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2 months 2 weeks ago

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

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Loser Wins (Les Séquestrés d'Altona: A Play in Five Acts)
1 month 2 weeks ago

All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.

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What worries me about religion is that it teaches people to be satisfied with not understanding the world they live in.

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Heart Of The Matter: God Under The Microscope | BBC
2 months 2 weeks ago

Do not allow your dreams of a beautiful world to lure you away from the claims of men who suffer here and now. Our fellow men have a claim to our help; no generation must be sacrificed for the sake of future generations, for the sake of an ideal of happiness that may never be realised.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation.

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No. 1
2 months 2 weeks ago

'Our kingdom go' is the necessary and unavoidable corollary of 'Thy kingdom come.' For the more there is of self, the less there is of God.

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Chapter VI - Mortification, Non-Attachment, Right Livelihood
2 months 2 weeks ago

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

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Ch. 1: Introductory
2 months 2 weeks ago

Life is a business that does not cover the costs.

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Vol II "On the Vanity and Suffering of Life"
2 weeks 2 days ago

Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.

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"The Care and Feeding of Communication Innovation", Dinner Address to Conference on 8 mm Sound Film and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, 8 November 1961
1 month 2 days ago

Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.

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Ch. 5
1 month 2 weeks ago

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The heavens are as deep as our aspirations are high.

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Quoted in Maturin M. Ballou (ed.) Pearls of Thought (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1881) p. 21
1 month 2 weeks ago

Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what's the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?

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3 weeks 5 days ago

Computers were within my sphere of attention, but only computers used as number crunchers. In spite of the "giant brain" metaphor, there is little suggestion in this 1950 talk that the most important application of computers might lie in imitating intelligence symbolically, not numerically.

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p. 199.
1 month 1 week ago

The color is of the object and the object in all its qualities is expressed through color. For it is objects that glows- gems and sunlight; and it is objects that are splendid- crowns, robes, sunlight. Except as they express objects, through being the significant color-quality of materials of ordinary experience, colors effect only transient excitations.

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p. 212
2 months 2 weeks ago

And striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form.

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May-Day
2 weeks 1 day ago

When two do the same thing, it is not the same thing after all.

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Maxim 338
3 weeks 5 days ago

Even though the model referred to satisfies the theory, etc., it is 'unintended'; and we recognize that it is unintended from the description through which it is given (as in the intuitionist case). Models are not lost noumenal waifs looking for someone to name them; they are constructions within our theory itself. and they have names from birth.

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Models and Reality
1 month 2 weeks ago

Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be . . . optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?

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2 months 2 weeks ago

It is for the sake of order that I seduced Clytemnestra, for the sake of order that I killed my king. I wanted for order to rule and that it rule through me. I have lived without desire, without love, without hope: I made order. Oh! terrible and divine passion!

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Aegistheus, Act 2
1 month 2 weeks ago

...what the freedom is that I love, and that to which I think all men intitled. It is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish Liberty. As if every Man was to regulate the whole of his Conduct by his own will. The Liberty I mean is social freedom. It is that state of things in which Liberty is secured by the equality of Restraint; A Constitution of things in which the liberty of no one Man, and no body of Men and no Number of men, can find Means to trespass on the liberty of any Person, or any description of Persons in the Society. This kind of liberty is indeed but another name for Justice, as ascertained by wise Laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions.

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Letter to Charles-Jean-François Depont (November 1789), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), p. 42
1 month 1 week ago

The RIGHT OF NATURE, which Writers commonly call Jus Naturale, is the Liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life; and consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own Judgement, and Reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.

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The First Part, Chapter 14, p. 64
1 month 2 weeks ago

Word - that invisible dagger.

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1 month 1 week ago

The passion of laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmities of others, or with our own formerly...

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The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic Pt. I Human Nature (1640) Ch. 9
1 month 5 days ago

Christians are beginning to lose the spirit of intolerance which animated them: experience has shown the error of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and of the persecution of those Christians in France whose belief differed a little from that of the king. They have realized that zeal for the advancement of religion is different from a due attachment to it; and that in order to love it and fulfill its behests, it is not necessary to hate and persecute those who are opposed to it.

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No. 60. (Usbek writing to Ibben)
2 weeks 2 days ago

Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete.

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(p. 99)
1 month 1 week ago

Abolish competition and replace it with association.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

As much in vain, perhaps, will they search ancient history for examples of the modern Slave-Trade. Too many nations enslaved the prisoners they took in war. But to go to nations with whom there is no war, who have no way provoked, without farther design of conquest, purely to catch inoffensive people, like wild beasts, for slaves, is an hight of outrage against Humanity and Justice, that seems left by Heathen nations to be practised by pretended Christians. How shameful are all attempts to colour and excuse it!

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1 month 3 weeks ago

In America, conscription is unknown; men are enlisted for payment. Compulsory recruitment is so alien to the ideas and so foreign to the customs of the people of the United States that I doubt whether they would ever dare to introduce it into their law.

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Chapter XIII.
1 month 1 week ago

In solitude it is possible to love mankind; in the world, for one who knows the world, there can be nothing but secret or open war.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malformation nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.

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2 weeks 2 days ago

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

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2 months 1 week ago

My cares and my inquiries are for decency and truth, and in this I am wholly occupied.

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Book I, epistle i, line 11
1 month 2 weeks ago

This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.

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1 month 1 week ago

Our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the commonweal, and the whole appeals to be the very embodiment of Reason.

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p. xli
1 week 4 days ago

Tocqueville predicted that in democratic countries the public would demand larger and larger doses of excitement and increasingly stronger stimulants from its writers. He probably did not expect that public to dramatize itself so extensively, to make the world scene everybody's theatre, or, in the developed countries, to take to alcohol and drugs in order to get relief from the horrors of ceaseless intensity, the torment of thrills and distractions. A great many writers have done little more than meet the mounting demand for thrills. I think that this demand has, in the language of marketing, peaked.

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The Distracted Public
1 month 1 week ago

If you have money, don't lend it at interest. Rather, give it to someone from whom you won't get it back.

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I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.

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As quoted in Richard Dawkins causes outcry after likening the burka to a bin liner (10 August 2010), The Telegraph.
1 month 2 weeks ago

The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.

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1 month 5 days ago

The truth is sum, ergo cogito - I am, therefore I think, although not everything that is thinks. Is not consciousness of thinking above all consciousness of being? Is pure thought possible, without consciousness of self, without personality? Can there exist pure knowledge without feeling, without that species of materiality which feelings lends to it? Do we not perhaps feel thought, and do we not feel ourselves in the act of knowing and willing? Could not the man in the stove [Descartes] have said: "I feel, therefore I am"? or "I will, therefore I am"? And to feel oneself, is it not perhaps to feel oneself imperishable?

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1 month 2 days ago

In classroom settings I have often listened to groups of students tell me that racism really no longer shapes the contours of our lives, that there is no such thing as racial difference, that "we are all just people." Then a few minutes later I give them an exercise. I ask if they were about to die and could choose to come back as a white male, a white female, a black female, or a black male, which identity would they choose. Each time I do this exercise, most individuals, irrespective of gender or race invariably choose whiteness, and most often male whiteness. Black females are the least chosen. When I ask students to explain their choice they proceed to do a sophisticated analysis of privilege based on race (with perspectives that take gender and class into consideration).

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Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope
1 month 2 days ago

Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and - so far as may be - efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests.

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Preface, pp. ix-x
3 weeks 4 days ago

Much early alchemy seems to have been adventure. You heated and mixed and burnt and pounded and to see what would happen. An adventure might suggest an hypothesis that can subsequently be tested, but adventure is prior to theory.

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Chapter 4, Evidence, p. 36.
1 month 2 weeks ago

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Why has the Revolution of France been stained with crimes, which the Revolution of the United States of America was not? Men are physically the same in all countries; it is education that makes them different. Accustom a people to believe that priests or any other class of men can forgive sins, and you will have sins in abundance.

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Worship and Church Bells, 1797

To be content with life - or to live merrily, rather - all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance; the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow.

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K 29
1 month 2 weeks ago

The world must be romanticized. In this way the originary meaning may be found again.

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As quoted in The Experience of the Foreign : Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany (1992) by Antoine Berman Variant translation: Romanticize the world.
3 months 2 weeks ago
Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries, a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world.
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2 months 2 weeks ago

Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.

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Chapter 3 (pp. 19-20)

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