1 week ago

Every state, like every theology, assumes man to be fundamentally bad and wicked.

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As quoted in Michael Bakunin (1937), E.H. Carr, p. 453
1 month 4 weeks ago

I love men too, not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no 'commandment of love'.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 258
3 months 3 weeks ago

Logos is powerless without the force of eros.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Jews are angry and brutish people, vile and vulgar men, slaves worthy of the yoke [Talmudism] which you bear... Go, take back your books and remove yourselves from me. [ The Talmud ] taught the Jews to steal the goods of Christians, to regard them as savage beasts, to push them over the precipice... to kill them with impunity and to utter every morning the most horrible imprecations against them.

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See The Jews: A History, Second Edition, by John Efron, Steven Weitzman and Matthias Lehmann
4 months 1 week ago

Originally, ethics has no existence apart from religion, which holds it in solution.

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Ch. 1, The Confusion of Ethical Thought
5 months 2 weeks ago

Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.

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Considerations by the Way
5 months 2 weeks ago

Probably in time physiologists will be able to make nerves connecting the bodies of different people; this will have the advantage that we shall be able to feel another man's tooth aching.

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Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), p. 493
5 months 1 week ago

Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.

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Between the Shaman of the Tungus, the European prelate who rules church and state, the Voguls, and the Puritans, on the one hand, and the man who listens to his own command of duty, on the other, the difference is not that the former make themselves slaves, while the latter is free, but that the former have their lord outside themselves, while the latter carries his lord in himself, yet at the same time is his own slave.

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4 months 1 week ago

One disgust, then another - to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.

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1 month 1 week ago

Art thy not content that thou hast done something conformable to thy nature, and dost thou seek to be paid for it? Just as if the eye demanded recompense for seeing, or the feet for walking. For as these members are formed for a particular purpose... so also is man formed by nature to acts of benevolence.

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IX, 42
1 month 2 weeks ago

Who holds a sword is tempted, who has youth must play,he who does not fear death on earth does not fear God.

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Odysseus, Book VIII, line 560
6 months 1 week ago

Without the interplay of human against human, the chief interest in life is gone; most of the intellectual values are gone; most of the reason for living is gone.

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6 months 3 days ago

War is the father and king of all, and has produced some as gods and some as men, and has made some slaves and some free.

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4 months 1 week ago

It is impossible for any man, when the most favourable circumstances concur, to acquire sufficient knowledge and strength of mind to discharge the duties of a king, entrusted with uncontrolled power; how then must they be violated when his very elevation is an insuperable bar to the attainment of either wisdom or virtue; when all the feelings of a man are stifled by flattery, and reflection shut out by pleasure! Surely it is madness to make the fate of thousands depend on the caprice of a weak fellow creature, whose very station sinks him NECESSARILY below the meanest of his subjects! But one power should not be thrown down to exalt another--for all power intoxicates weak man; and its abuse proves, that the more equality there is established among men, the more virtue and happiness will reign in society.

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Ch. 1
4 months 6 days ago

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

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A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
3 months 3 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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Write as if thou wert alone in the universe and hadst nothing to fear from the jealousies and prejudices of the people. Otherwise thou wilt miss thy purpose.

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Preface, Oeuvres philosophiques de Monsieur de La Mettrie (1764) as quoted by Paul Carus, The Mechanistic Principle and the Non-mechanical (1913) p. 102.
3 months 1 week ago

The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity.

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(p. 135)
5 months 2 weeks ago

Solvency is maintained by means of the national debt, on the principle, "If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?"

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Ability
4 months 1 week ago

The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity...

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6 months 1 week ago

I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys.

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5 months 1 week ago

It often happens that reforms merely have the effect of transferring the undesirable tendencies of individuals from one channel to another channel. An old outlet for some particular wickedness is closed; but a new outlet is opened. The wickedness is not abolished; it is merely provided with a different set of opportunities for self-expression.

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Ch. 3, p. 20 [2012 reprint]
3 months 4 weeks ago

No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of all rationality.

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Ch. 11: "God", p. 250
3 months 3 weeks ago

The terrible struggle of the thinking man and woman against political, social and moral conventions owes its origin to the family, where the child is ever compelled to battle against the internal and external use of force. The categorical imperatives: You shall! you must! this is right! that is wrong! this is true! that is false! shower like a violent rain upon the unsophisticated head of the young being and impress upon its sensibilities that it has to bow before the long established and hard notions of thoughts and emotions.

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3 months 1 week ago

There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism.

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Chapter 9 "Puncturing Punctuationism" (p. 250)
5 months 1 week ago

It is the good children, Madame, who make the most terrible revolutionaries. They say nothing, they do not hide under the table, they eat only one sweet at a time, but later on, they make Society pay dearly for it!

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Jessica, Act 3, sc. 1
5 months 1 week ago

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

It seems that thought itself has a power for which it has never been given credit.

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p. 16
5 months 3 weeks ago

There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage.

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