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2 months 3 weeks ago

Every new discovery may be considered as a new species of manufacture, awakening moral industry and sagacity, and employing, as it were, new capital of mind.

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In The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal (June-October 1827) as quoted in Lee Johnson and Joseph Meany, Graphene
2 months 3 weeks ago

What are we, weak and blind human beings! And what is that flickering light we call Reason? When we have calculated all the probabilities, questioned history, satisfied every doubt and special interest, we may still embrace only a deceptive shadow rather than the truth. What decree has He pronounced on the king, on his dynasty, on his family, on France, and on Europe? Where and when will the troubles end, and by how many misfortunes must we purchase our tranquillity? Is it to build that He has overthrown, or are our hardships to last forever? Alas! A dark cloud hides the future and no eye can penetrate its shadows.

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Chapter VIII, p. 76
7 months ago

The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it.

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Section 4 : Sceptical Doubts Concerning The Operations of The Understanding
2 months 3 weeks ago

Eros? What other name may we give that impetus which becomes enchanted as soon as it casts its glance on matter and then longs to impress its features upon it? It confronts the body and longs to pass beyond it, to merge with the other erotic cry hidden in that body, to become one till both may vanish and become deathless by begetting sons. It approaches the soul and wishes to merge with it inseparably so that "you" and "I" may no longer exist; it blows on the mass of man - kind and wishes, by smashing the resistances of mind and body, to merge all breaths into one violent gale that may lift the earth! In moments of crisis this Erotic Love swoops down on men and joins them together by force - friends and foes, good and evil. It is a breath superior to all of them, independent of their desires and deeds. It is the spirit, the breathing of God on earth. It descends on men in whatever form it wishes - as dance, as eros, as hunger, as religion, as slaughter. It does not ask our permission.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

There is room in the world, no doubt, and even in old countries, for a great increase of population, supposing the arts of life to go on improving, and capital to increase. But even if innocuous, I confess I see very little reason for desiring it. The density of population necessary to enable mankind to obtain, in the greatest degree, all the advantages both of co-operation and of social intercourse, has, in all the most populous countries, been attained. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it..

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Book IV, Chapter VI, §3, p. 516
2 months 3 weeks ago

The Idea of Cause is expressed for purposes of science by these three Axioms:-'Every Event must have a Cause':-'Causes are measured by their Effects':-'Reaction is equal and opposite to Action'.

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7 months 1 week ago

Of the truths within our reach... the mind and the heart are as doors by which they are received into the soul, but... few enter by the mind, whilst they are brought in crowds by the rash caprices of the will, without the council of reason.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

"Their own strength has betrayed them. They have pulled down Deep Heaven on their heads."

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Ch. 13 : They Have Pulled Down Deep Heaven on Their Heads
7 months 1 week ago

Don't you know that a good and excellent person does nothing for the sake of appearances, but only for the sake of having acted right?

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Book III, ch. 24, 50.
6 months 3 weeks ago

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.

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5 months 1 week ago

Violence and freedom are the two endpoints on the scale of power.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The first character of a general idea so resulting is that it is living feeling. A continuum of this feeling, infinitesimal in duration, but still embracing innumerable parts, and also, though infinitesimal, entirely unlimited, is immediately present. And in its absence of boundedness a vague possibility of more than is present is directly felt.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men; nay, it is vain to expect that strength of natural affection which would make them good wives and mothers. Whilst they are absolutely dependent on their husbands they will be cunning, mean, and selfish.

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Ch. 9
5 months 3 weeks ago

All government - indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act - is founded on compromise and barter.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Expect nothing more from philosophy than a voice, language and grammar of the instinct for Godliness that lies at its origin, and, essentially, is philosophy itself.

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"On Philosophy: To Dorothea," in Theory as Practice (1997), p. 421
4 months 3 days ago

Cheating ageing by a low-calorie diet, uploading one's mind into a super-computer, migrating into outer space ... Longing for everlasting life, humans show that they remain the death-defined animal.

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Sweet Morality (p. 235)
2 months 3 weeks ago

One of our fan-coloring biographers, who paints small men as very great, inquired of me lately with real affection too, whether he might consider as authentic, the change of my religion much spoken of in some circles. Now this supposed that they knew what had been my religion before, taking for it the word of their priests, whom I certainly never made the confidants of my creed. My answer was "say nothing of my religion. It is known to my God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one."

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Letter to John Adams (11 January 1817), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12, pp. 48-49
5 months 1 week ago

The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.

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"Two dogmas of Empiricism", p. 26
3 months 2 weeks ago

To such a one, already filled with intellectual substance, and possessing what we may call the practical gold-bullion of human culture, it was an obvious improvement that he should be taught to speak it out of him on occasion; that he should carry a spiritual banknote producible on demand for what of "gold-bullion" he had, not so negotiable otherwise, stored in the cellars of his mind. A man, with wisdom, insight and heroic worth already acquired for him, naturally demanded of the schoolmaster this one new faculty, the faculty of uttering in fit words what he had. A valuable superaddition of faculty:-and yet we are to remember it was scarcely a new faculty; it was but the tangible sign of what other faculties the man had in the silent state.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?

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"Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus)" preface, Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poésie Nègre et Malgache
4 months 3 days ago

Terror is not now, if it ever was, something that comes to us from outside. It is a part of the society in which we live. Both liberals and neoconservatives believe terrorism can be dealt with by removing its causes. The truth is less reassuring. Al-Qaeda has mutated into a decentralised, often locally based type of apocalyptic terrorism and, in this new guise, seems to be acquiring a formidable momentum.

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"Look out for the enemy within," The Observer
6 months 3 weeks ago

In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination, about whose weird successes and eventual failures we know perhaps more than any generation before us. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.

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On Violence
6 months 3 weeks ago

Mathematics takes us still further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the world, but every possible world, must conform.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Socrates did not stop with a philosophical consideration of mankind; he addressed himself to each one individually, wrested everything from him, and sent him away empty-handed.

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The life of God - the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things - may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things.

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§ 19
5 months 1 week ago

Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.

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"Natural Kinds", in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (1969), p. 126
4 months 3 weeks ago

We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

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Preface to the first edition
3 months 2 weeks ago

I feel that these old Northmen wore looking into Nature with open eye and soul: most earnest, honest; childlike, and yet manlike; with a great-hearted simplicity and depth and freshness, in a true, loving, admiring, unfearing way.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

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Quotation and Originality
5 months 3 weeks ago

There is no problem in all mathematics that cannot be solved by direct counting. But with the present implements of mathematics many operations can be performed in a few minutes which without mathematical methods would take a lifetime.

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p. 197; On mathematics and counting.
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is sometimes expedient to forget who we are.

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Maxim 233
2 months 3 weeks ago

He who steadily observes the moral precepts in which all religions concur, will never be questioned at the gates of heaven as to the dogmas in which they all differ.

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Letter to William Canby
6 months 3 weeks ago

The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,-a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

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par. 5
7 months ago

By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will.

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§ 8.23
6 months 2 weeks ago

No one deserves to live who has not at least one good-man-and-true for a friend.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

I have come to believe that the motion of the Earth cannot be detected by any optical experiment.

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How I Created the Theory of Relativity, speech at Kyoto University, Japan, December 14, 1922, as cited in Physics Today, August, 1982.
6 months 3 weeks ago

The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the supreme being for man, hence the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which man is degraded, enslaved, neglected, contemptible being-conditions which can hardly be better described than in the exclamation of a Frenchman on the occasion of a proposed tax upon dogs: 'Wretched dogs! They want to treat you like men!'

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam & an Eve left in every country, & left free, it would be better than as it now is.

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Letter to William Short (January 3, 1793), quoted in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (1995), pp. 316-317
7 months 4 days ago

When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, "Repent," he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

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Thesis 1
5 months 3 weeks ago

For the first time in the revolutionary movement of 1848, for the first time since 1793, a nation surrounded by superior counter-revolutionary forces dares to counter the cowardly counter-revolutionary fury by revolutionary passion, the terreur blanche by the terreur rouge. For the first time after a long period we meet with a truly revolutionary figure, a man who in the name of his people dares to accept the challenge of a desperate struggle, who for his nation is Danton and Carnot in one person - Lajos Kossuth.

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The Magyar Struggle in Neue Rheinische Zeitung (13 January 1849).
7 months 2 weeks ago

The Superior Man has nothing to compete for. But if he must compete, he does it in an archery match, wherein he ascends to his position, bowing in deference. Descending, he drinks (or has [the winner] drink) the ritual cup. Note: Bowing is a courtesy for the host who invites him as well drinking a cup.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The idea of an all-powerful divine Being is present everywhere, unconsciously if not consciously, because it is an archetype. There is in the psyche some superior power, and if it is not consciously a god, it is the "belly" at least, in St. Paul's words. I therefore consider it wiser to acknowledge the idea of God consciously, for, if we do not, something else is made God, usually something quite inappropiate and stupid such as only an "enlightened" intellect could hatch forth.

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C. G. Jung. 2014. Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 7: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology. Princeton University Press. p. 71

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