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5 months 3 weeks ago

The constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.

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Preface to 1961 edition
4 months 3 weeks ago

In the state of nature, Profit is the measure of Right.

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De Cive
5 months 3 weeks ago

The need of black conservatives to gain the respect of their white peers deeply shapes certain elements of their conservatism. In this regard, they simply want what most people want, to be judged by the quality of their skills, not by the color of their skin. But the black conservatives overlook the fact that affirmative action policies were political responses to the pervasive refusal of most white Americans to judge black Americans on that basis.

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(p52)
6 months 2 weeks ago

Let the superior man never fail reverentially to order his own conduct, and let him be respectful to others and observant of propriety: then all within the four seas, all men are brothers. What has the superior man to do with being distressed because he has no brothers?

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around.

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II, 7
4 months 2 weeks ago

We have seen that language is something precious because it allows us to express ourselves; but it is fatal when one allows oneself to be completely led astray by it, because then it prevents one from expressing oneself. Language is the source of the prejudices and haste which Descartes thought of as the sources of error.

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p. 76
5 months 3 weeks ago

Discipline 'makes' individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise. It is not a triumphant power...it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy.

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6 months ago

Things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. ...It pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again.

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Ch. 16
4 months 4 weeks ago

Liberty is so great a magician, endowed with so marvelous a power of productivity, that under the inspiration of this spirit alone, North America was able within less than a century to equal, and even surpass, the civilization of Europe.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.

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Speech at the Descartes Conference in Paris (1937) Quoted in The Forbes Scrapbook of Thoughts on the Business of Life (1950), p. 442, as "Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought."
4 months 3 weeks ago

I am enraptured by Hindu philosophy, whose essential endeavor is to surmount the self; and everything I do, everything I think is only myself and the selfs humiliations.

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Let those flatter who fear; it is not an American art. To give praise which is not due might be well from the venal, but would ill beseem those who are asserting the rights of human nature. They know, and will therefore say, that kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people.

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Let the eye of vigilance never be closed.

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Letter to Spencer Roane, 9 March 1821
2 months 3 weeks ago

We need a good alternative to Trumpism. There is a majority in favor of that, but... the other party is really not providing that alternative in a very clear way.

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46:46:00
3 months 3 weeks ago

It takes intellectual courage to kick yourself out of your emotional incredulity and persuade yourself that there is no other rational choice.

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The Intellectual and Moral Courage of Atheism
2 months 3 weeks ago

Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.

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As quoted in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (1957) by Stillman Drake, p. 92
2 months 2 weeks ago

Consider that we shouldn't call our brother a fool, since we don't know ourselves what we are.

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7 months 1 day ago

Remember that time slurs over everything, let all deeds fade, blurs all writings and kills all memories. Except are only those which dig into the hearts of men by love.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes - desertion after desertion.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

When I first read The Wretched of the Earth I heard a new history spoken-the voice of the decolonised subject raised in resistance. That voice . . . articulated a yearning for freedom that was so intense and a quality of emotional hunger that was so fierce that it was overwhelming. Dying into the text, I abandoned and forgot myself. The lust for freedom in those pages awakened and resurrected me.

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Gender and Decolonization in the Congo (2010) ISBN 978-0-230-11040-3
5 months 5 days ago

Be charitable before Wealth makes thee covetous.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

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Quoted in The Observer September 13, 1987.
5 months ago

Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs none.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The will to the "true world" in the sense of Plato and Christianity ... is in truth a no-saying to our present world, precisely the one in which art is at home.

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p. 74
6 months 4 weeks ago

I get a certain pleasure in knowing that I live not merely in a city but in Manhattan, the center of New York City, a region so unique in many ways that I honestly believe that Earth is divided into halves: Manhattan and non-Manhattan.

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It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.

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2 weeks 1 day ago

"To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature."
- Voltaire

See biography for Voltaire:
https://civilsimian.com/Voltaire

Read Voltaire's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/66/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Worte sind Taten. Words are deeds.

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p. 50e
2 months 2 weeks ago

In fact, when a nation has become free, it is extremely difficult to persuade them that their freedom is only to be preserved by perpetual and minute jealousy. They do not observe that there is a constant, perhaps an unconscious, effort on the part of their governors to diminish, and so ultimately to destroy, that freedom.

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Characters of Mr. Fox (review of Characters of the late Charles James Fox, edited by Philopatris Varvicensis, 2 vols), in The Edinburgh Review
4 months 3 weeks ago

What has been shown by Machiavelli, who is often (like Nietzsche) congratulated for tearing off hypocritical masks, brutally revealing the truth, and so on, is not that men profess one thing and do another (although no doubt he shows this too) but that when they assume that the two ideals are compatible, or perhaps are even one and the same ideal, and do not allow this assumption to be questioned, they are guilty of bad faith (as the existentialists call it, or of "false consciousness," to use a Marxist formula) which their actual behavior exhibits. Machiavelli calls the bluff not just of official morality-the hypocrisies of ordinary life-but of one of the foundations of the central Western philosophical tradition, the belief in the ultimate compatibility of all genuine values. His own withers are unwrung. He has made his choice. He seems wholly unworried by, indeed scarcely aware of, parting company with traditional Western morality.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The problem... Democracy is founded by a politeia, a constitution, where the demos, the people, exercise power, and... everyone is equal in front of the law. Such a constitution... is condemned to give equal place to all forms of parrhesia, even the worst. Because parrhesia is given even to the worst citizens, the overwhelming influence of bad, immoral, or ignorant speakers may lead... into tyranny, or... otherwise endanger the city. Hence parrhesia may be dangerous for democracy itself.

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6 months 1 day ago

I never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both of individual and of social improvement. But I thought that it had consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultivation with it. The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties, now seemed to me of primary importance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed.

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(pp. 143-144)
2 months ago

Attractions take place between bodies, affinities between the particles of a body. The former may be compared to the alliances of states, the latter to the ties of family.

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4 months 1 week ago

Once we can see how this question of freedom of the will has been vitiated by post-romantic philosophy, with its inbuilt tendency to laziness and boredom, we can also see how it came about that existentialism found itself in a hole of its own digging, and how the philosophical developments since then have amounted to walking in circles round that hole.

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p. 214
7 months 1 day ago

An authorship that began with Either/Or and advanced step by step seeks here its decisive place of rest, at the foot of the altar, where the author, personally most aware of his own imperfections and guilt, certainly does not call himself a truth-witness but only a singular kind of poet and thinker who, without authority, has had nothing new to bring but “has wanted once again to read through, if possible in a more inward way, the original text handed down from the fathers.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The inversion of external compulsion into the compulsion of conscience ... produces the machine-like assiduity and pliable allegiance required by the new rationality.

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p. 34.
2 months 3 weeks ago

The "imagination that shudders at the Hell of Dante," is not that the same faculty, weaker in degree, as Dante's own? No one but Shakspeare can embody, out of Saxo Grammaticus, the story of Hamlet as Shakspeare did: but every one models some kind of story out of it; every one embodies it better or worse. We need not spend time in defining. Where there is no specific difference, as between round and square, all definition must be more or less arbitrary. A man that has so much more of the poetic element developed in him as to have become noticeable, will be called Poet by his neighbors.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The non-evaluative general total conception of ideology is to be found primarily in those historical investigations, where, provisionally and for the sake of the simplification of the problem, no judgments are pronounced as to the correctness of the ideas to be treated. This approach confines itself to discovering the relations between certain mental structures and the life-situations in which they exist. We must constantly ask ourselves how it comes about that a given type of social situation gives rise to a given interpretation. Thus the ideological element in human thought, viewed at this level, is always bound up with the existing life-situation of the thinker. According to this view human thought arises, and operates, not in a social vacuum but in a definite social milieu.

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Treasury notes of small as well as high denomination, bottomed on a tax which would redeem them in ten years, would place at our disposal the whole circulating medium of the United States... The public... ought never more to permit its being filched from them by private speculators and disorganizers of the circulation.

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Letter to William H. Crawford, 1815. ME 14:242
4 months 2 days ago

Preserving seeks to secure the life that already is; safeguarding secures and reproduces the conditions of becoming, of living, of futurity, where the content of that life, that living, can be neither prescribed nor predicted, and where self-determination emerges as a potential.

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p. 94
4 months 3 weeks ago

Government was intended to suppress injustice, but its effect has been to embody and perpetuate it.

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"Summary of Principles" 2.7

Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer. One orients one's attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands.

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Miscellaneous writings of G.W.F. Hegel, translation by Jon Bartley Stewart, Northwestern University Press, 2002, page 247.
4 months ago

I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders.

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My Religion (1884)

When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

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D 66

There can be no safer deposit on earth than the Treasury of the United States.

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Letter to Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette (1825) ME 19:281
4 months 1 week ago

What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.

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Ch. 1

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