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5 months 6 days ago

Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.

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Chapter 11 (p. 106)
3 months 3 weeks ago

There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

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Prologue.
4 months 2 weeks ago

A good Soul hath neither too great joy, nor too great sorrow: for it rejoiceth in goodness; and it sorroweth in wickedness. By the means whereof, when it beholdeth all things, and seeth the good and bad so mingled together, it can neither rejoice greatly; nor be grieved with over much sorrow.

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4 months 3 days ago

When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight).

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Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.338.30
5 months 6 days ago

Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.

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"The Will to Believe" p. 205
2 months 1 week ago

Is not the minimal state, the framework for utopia, an inspiring vision? The minimal state treats us as inviolate individuals, who may not be used in certain ways by others as means or tools or instruments or resources; it treats us as persons having individual right with the dignity this constitutes. Treating us with respect by respecting our rights, it allows us, individually or with whom we please, to choose our life and to realize our ends and our conception of ourselves, insofar as we can, aided by the voluntary cooperation of other individuals possessing the same dignity. How dare any state or group of individuals do more. Or less.

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Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; Utopia and the Minimal State, p. 333
1 month 3 weeks ago

The capitalist system of production is an economic democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote. The consumers are the sovereign people. The capitalists, the entrepreneurs, and the farmers are the people's mandatories. If they do not obey, if they fail to produce, at the lowest possible cost, what the consumers are asking for, they lose their office. Their task is service to the consumer. Profit and loss are the instruments by means of which the consumers keep a tight rein on all business activities.

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Chapter I: Profit Management, § 1: The Operation of The Market Mechanism
1 month 3 days ago

Search men's governing principles, and consider the wise, what they shun and what they cleave to.

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IV, 38
5 months 3 weeks ago

When the apostle James was talking about faith and works against those who thought their faith was enough, and didn't want to have good works, he said, You believe God is one; you do well; the demons also believe, and tremble.

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(Jas 2:19) 183:13:2
3 weeks 5 days ago

The moral decline we are compelled to witness and the suffering it engenders are so oppressive that one cannot ignore them even for a moment. No matter how deeply one immerses oneself in work, a haunting feeling of inescapable tragedy persists. Still, there are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments, one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable: life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only being.

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Letter to Queen Mother Elisabeth of Belgium (9 January 1939), asking for her help in getting an elderly cousin of his out of Germany and into Belgium. Quoted in Einstein on Peace edited by Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden (1960), p. 282
1 month 3 weeks ago

Withdraw into yourself, as far as you can. Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve. The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach.

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Line 8.
5 months 1 week ago

Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.

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A 120
4 months 1 week ago

We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.

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"Conversation Between D'Alembert and Diderot"
6 months 4 days ago

Hypocrisy is a universal phenomenon. It ends with death, but not before.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The art of persuasion consists as much in that of pleasing as in that of convincing, so much more are men governed by caprice than by reason!

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our other faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or to break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. A strange thing, indeed, the existence in man of this mental activity which substitutes one thing for another - from an urge not so much to get at the first as to get rid of the second.

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"Taboo and Metaphor"
3 months 2 weeks ago

Today's fashion magazines may carry an article about the dangers of anorexia while bombarding its readers with images of emaciated young bodies representing the height of beauty and desirability.

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As quoted in Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2014), p.34
3 months 4 weeks ago

The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.

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8:20 (KJV)
3 months 3 weeks ago

You do not attain to knowledge by remaining on the shore and watching the foaming waves, you must make the venture and cast yourself in, you must swim, alert and with all your force, even if a moment comes when you think you are losing consciousness; in this way, and in no other, do you reach anthropological insight.

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p. 148
4 months 3 weeks ago

I regard Peter as one of the great moralists, because I suspect that more than anyone he has helped to change the attitudes of very many people to the sufferings of animals. Peter is a utilitarian in normative ethics, and a humane attitude to animals is a natural corollary of utilitarianism. Utilitarian concern for animals goes back to Bentham, who, presumably alluding to the Kantians, said that the question was not whether animals can reason, but whether they can suffer.

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J. J. C. Smart, Reply to Singer, in Philip Pettit, Richard Sylvan and Jean Norman (eds.), Metaphysics and Morality: Essays in Honour of J. J. C. Smart, Oxford, 1987, p. 192
5 months 1 week ago

It seems to me now that mathematics is capable of an artistic excellence as great as that of any music, perhaps greater; not because the pleasure it gives (although very pure) is comparable, either in intensity or in the number of people who feel it, to that of music, but because it gives in absolute perfection that combination, characteristic of great art, of godlike freedom, with the sense of inevitable destiny; because, in fact, it constructs an ideal world where everything is perfect and yet true.

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Letter to Gilbert Murray, April 3, 1902
1 month 2 weeks ago

Physicists and philosophers stick stubbornly to the principles of a mechanistic interpretation of the world after physics has, in its factual structure, already outgrown the latter. They have the same excuse as the inhabitant of the mainland who for the first time travels on the open sea: he will desperately try to stay in sight of the vanishing coast line, as long as there is no other coast in sight, towards which he steers.

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"Wissenschaft als symbolische Konstruktion des Menschen" Eranos-Jahrbuch (1948) GA IV, as quoted/translated by Erhard Scholz, "Philosophy as a Cultural Resource and Medium of Reflection for Hermann Weyl"
3 months 3 weeks ago

There are only two cases in which war is just: first, in order to resist the aggression of an enemy, and second, in order to help an ally who has been attacked.

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No. 95. (Usbek writing to Rhedi)
4 months 1 week ago

One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.

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"Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaeum (1798)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #54
5 months 5 days ago

Abjection is a methodological conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian epoche: it establishes the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without, in the manner of divine understanding.

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p. 141
5 months 2 weeks ago

It is necessary to show that there is nothing so little known [as the above rules], nothing more difficult to practice, or nothing more useful and universal.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

In summary, then, the set theoretic 'needs' of physics are surprisingly similar to the set theoretic needs of pure logic. Both disciplines need some set theory to function at all. Both disciplines can 'live' - but live badly - on the meager diet of only predicative sets. Both can live extremely happily on the rich diet of impredicative sets. Insofar, then, as the indispensability of quantification over sets is any argument for their existence - and we will discuss why it is in the next section - we may say that it is a strong argument for the existence of at least predicative sets, and a pretty strong, but not as strong, argument for the existence of impredicative sets.

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Philosophy of Logic
3 months 2 weeks ago

There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.

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F 81
1 month 2 weeks ago

Inasmuch as it is my wish only to compose a hymn of thanksgiving in honour of the god, I have deemed it quite sufficient to discourse to the best of my ability concerning his nature. I do not think I have wasted words to no purpose: the maxim, "Sacrifice to the immortal gods according to thy means," I accept as applying not merely to burnt-offerings, but also to our praises addressed unto the gods. I pray for the third time, in return for this my good intention, the Sun lord of the universe to be propitious to me, and to bestow on me a virtuous life, a more perfect understanding, and a superhuman intellect, and a very easy release from the trammels of life at the time appointed: and after that release, an ascension up to himself, and an abiding place with him, if possible, for all time to come; or if that be too great a recompense for my past life, many and long-continued revolutions around his presence!

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The point is that philosophy is seen to have come full circle, and to have exhausted itself.

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Chapter 5, Nietzsche's Styles, p. 95
3 months 1 week ago

Nonviolence has now to be understood less as a moral position adopted by individuals in relation to a field of possible action than as a social and political practice undertaken in concert, culminating in a form of resistance to systemic forms of destruction coupled with a commitment to world building that honors global interdependency of the kind that embodies ideals of economic, social, and political freedom and equality.

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p. 20
1 month 3 weeks ago

Why then do you occupy me with the words rather than with the works of wisdom? Make me braver, make me calmer, make me the equal of Fortune, make me her superior.

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3 months 6 days ago

People usually think that progress consists in the increase of knowledge, in the improvement of life, but that isn't so. Progress consists only in the greater clarification of answers to the basic questions of life. The truth is always accessible to a man. It can't be otherwise, because a man's soul is a divine spark, the truth itself. It's only a matter of removing from this divine spark (the truth) everything that obscures it. Progress consists, not in the increase of truth, but in freeing it from its wrappings. The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn't gold.

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Tolstoy's Diaries (1985) edited and translated by R. F. Christian. London: Athlone Press, Vol 2, p. 512
4 months 3 weeks ago

He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.

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Book I, epistle ii, lines 41-42
4 months 2 days ago

In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

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5 months 6 days ago

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

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Education
4 months 1 week ago

...no legislator, at any period of the world, has willingly placed the seat of active power in the hands of the multitude: Because there it admits of no control, no regulation; no steady direction whatsoever. The people are the natural control on authority; but to exercise and to control together is contradictory and impossible.

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p. 441
5 months 1 week ago

In looking over the catalogue of human actions (says a partizan of this principle) in order to determine which of them are to be marked with the seal of disapprobation, you need but to take counsel of your own feelings: whatever you find in yourself a propensity to condemn, is wrong for that very reason. For the same reason it is also meet for punishment: in what proportion it is adverse to utility, or whether it be adverse to utility at all, is a matter that makes no difference. In that same proportion also is it meet for punishment: if you hate much, punish much: if you hate little, punish little: punish as you hate. If you hate not at all, punish not at all: the fine feelings of the soul are not to be overborne and tyrannized by the harsh and rugged dictates of political utility.

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Ch. 2: Of Principles Adverse to That of Utility
1 month 2 weeks ago

Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print", it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

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Variant translation, as quoted in TIME
5 months 1 week ago

Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.

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Letter to W. Bracke, 5 May 1875
5 months 1 week ago

Though the managing ourselves well in this part of our behavior has the name good-breeding, as if a peculiar effect of education; yet... young children should not be much perplexed about it... Teach them humility, and to be good-natur'd, if you can, and this sort of manners will not be wanting; civility being in truth nothing but a care not to shew any slighting or contempt of any one in conversation.

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Sec. 145
2 months 1 day ago

Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.

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5 months 1 day ago

The only knowledge that can truly orient action is knowledge that frees itself from mere human interests and is based in Ideas-in other words knowledge that has taken a theoretical attitude.

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p. 301
1 month 6 days ago

The idea of living beings as subject to 'disease' includes a recognition of a Final Cause in organization; for disease is a state in which the vital forces do not attain their 'proper ends'.

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4 months 2 days ago

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

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5 months 1 week ago

Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.

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5 months 1 week ago

Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution. This plebeian, who worked his way up from stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional importance-an average person of good will, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organisation, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world!

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Every living creature is happy when he fulfills his destiny, that is, when he realizes himself, when he is being that which in truth he is. For this reason, Schlegel, inverting the relationship between pleasure and destiny, said, "We have a genius for what we like." Genius, man's superlative gift for doing something, always carries a look of supreme pleasure.

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pp. 16-17

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