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8 months 4 days ago

Looking for God-or Heaven-by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play.

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"The Seeing Eye", in Christian Reflections (1967), p. 167
8 months ago

The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.

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5 months 2 days ago

Democracy is a meaningless word unless it signifies that differences of opinion have been expressed, represented, and even satisfied in the decision.

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Ch. IV: "The Line of Least Resistance", pp. 47-48
8 months 6 days ago

Democracy is the road to socialism.

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Attributed to Marx in recent years, including in Communism (2007) by Tom Lansford, p. 48
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is a double-edged makeshift to entrust an individual or a group of individuals with the authority to resort to violence. The enticement implied is too tempting for a human being. The men who are to protect the community against violent aggression easily turn into the most dangerous aggressors. They transgress their mandate. They misuse their power for the oppression of those whom they were expected to defend against oppression. The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.

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Chapter 5: On Some Popular Errors Concerning the Scope and Method of Economics, § 10 : The Concept of a Perfect System of Government
6 months 3 days ago

World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.

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(p.66)
4 months 2 weeks ago

Self-respect is the cornerstone of all virtue.

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As quoted in A Toolbox for Humanity : More Than 9000 Years of Thought (2004) by Lloyd Albert Johnson, p. 147
4 months 2 weeks ago

The words of malicious slander should not be allowed to enter the ear. A defensive voice should not be allowed to come out of the mouth. The want to gravely injure people should not be allowed to exist in the heart. If this is accomplished, though there be people who cynically expose others, they would be without people who would align with them.

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Book 1; Self-culfivation
8 months 6 days ago

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.

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p. 85
8 months ago

Absurdity destroys the and of the enumeration by making impossible the in where the things enumerated would be divided up.

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Preface
8 months 1 week ago

While it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.

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Religion and Science (1935), Ch. IX: Science of Ethics.
8 months 4 days ago

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

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Act 2, sc. 3
8 months 4 days ago

Thus, Beauty is neither an appearance nor a being, but a relationship: the transformation of being into appearance

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p. 408
9 months 1 week ago
The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence. For this pride contains within itself the most flattering estimation of the value of knowing. Deception is the most general effect of such pride, but even its most particular effects contain within themselves something of the same deceitful character.
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4 months 6 days ago

We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. As soon as we are born the return begins, at once the setting forth and the coming back; we die in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of life is death! But as soon as we are born we begin the struggle to create, to compose, to turn matter into life; we are born in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of ephemeral life is immortality! In the temporary living organism these two streams collide ... both opposing forces are holy. It is our duty, therefore, to grasp that vision which can embrace and harmonize these two enormous, timeless, and indestructible forces, and with this vision to modulate our thinking and our action.

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8 months 4 days ago

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

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5 months 1 day ago

You may take great comfort from the fact that suffering inwardly for the sake of truth proves abundantly that one loves it and marks one out as being of the elect.

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Saint Sulpice and the Hidden God.
8 months 1 week ago

That a joint stock company should be able to carry on successfully any branch of foreign trade, when private adventurers can come into any sort of open and fair competition with them, seems contrary to all experience.

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Chapter I, Part III, Article I, p. 810.
8 months 1 week ago

What I have given in the second book on the nature and properties of curved lines, and the method of examining them, is, it seems to me, as far beyond the treatment in the ordinary geometry, as the rhetoric of Cicero is beyond the a, b, c of children.

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Letter to Marin Mersenne (1637) as quoted by D. E. Smith & M. L. Latham Tr. The Geometry of René Descartes
4 months 3 weeks ago

Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.

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Attributed in Forbes Vol 38 Iss. 2 (1936) p. 18, and in Lifetime Speaker's Encyclopedia (1962) by Jacob Morton Braude, p. 275
4 months 2 weeks ago

Who is everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.

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Line 2.
7 months 2 days ago

I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.

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4 months 3 days ago

Men gather the clouds, and then they complain of the tempests that follow.

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Chapter III, p. 30
6 months 3 days ago

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.

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(p. 26)
8 months 4 days ago

It is wrong to think that belief in freedom always leads to victory; we must always be prepared for it to lead to defeat. If we choose freedom, then we must be prepared to perish along with it. Poland fought for freedom as no other country did. The Czech nation was prepared to fight for its freedom in 1938; it was not lack of courage that sealed its fate. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 - the work of young people with nothing to lose but their chains - triumphed and then ended in failure. ... Democracy and freedom do not guarantee the millennium. No, we do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things - and above all on ourselves.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

A golden bit does not make a better horse.

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8 months ago

Navigation brought man face to face with the uncertainty of destiny, where each is left to himself and every departure might always be the last. The madman on his crazy boat sets sail for the other world, and it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks. This enforced navigation is both rigorous division and absolute Passage, serving to underline in real and imaginary terms the liminal situation of the mad in medieval society. It was a highly symbolic role, made clear by the mental geography involved, where the madman was confined at the gates of the cities. His exclusion was his confinement, and if he had no prison other than the threshold itself he was still detained at this place of passage. In a highly symbolic position he is placed on the inside of the outside, or vice versa. A posture that is still his today, if we admit that what was once the visible fortress of social order is now the castle of our own consciousness.

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Part One: 1. Stultifera Navis
4 months 3 days ago

Whereas the particular conception of ideology designates only a part of the opponent's assertions as ideologies - and this only with reference to their content, the total conception calls into question the opponent's total Weltanschauung (including his conceptual apparatus), and attempts to understand these concepts as an outgrowth of the collective life of which he partakes.

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8 months 1 week ago

I have gathered a posy of other men's flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own.

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Ch. 12: Of Physiognomy
6 months 2 weeks ago

An absolute power would be one that never becomes apparent, never pointed to itself, one that rather blended completely into what goes without saying. Power shines in its own absence.

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6 months 3 days ago

Money alone sets all the world in motion.

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Maxim 656
7 months 1 week ago

Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners.

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Book Three, Chapter XIV.
7 months 1 week ago

It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor; as such differences become less, it grows feeble; and when they disappear, it will vanish too.

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Book Three, Chapter XVIII.
4 months 6 days ago

How can anyone see the only way the world can be saved and not be forced to weep?

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4 months 5 days ago

When alterations in technical terms become necessary, it is desirable that the new term should contain in its form some memorial of the old one.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Man is a born geometer. Even when he is expressing himself in curves, as he has done in the undulating roofs of Eastern Asia and in the flowing sculptures at Borobudur, his lines follow mathematical laws that are unknown to Nature; and he is frankly defying her when he works in rectangles. Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to light... The Buddhist stupa at Borobudur in Central Java is a lyric poem in stone, flowing round the crown of a hill to the musical accompaniment of a jagged mountain range on one side and a green expanse of rice fields on the other. Angkor is not orchestral; it is monumental. It is an epic poem which makes its effect, like the Odyssey and like Paradise Lost, by the grandeur of its structure as well as by the beauty of the details. Angkor is an epic in rectangular forms imposed upon the Cambodian jungle.

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27. Angkor
9 months 2 days ago

With the exception of professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be history of its successive regrets and impotences.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

We put down mad dogs; we kill the wild, untamed ox; we use the knife on sick sheep to stop their infecting the flock; we destroy abnormal offspring at birth; children, too, if they are born weak or deformed, we drown. Yet this is not the work of anger, but of reason - to separate the sound from the worthless.

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De Ira (On Anger): Book 1, cap. 15, line 2 Seneca: Moral and Political Essays (Cambridge UP, 1995) p. 32
8 months 1 week ago

The very port and gait of a swan, or turkey, or peacock show the high idea he has entertain'd of himself; and his contempt of all others. This is the more remarkable, that in the two last species of animals, the pride always attends the beauty, and is discover'd in the male only. The vanity and emulation of nightingales in singing have been commonly remark'd [...] All these are evident proofs, that pride and humility are not merely human passions, but extend themselves over the whole animal creation.

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Part 1, Section 12
7 months 2 days ago

The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.

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Bk. I, ch. 9.
6 months 4 weeks ago

The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to It.

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p. 57
7 months 2 days ago

If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!

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4 months 2 weeks ago

To the West, it seems hardly imaginable that the relationship between man and man (which is morality) could be maintained without reference to a Supreme Being, while to the Chinese it is equally amazing that men should not, or could not, behave toward one another as decent beings without thinking of their indirect relationship through a third party.

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p. 106
4 months 2 days ago

Let your occupations be few, says the sage, "if you would lead a tranquil life."

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IV, 24
6 months 3 weeks ago

Avoid melancholy with all your might. It hurts the service of God more than sin. Satan takes less pleasure in sin than in a man's melancholy over having sinned again and so feeling that he is a slave to sin. Thus the Evil One has caught the poor soul in the net of despair.

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Rabbi Jaacob Yitzchak, p. 7
9 months 2 days ago

Hungary conquered and in chains has done more for freedom and justice than any people for twenty years. But for this lesson to get through and convince those in the West who shut their eyes and ears, it was necessary, and it can be no comfort to us, for the people of Hungary to shed so much blood which is already drying in our memories. In Europe's isolation today, we have only one way of being true to Hungary, and that is never to betray, among ourselves and everywhere, what the Hungarian heroes died for, never to condone, among ourselves and everywhere, even indirectly, those who killed them. It would indeed be difficult for us to be worthy of such sacrifices.

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