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7 months 2 weeks ago

Karsky: I met your father last week. Are you still interested in hearing how he is doing?

Hugo: No. 

Karsky: It is very probable that you will be responsible for his death.

Hugo: It is virtually certain that he is responsible for my life. We are even.

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Act 4, sc. 4
7 months 3 weeks ago

All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.

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B 730; Variant translation: All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
7 months 3 weeks ago

In public, as well as in private expences, great wealth may, perhaps, frequently be admitted as an apology for great folly.

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Chapter V, p. 563.
6 months 1 week ago

And seeing every man is presumed to do all things in order to his own benefit, no man is a fit Arbitrator in his own cause.

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The First Part, Chapter 15, p. 78
5 months 2 weeks ago

To preserve permanent good health, the state of mind must be taken into consideration.

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3rd Part
5 months 4 days ago

Being a planetary citizen does not need space travel. It means being conscious that we are part of the universe and of the earth. The most fundamental law is to recognise that we share the planet with other beings, and that we have a duty to care for our common home.

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5 months 3 days ago

There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas.

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North to the Orient (1935) Ch. 1
5 months 2 weeks ago

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man's sex relation to the motorcar.

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(p.46)
7 months 2 weeks ago

By 'arguing...' I mean... criticizing... inviting... criticism; and trying to learn from it.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem.

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5 months ago

The serpent, the king, the tiger, the stinging wasp, the small child, the dog owned by other people, and the fool: these seven ought not to be awakened from sleep.

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8 months ago

Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature. Beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.

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Aphorism 1
3 months 2 weeks ago

Why should we divide the sensitive principle which thinks in man? ...For a thing that is divided can no longer without absurdity be regarded as indivisible.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read-ultimately you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it. But it is impossible to enjoy affluence with the felicity it is capable of being enjoyed, while so much misery is mingled in the scene.

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

In one way or another, all my books have been devoted to expounding and exploring the almost limitless power of the Darwinian principle-power unleashed whenever and wherever there is enough time for the consequences of primordial self-replication to unfold. Preface

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6 months 6 days ago

We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them. Man cannot discover them by his own powers, and if he sets out to seek for them he will find in their place counterfeits of which he will be unable to discern falsity.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophy is the science of truth.

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6 months 2 days ago

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

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Ch. 2
3 months 2 weeks ago

The thought of every group is seen as arising out of its life conditions. Thus, it becomes the task of the sociological history of thought to anlayse without regard for party biases all the factors in the actually existing social situation which may influence thought. This sociologically oriented history of ideas is destined to provide modern men with a revised view of the whole historical process.

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7 months 1 week ago

Those who have a well-ordered character lead also a well-ordered life.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

We do not have to love one another to be obligated to build a world in which all lives are sustainable. The right to persist can only be understood as a social right, as the subjective instance of a social and global obligation we bear toward one another.

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p. 64
4 months 2 days ago

There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to "get culture" or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost.

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p. 90
6 months 2 weeks ago

That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts...

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5 months 3 days ago

So dazzling was the spread of constellations that it had the impact of a vision, of some hidden insight. I drove home saying to myself: The dead, too, are like this, blazing within us - invisibly.

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As quoted in No More Words : A Journal of My Mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh (2001) by Reeve Lindbergh, p. 41
6 months 2 weeks ago

That the uneducated and the ill-educated should think the hypothesis that all races of beings, man inclusive, may in process of time have been evolved from the simplest monad, a ludicrous one, is not to be wondered at. But for the physiologist, who knows that every individual being is so evolved-who knows, further, that in their earliest condition the germs of all plants and animals whatever are so similar, "that there is no appreciable distinction amongst them, which would enable it to be determined whether a particular molecule is the germ of a Conferva or of an Oak, of a Zoophyte or of a Man";-for him to make a difficulty of the matter is inexcusable.

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Spencer here references William Benjamin Carpenter, Principles of Comparative Physiology see p. 473
8 months 3 weeks ago

From the Christian point of view it stands firm that the truly Christian venturing requires probability.

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6 months 1 week ago

Shall we not perhaps be told, on the other hand, that if the sinner suffers an eternal punishment, it is because he does not cease to sin? - for the damned sin without ceasing. This however is no solution to the problem, which derives all its absurdity from the fact that punishment has been conceived as vindictiveness or vengeance, not as correction, and has been conceived after the fashion of barbarous peoples. And in the same way hell has been conceived as a sort of police institution, necessary in order to put fear into the world. And the worst of it is that it no longer intimidates, and therefore will have to be shut up.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The different pieces of evidence did not constitute so many neutral elements, until such time as they could be gathered together into a single body of evidence that would bring the final certainty of guilt. Each piece of evidence aroused a particular degree of abomination. Guilt did not begin when all the evidence was gathered together; piece by piece, it was constituted by each of the elements that made it possible to recognize a guilty person. Thus a semi-proof did not leave the suspect innocent until such time as it was completed; it made him semi-guilty; slight evidence of a serious crime marked someone as slightly criminal. In short, penal demonstration did not obey a dualistic system: true or false; but a principle of continuous gradation; a degree reached in the demonstration already formed a degree of guilt and consequently involved a degree of punishment.

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Chapter One, The body of the condemned, pp.23
7 months 3 weeks ago

What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.

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Chapter II, p. 490.
6 months 5 days 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
4 months 2 weeks ago

It is hard to see how the discarding of liberal values is going to lead to anything in the long term other than increasing social conflict and ultimately a return to violence as a means of resolving differences.

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6 months 1 week ago

Adam came from great power and great wealth, but he was not worthy of you. For had he been worthy, he would not have tasted death.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

What we principally thought of, was to alter people's opinions; to make them believe according to evidence, and know what was their real interest, which when they once knew, they would, we thought, by the instrument of opinion, enforce a regard to it upon one another. While fully recognizing the superior excellence of unselfish benevolence and love of justice, we did not expect the regeneration of mankind from any direct action on those sentiments, but from the effect of educated intellect, enlightening the selfish feelings. Although this last is prodigiously important as a means of improvement in the hands of those who are themselves impelled by nobler principles of action, I do not believe that any one of the survivors of the Benthamites or Utilitarians of that day, now relies mainly upon it for the general amendment of human conduct.

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(pp. 111-112)
6 months 1 week ago

That science is incapable of solving in its own way those fundamental questions is no sufficient reason for slighting them.

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p. 14
6 months 2 weeks ago

But, braggart demons, we postpone our end: how could we renounce the display of our freedom, the show of our pride?

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7 months 4 weeks ago

I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.

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Book III, Ch. 13. Of Experience
6 months 1 week ago

In the ancient notion of love, on the other hand, there is an element of anxiety. The noble fears the descent to the less noble, is afraid of being infected and pulled down. The "sage" of antiquity does not have the same firmness, the same inner certainty of himself and his own value, as the genius and hero of Christian love.

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L. Coser, trans. (1961), p. 92
7 months 2 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
4 months 5 days ago

You are doing an excellent thing, one which will be wholesome for you, if, as you write me, you are persisting in your effort to attain sound understanding; it is foolish to pray for this when you can acquire it from yourself. We do not need to uplift our hands towards heaven, or to beg the keeper of a temple to let us approach his idol's ear, as if in this way our prayers were more likely to be heard. A god is near you, with you, and in you. This is what I mean, Lucilius: there sits a holy spirit within us, one who marks our good and bad deeds, and is our a guardian.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Titles are an important part of a story and I take considerable care in choosing one. In fact, I cannot start a story until I have chosen a title.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

He that dies in extreme old age will be reduced to the same state with him that is cut down untimely.

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IX, 33
6 months 6 days ago

Being, in whose name Heidegger's philosophy increasingly concentrates itself, is for him-as a pure self-presentation to passive consciousness-just as immediate, just as independent of the mediations of the subject as the facts and the sensory data are for the positivists. In both philosophical movements thinking becomes a necessary evil and is broadly discredited. Thinking loses its element of independence. The autonomy of reason vanishes: the part of reason that exceeds the subordinate reflection upon and adjustment to pre-given data. With it, however, goes the conception of freedom and, potentially, the self-determination of human society.

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p. 9
4 months 5 days ago

No one is able to rule unless he is also able to be ruled.

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De Ira (On Anger): Book 2, cap. 15, line 4

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