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5 months 1 day ago

You're either excluding the right people or including the wrong people.

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ComfortDragon
3 months 2 weeks ago

Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such "transcending" analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory.

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p. xliii
3 months 3 weeks ago

The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up!

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Fragment No. 114
2 months 3 weeks ago

Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds.

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(p. 63)
1 month 5 days ago

A new theory by the author has been added, which draws the physical inferences consequent on the extension of the foundations of geometry beyond Reimann... and represents an attempt to derive from world-geometry not only gravitational but also electromagnetic phenomena. Even if this theory is still only in its infant stage, I feel convinced that it contains no less truth than Einstein's Theory of Gravitation-whether this amount of truth is unlimited or, what is more probable, is bounded by the Quantum Theory.

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From the Author's Preface to Third Edition
3 weeks 3 days ago

On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, & what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, & consequently may govern them as they please. But persons & property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished then in their natural course, with those who gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, & no longer. Every constitution then, & every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, & not of right. It may be said that the succeeding generation exercising in fact the power of repeal, this leaves them as free as if the constitution or law had been expressly limited to 19 years only.

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Letter to James Madison,
3 months 1 week ago

Open, honest, truth-telling individuals value privacy. We all need spaces where we can be alone with thoughts and feelings - where we can experience healthy psychological autonomy and can choose to share when we want to.

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All About Love: New Visions
3 months 2 weeks ago

Words ... are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in 'foreign commerce' on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves-this is a poet's life. To mount too high or descend too low is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together.

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Ch. 6
3 weeks 2 days ago

Whoever asserts a value, must bring its influence to bear. Whoever maintains that it has value regardless of the influence brought to bear by any individual human being who endorses it, is simply cheating.

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What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?

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F 123
4 months 3 weeks ago

"And yet, it was not, not now, she that really counted. Or if she counted (and, oh, gloriously she did) it was for another's sake. The earth and stars and sun, all that was or will be, existed for his sake. And he was coming. The most dreadful, the most beautiful, the only dread and beauty there is, was coming. The pillars on the far side of the pool flushed with his approach. I cast down my eyes."

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Orual

America, you have it better than our continent, the old one.

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Wendts Musen-Almanach
4 months 3 weeks ago

Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend; I am not thine.

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Good-bye, st. 1
4 months 3 weeks ago

The supreme enjoyment is in satisfaction with oneself ; it is in order to deserve this satisfaction that we are placed on earth and endowed with freedom.

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As quoted in Dreamer of Democracy by James Miller and Jim Miller, p. 194.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Every other art,-as poetry, music, painting,-may be practised without the process showing forth the rules according to which it is conducted ;-but in the self-cognizant art of the philosopher, no step can be taken without declaring the grounds upon which it proceeds.

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p. 14
3 months 1 week ago

Just as eunuchs will never know aesthetics as applied to the selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is reasoned or defined.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

My hearers, this discourse has not wandered out into the world to look for conflict, it has not tried to get the better of anybody, it has not even tried to uphold anybody, as though there was battle without. It has spoken to you; not by way of explaining anything to you, but trying to speak secretly with you about your relationship to that secret wisdom mentioned in our text. Oh that nothing may upset you in respect to this, “neither life nor death nor things present nor things to come nor any other creature” (Romans 8:38) –not this discourse, which, though it may have profited you nothing, yet has striven for what after all is the first and the last, to help you have what the Scripture calls “faith in yourself before God.

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3 months 6 days ago

People often say to me, You don't know what a wife and mother feels. No, I say, I don't and I'm very glad I don't. And they don't know what I feel. ... I am sick with indignation at what wives and mothers will do of the most egregious selfishness. And people call it all maternal or conjugal affection, and think it pretty to say so. No, no, let each person tell the truth from his own experience.

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Letter to Madame Mohl
2 months 2 weeks ago

French schoolchildren can be proud to become citizens of the country that gave the world the Declaration of the Rights of Man; need they be told that it was disregarded a few years after it inspired the revolution in Haiti, whose leader, Toussaint Louverture, was consigned to death in a French prison?

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4 months 2 weeks ago

It has no sense and cannot just unless it comes to terms with death. Mine as (well as) that of the other. Between life and death, then, this is indeed the place of a sententious injunction that always feigns to speak the just.

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Exordium
4 months 3 weeks ago

It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

Any question of philosophy ... which is so obscure and uncertain, that human reason can reach no fixed determination with regard to it; if it should be treated at all; seems to lead us naturally into the style of dialogue and conversation.

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Pamphilus to Hermippus, Prologue
5 months 1 week ago

A thing therefore never returns to nothing.

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Book I, line 248 (tr. Munro)
4 months 2 weeks ago

What is important is that sex was not only a question of sensation and pleasure, of law and interdiction, but also of the true and the false.

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Vol. I, p. 76
3 months 1 week ago

In conclusion, I wish to say that my attitude to the whole tragic question is not dictated by my Jewish antecedents. It is motivated by my abhorrence of injustice, and man's inhumanity to man. It is because of this that I have fought all my life for anarchism which alone will do away with the horrors of the capitalist régime and place all races and peoples, including the Jews, on a free and equal basis. Until then I consider it highly inconsistent for socialists and anarchists to discriminate in any shape or form against the Jews.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The simple-minded positivism that believes it has found a firm ground of certainty if it only excludes all mental phenomena from consideration and holds fast to observable facts.

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p. 39
3 months 3 weeks ago

By means of the new education we want to mould the Germans into a corporate body, which shall be stimulated and animated in all its individual members by the same interest.

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Introduction p. 15
3 weeks 4 days ago

We must understand well that we do not proceed from a unity of God to the same unity of God again. We do not proceed from one chaos to another chaos, neither from one light to another light, nor from one darkness to another darkness. What would be the value of our life then? What would be the value of all life? But we set out from an almighty chaos, from a thick abyss of light and darkness tangled. And we struggle - plants, animals, men, ideas - in this momentary passage of individual life, to put in order the Chaos within us, to cleanse the abyss, to work upon as much darkness as we can within our bodies and to transmute it into light.

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It is crazy to want what is impossible. And impossible for the wicked not to do so. (Hays translation) To seek what is impossible is madness: and it is impossible that the bad should not do something of this kind.

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V, 17

Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.

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A 58
2 months 3 days ago

If we want eternal life, then we'll need to rewrite our bug-ridden genetic code and become god-like. "May all that have life be delivered from suffering", said Gautama Buddha. It's a wonderful sentiment. Sadly, only hi-tech solutions can ever eradicate suffering from the living world. Compassion alone is not enough.

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Interview with Nick Bostrom and David Pearce, Dec. 2007
2 months 3 weeks ago

Further acquaintance with the labors of the Quakers and their works - with Fox, Penn, and especially the work of Dymond (published in 1827) - showed me not only that the impossibility of reconciling Christianity with force and war had been recognized long, long ago, but that this irreconcilability had been long ago proved so clearly and so indubitably that one could only wonder how this impossible reconciliation of Christian teaching with the use of force, which has been, and is still, preached in the churches, could have been maintained in spite of it.

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Chapter I, The Doctrine of Non-resistance to Evil by Force has been Professed by a Minority of Men from the Very Foundation of Christianity
3 months 2 weeks ago

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

France wanted to make proselytes to her opinions, and turn every government in the world into a republic. If every government was against her, it was because she had declared herself hostile to every government. He knew of nothing to which this strange republic could be compared, but to the system of Mahomet, who with the koran in one hand, and a sword in the other, held out the former to the acceptance of mankind, and with the latter compelled them to adopt it as their creed. The koran which France held out, was the declaration of the rights of man and universal fraternity; and with the sword she was determined to propagate her doctrines, and conquer those whom she could not convince.

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Speech in the House of Commons (14 December 1792), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXX (1817), column 72

But to return to the Jewish question. Other groups and nations cultivate their individual traditions. There is no reason why we should sacrifice ours. Standardization robs life of its spice. To deprive every ethnic group of its special traditions is to convert the world into a huge Ford plant. I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.

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3 months 1 week ago

It appears that liberty is bound up with imperfection, with a right to imperfection. Socialism leads to the same type of authoritarian state as Theocracy. ... One must choose: either Socialism or liberty of spirit, the liberty of man's conscience. ... Socialism uses a "sacred" authority and establishes a "sacred" society in which there is no place for the "lay," for the free, for choice, for the unrestrained activity of human forces.

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pp. 188-189
4 months 3 weeks ago

Just as the witticism brings two very different real objects under one concept, the pun brings two different concepts, by the assistance of accident, under one word.

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Volume I, Book I
1 month 2 weeks ago

[after quoting from Lucretius] In the face of warfare and inevitable death, there is no wisdom but in ataraxia, "to look on all things with a mind at peace"." Here, clearly, the old pagan joy of life is gone, and an almost exotic spirit touches a broken lyre. History, which is nothing if not humorous, was never so facetious as when she gave to this abstemious and epic pessimist the name of Epicurean.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

A scholar who loves comfort is not worthy of the name.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

One always dies too soon - or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

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Inès, Act 1, sc. 5
4 months 3 weeks ago

The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.

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Ch. 9
3 months 2 weeks ago

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self.

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The Nice and the Good (1968), ch. 22.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Be a craftsman in speech that thou mayest be strong, for the strength of one is the tongue, and speech is mightier than all fighting.

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Translated by J. H. Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933) p. 131

There is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don't use it to free yourself it will be gone and never return.

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(Hays translation) II, 4

This is a fine saying of Plato: That he who is discoursing about men should look also at earthly things as if he viewed them from some higher place; should look at them... a mixture of all things and an orderly combination of contraries.

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VII, 48
3 months 3 weeks ago

A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words.

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Letter to Richard Burke post 19 February 1792 (1792), in R. B. McDowell and William B. Todd (eds), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. 9: I: The Revolutionary War, 1794-1797; II: Ireland. p. 647

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