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2 months 4 weeks ago

Respectable scientists like de Broglie himself accept wave mechanics because it confers coherence and unity upon the experimental findings of contemporary science, and in spite of the astonishing changes it implies in connection with ideas of causality, time, and space, but it is because of these changes that it wins favor with the public. The great popular success of Einstein was the same thing. The public drinks in and swallows eagerly everything that tends to dispossess the intelligence in favor of some technique; it can hardly wait to abdicate from intelligence and reason and from everything that makes man responsible for his destiny.

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"Wave Mechanics," p. 75
4 months 1 week ago

The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.

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5 months 1 week ago

It is surely better to be wronged than to do wrong.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

The ethic of Reverence for Life is the ethic of Love widened into universality.

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Epilogue, p. 235
2 months 2 weeks ago

We will never know if an advertisement or opinion poll has had a real influence on individual or collective wills, but we will never know either what would have happened if there had been no opinion poll or advertisement.

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2 weeks 6 days ago

Suppose we try to locate the cause of disorder, we shall find it lies in the want of mutual love.

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Book 4; Universal Love I
3 weeks 6 days ago

There stood Mucius, despising the enemy and despising the fire, and watched his hand as it dripped blood over the fire on his enemy's altar, until Porsenna, envying the fame of the hero whose punishment he was advocating, ordered the fire to be removed against the will of the victim.

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1 week 3 days ago

Those who are most to be considered, those for whose help the struggle must be made, if labor is to be enfranchised, and social justice won, are those least able to help or struggle for themselves, those who have no advantage of property or skill or intelligence, - the men and women who are at the very bottom of the social scale. In securing the equal rights of these we shall secure the equal rights of all. Hence it is, as Mazzini said, that it is around the standard of duty rather than around the standard of self-interest that men must rally to win the rights of man. And herein may we see the deep philosophy of Him who bade men love their neighbors as themselves. In that spirit, and in no other, is the power to solve social problems and carry civilization onward.

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Ch. 21 : Conclusion
3 weeks 5 days ago

Let every man be occupied, and occupied in the highest employment of which his nature is capable, and die with the consciousness that he has done his best.

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Vol. I, ch. 6, "Of Occupation", p. 178
4 months 1 week ago

All the time that he can spare from the adornment of his person, he devotes to the neglect of his duties.

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Of Sir Richard Jebb, Some Cambridge Dons of the Nineties, 1956
3 months 1 week ago

Of all that makes us suffer, nothing - so much as disappointment - gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

Running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain; trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought.

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4 months 1 week ago

If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.

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Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
1 month 1 week ago

But there has also been the rise of populist movements within existing liberal democracies, and particularly within the United States and Britain, which were... the leaders of the neoliberal revolution... in the 1980s...

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20:01
1 month 1 week ago

Culture is a much better predictor of populist sentiment than economics. ...The average Trump voter in 2016 had a higher per capita income than the average Hillary Clinton voter, and if you look at the people in the January 6th riot, the vast majority... were comfortable middle class people with good jobs... There is a core... white working class base to Trumpism, but... a lot of the people that are aligned with that movement are there for cultural reasons. They really don't like the kind of identity politics that's being... put forward by the progressive left... A lot of Hispanic voters, for example, don't like socialism, and they don't like the fact that the Democrats are using the word socialism as if it's a perfectly normal set of economic choices.

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51:36:00
4 months 1 week ago

Consider MacArthur and his Republican supporters. So limited is his intelligence and his imagination that he is never puzzled for one moment. All we have to do is to go back to the days of the Opium War. After we have killed a sufficient number of millions of Chinese, the survivors among them will perceive our moral superiority and hail MacArthur as a saviour. But let us not be one-sided. Stalin, I should say, is equally simple- minded and equally out of date. He, too, believes that if his armies could occupy Britain and reduce us all to the economic level of Soviet peasants and the political level of convicts, we should hail him as a great deliverer and bless the day when we were freed from the shackles of democracy. One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

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Part I: Man and Nature, Ch. 1: Current Perplexities, pp. 4-5
4 months 2 days ago

Thou shouldst not become presumptuous through life; for death comes upon thee at last, and the perishable part falls to the ground.

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3 months 4 days ago

Why did we obey? The question hardly occurred to us. We had formed the habit of deferring to our parents and teachers. All the same we knew very well that it was because they were our parents, because they were our teachers. Therefore, in our eyes, their authority came less from themselves than from their status in relation to us.

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Chapter I: Moral Obligation
4 months 1 week ago

The first thing to realize, if you wish to become a philosopher, is that most people go through life with a whole world of beliefs that have no sort of rational justification, and that one man's world of beliefs is apt to be incompatible with another man's, so that they cannot both be right. People's opinions are mainly designed to make them feel comfortable; truth, for most people is a secondary consideration.

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"How to Become a Philosopher" (1942), in The Art of Philosophizing, and Other Essays (New York: Philosophical Library, 1968), p. 2
4 months 3 weeks ago

There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried.

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Aphorism 19
3 months 1 week ago

I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.

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4 months 6 days ago

Of course, the aim of a constitutional democracy is to safeguard the rights of the minority and avoid the tyranny of the majority. Yet the concrete practice of the US legal system from 1883 to 1964 promoted a tyranny of the white majority much more than a safeguarding of the rights of black Americans.

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(p. 102-3)
2 months 3 weeks ago

To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.

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K 42
4 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)
1 month 6 days ago

The principal aim of mathematical education is to develop certain faculties of the mind, and among these intuition is not the least precious. It is through it that the mathematical world remains in touch with the real world, and even if pure mathematics could do without it, we should still have to have recourse to it to fill up the gulf that separates the symbol from reality.

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Part II. Ch. 2 : Mathematical Definitions and Education, p. 128
2 months 5 days ago

To teach virtue we must educate the emotions, and this means learning "what to feel" in the various circumstances that prompt them.

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"Knowledge and Feeling" (p. 37)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Power tends to reduce openness... Power tries to solidify and stabilize its position by eradicating spaces open to play, or incalculable spaces.

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4 months 1 week ago

An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: "There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important." This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.

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"The Importance of Individuals"
2 months 1 week ago

The percept takes priority of the concept.

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Letter to Edward T. Hall, 1971, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 397
1 week 1 day ago

And truly... if men could be persuaded to mind more the advancement of natural philosophy than that of their own reputations, it were not, methinks, very uneasy to make them sensible, that one of the considerablest services, that they could do mankind, were to set themselves diligently and industriously to make experiments and collect observations, without being over-forward to establish principles and axioms, believing it uneasy to erect such theories, as are capable to explicate all the phænomena of nature, before they have been able to take notice of the tenth part of those phænomena, that are to be explicated.

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3 months 1 week ago

It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All dynamic action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects, - whether they react equally upon each other, or one is agent and the other patient, entirely or partially, - or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs. But by "semiosis" I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs.

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"Pragmatism" (1907) in The Essential Peirce : Selected Philosophical Writings (1998) edited by the Peirce Edition Project, Vol. 2, p. 411, Indiana University Press.
4 months 1 week ago

If a man own land, the land owns him.

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Wealth
4 months 1 week ago

Friendship, I have said, is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself..."

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3 months 1 week ago

"Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?" - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

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4 months 1 week ago

The difference principle, for example, requires that the higher expectations of the more advantaged contribute to the prospects of the least advantaged.

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Chapter II, Section 16, pg. 95
3 months 1 week ago

Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.

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3 weeks 5 days ago

I do not mean to be disrespectful, but the attempt of the Lords to stop the progress of reform reminds me very forcibly of the great storm at Sidmouth, and of the conduct of the excellent Mrs Partington on that occasion. In the winter of 1824 there set in a great flood upon that town - the tide rose to an incredible height - the waves rushed in upon the houses, and everything was threatened with destruction. In the midst of this sublime and terrible storm, Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach, was seen at the door of her house with mop and pattens, trundling her mop, squeezing out the sea-water, and vigorously pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was roused; Mrs. Partington's spirit was up. But I need not tell you that the contest was unequal.

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The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs. Partington. Speech at Taunton
4 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing is ever gotten out of nothing by divine power.

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Book I, line 150 (tr. Munro)
4 months 2 weeks ago

The institution of religion exists only to keep mankind in order, and to make men merit the goodness of God by their virtue. Everything in a religion which does not tend towards this goal must be considered foreign or dangerous.

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"The Ecclesiastical Ministry"
4 months 2 weeks ago

Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap'd shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances.

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Part 4, Section 7
3 months 3 weeks ago

A transition, therefore, is not undeservedly made from sense to consideration, and from this to the nobler energies of intellect. Hence, as the certain knowledge of numbers received its origin among the Phœnicians, on account of merchandise and commerce, so geometry was found out among the Egyptians from the distribution of land. When Thales, therefore, first went into Egypt, he transferred this knowledge from thence into Greece: and he invented many things himself, and communicated to his successors the principles of many. Some of which were, indeed, more universal, but others extended to sensibles.

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Chap. IV.
2 weeks 6 days ago

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

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As quoted in Values of the Wise : Humanity's Highest Aspirations (2004) by Jason Merchey, p. 63
2 months 4 weeks ago

Objectification is above all exteriorization, the alienation of spirit from itself.

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p. 63
4 months 1 week ago

There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness, revelry, high life.

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Our Relation to Others, § 24
3 months 1 week ago

Love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other. p. 111, first American edition

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1970

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