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5 months 3 weeks ago

God!' said the Ghost, glancing around the landscape. 'God what?' asked the Spirit. 'What do you mean, "God what"?' asked the Ghost. 'In our grammar God is a noun' said the Spirit.

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Ch. 9
2 months 4 days ago

As long as I can remember, I have suffered because of the great misery I saw in the world. I never really knew the artless, youthful joy of living, and I believe that many children feel this way, even when outwardly they seem to be wholly happy and without a single care.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

My Father is glorified in this, that you keep bearing much fruit and prove yourselves my disciples. Just as the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; remain in my love. If you observe my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have observed the commandments of the Father and remain in his love. “These things I have spoken to you, so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be made full. This is my commandment, that you love one another just as I have loved you. No one has love greater than this, that someone should surrender his life in behalf of his friends. You are my friends if you do what I am commanding you. I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master does. But I have called you friends, because I have made known to you all the things I have heard from my Father.

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15:8-15, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures
6 months 1 day ago

Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life. Is it possible you can imagine never to arrive at the place towards which you are continually going? and yet there is no journey but hath its end. And, if company will make it more pleasant or more easy to you, does not all the world go the self-same way?

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Admit it, it is your youth that you regret, more even than your crime; it is my youth you hate, even more than my innocence.

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Electra to her mother Clytemnestra, Act 1
1 month 3 weeks ago

Religious beauty is superior to ideal beauty, since it is the ideal of the ideal.

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p. 287
5 months 3 weeks ago

I have been writing & speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty five or thirty years, & have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. I delight in driving them from me. What could I do, if they came to me? - they would interrupt and encumber me. This is my boast that I have no school & no follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did not create independence.

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April 1859
2 months 1 week ago

Who, then, can be more ignorant of nature than he who classes this cruel and hurtful vice as belonging to her best and most polished work?

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6 months 3 weeks ago

To the rest of the Galaxy, if they are aware of us at all, Earth is but a pebble in the sky. To us it is home, and all the home we know.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.

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Letter to Clare Westcott, November 26 1975. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 514
5 months 2 weeks ago

This book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge; a genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications and rules, from which it extends its effects and by which it extends its effects and by which it masks its exorbitant singularity.

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Chapter One, The Spectacle of the Scaffold, pp.42
5 months 2 weeks ago

One common strategy on which we should all be able to agree is to take steps to reduce the risk of human extinction when those steps are also highly effective in benefiting existing sentient beings. For example, eliminating or decreasing the consumption of animal products will benefit animals, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and lessen the chances of a pandemic resulting from a virus evolving among the animals crowded into today's factory farms, which are an ideal breeding ground for viruses. That therefore looks like a high-priority strategy.

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Chapter 15: Preventing Human Extinction (p. 177)
5 months 3 weeks ago

It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search.

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Ch. 12: Free Thought and Official Propaganda, books.google.com, archive.org
6 months 1 day ago

By the law is the knowledge of sin [Rom 3:20], so the word of grace comes only to those who are distressed by a sense of sin and tempted to despair.

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p. 168
1 month 3 weeks ago

It is hardly in human nature that a man should quite accurately gauge the limits of his own insight; but it is the duty of those who profit by his work to consider carefully where he may have been carried beyond it. If we must needs embalm his possible errors along with his solid achievements, and use his authority as an excuse for believing what he cannot have known, we make of his goodness an occasion to sin.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Terms must be constructed and appropriated so as to be fitted to enunciate simply and clearly true general propositions.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Murder begins where self-defense ends.

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Act I.
5 months 3 weeks ago

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

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2 months 1 week ago

If one doesn't know his mistakes, he won't want to correct them.

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Line 9
4 months 2 weeks ago

Since space is continuous, it follows that there must be an immediate community of feeling between parts of mind infinitesimally close together. Without this, I believe it would have been impossible for any co-ordination to be established in the action of the nerve-matter of one brain.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others. Coming from a logician, this surprise surprised me.

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Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), Part III, chapter II, "Solipsism", p. 196
9 months 2 weeks ago

I think we all understand why this image is absurd. Whether modern Christians want to believe it or not, Jesus was liberal minded. He taught a message of universality and aversion to greed. That being said, it's really hard to know exactly what has been added into the Christian bible as a matter of political council and what has truly been said by the characters.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

For the most trifling reasons, and sometimes for no conceivable reason at all, his majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary tendency. The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But previous to the infranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa. Yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty's negative: thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few British corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature deeply wounded by this infamous practice.

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A Summary View of the Rights of British America
4 months 3 weeks ago

These principles it is necessary strictly to attend to, because they will serve much to explain the whole course both of government and real property, wherever the German nations obtained a settlement; the whole of their government depending for the most part upon two principles in our nature,-ambition, that makes one man desirous, at any hazard or expense, of taking the lead amongst others; and admiration, which makes others equally desirous of following him from the mere pleasure of admiration, and a sort of secondary ambition, one of the most universal passions among men. These two principles, strong both of them in our nature, create a voluntary inequality and dependence.

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An Essay towards an Abridgment of English History (1757-c. 1763), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI (1856), p. 282
4 months 2 weeks ago

Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.

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The First Part, Chapter 13, p. 62
4 months 2 weeks ago

Sociology does not 'negate' philosophy, in the sense of taking over the hidden content of philosophy and carrying it into social theory and practice, but sets itself up as a realm apart from philosophy, with a province and truth of its own. Comte is rightly held to be the inaugurator of this separation between philosophy and sociology.

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P. 375
4 months 2 weeks ago

No man is bound by the words themselves, either to kill himselfe, or any other man.

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The Second Part, Chapter 21, p. 112
5 months 3 weeks ago

As the analysis of a substantial composite terminates only in a part which is not a whole, that is, in a simple part, so synthesis terminates only in a whole which is not a part, that is, the world.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none. But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in favour of diligence; only there is something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say.

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An Apology for Idlers.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.

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26:26-29 (KJV)
3 months 1 week ago

It will hardly be disputed, I suppose, that the department of literature in which the Eastern writers stand highest is poetry. And I certainly never met with any orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy for superstition.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but over-laid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions or phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own: and thus the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them. Mine, however, was not an education of cram. My father never permitted anything which I learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory. He strove to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the teaching, but, if possible, precede it. Anything which could be found out by thinking I never was told, until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself.

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(p. 31)
4 months 2 weeks ago

Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling; only no imagination is mere.

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Vol. VI, par. 286
4 months 4 weeks ago

I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.

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Book Four, Chapter VII.
5 months 1 week ago

A prating barber asked Archelaus how he would be trimmed. He answered, "In silence."

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33 Archelaus
6 months 1 week ago

When we have intelligence resulting from sincerity, this condition is to be ascribed to nature; when we have sincerity resulting from intelligence, this condition is to be ascribed to instruction. But given the sincerity, and there shall be the intelligence; given the intelligence, and there shall be the sincerity.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.

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"Money", 1770
4 months 2 weeks ago

The sensate body possesses an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis The Visible and the Invisible, trans.

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A. Lingis (Evanston: 1968), p. 135
4 months 6 days ago

Phenomenology is not a philosophy; it is a philosophical method, a tool. It is like an adjustable spanner that can be used for dismantling a refrigerator or a car, or used for hammering in nails, or even for knocking somebody out.

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p. 92
2 months 1 week ago

Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long.

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Line 17.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Want keeps pace with dignity. Destitute of the lawful means of supporting his rank, his dignity presents a motive for malversation, and his power furnishes the means.

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The Rationale of Reward, 1811
5 months 3 weeks 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 weeks ago

Basically-I speak of life as it is and not of abstract philosophical constructs-life is only bearable because one does not go to the end; doing something is only possible when one has particular illusions and that holds also for friendships, for everything.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.

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4 months 1 week ago

Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind.

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Ch. 3: "The Century of Genius", p. 77

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