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6 months 1 week ago

If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I, a sinner even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will God have pity upon you. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and cleanse not only your own sins but the sins of others.

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Book II, Chapter 3 (trans. Constance Garnett) The Elder Zossima, speaking to a devout widow afraid of death
7 months 1 week ago

It is not for its own sake that men desire money, but for the sake of what they can purchase with it.

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Chapter I, p. 471.
7 months 5 days ago

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

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God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)
7 months 1 week ago

The great end of all human industry, is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modelled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators.

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Part I, Essay 16: The Stoic
5 months 4 days ago

In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man's physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations.

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(p. 8)
7 months 6 days ago

Mr. Galton ...in his English Men of Science, has given ...cases showing individual variations in the type of memory... Some have it verbal. Others... for facts and figures, others for form. Most say... [it] must first be rationally conceived and assimilated.

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Ch. 16
3 months 6 days ago

Architecture worth great attention. As we double our numbers every 20 years we must double our houses. Besides we build of such perishable materials that one half of our houses must be rebuilt in every space of 20 years. So that in that term, houses are to be built for three fourths of our inhabitants. It is then among the most important arts: and it is desireable to introduce taste into an art which shews so much.

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Hints to Americans travelling in Europe, letter to John Rutledge, Jr. (June 19, 1788); in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (1956), vol. 13, p. 269
5 months 4 weeks ago

Ever since the first World War, when the system of liberalism began to shape into the system of authoritarianism, a widespread opinion has blames Hegelianism for the ideological of the new system.

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P. 390
7 months 3 weeks ago

To become like God is the ultimate end of all.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Saturninus said, "Comrades, you have lost a good captain to make him an ill general."

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Book III, Ch. 9. Of Vanity
7 months 6 days ago

I call upon you, young men, to obey your heart, and be the nobility of this land. In every age of the world, there has been a leading nation, one of a more generous sentiment, whose eminent citizens were willing to stand for the interests of general justice and humanity, at the risk of being called, by the men of the moment, chimerical and fantastic. Which should be that nation but these States? Which should lead that movement, if not New England? Who should lead the leaders, but the Young American?

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3 months 2 weeks ago

First, the physicists in the persons of Faraday and Maxwell, proposed the "electromagnetic field" in contradistinction to matter, as a reality of a different category. Then, during the last century, the mathematicians, ... secretly undermined belief in the evidence of Euclidean Geometry. And now, in our time, there has been unloosed a cataclysm which has swept away space, time, and matter hitherto regarded as the firmest pillars of natural science, but only to make place for a view of things of wider scope and entailing a deeper vision. This revolution was promoted essentially by the thought of one man, Albert Einstein.

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Introduction
5 months 4 weeks ago

The office of the sovereign, be it a monarch or an assembly, consisteth in the end for which he was trusted with the sovereign power, namely the procuration of the safety of the people, to which he is obliged by the law of nature, and to render an account thereof to God, the Author of that law, and to none but Him. But by safety here is not meant a bare preservation, but also all other contentments of life, which every man by lawful industry, without danger or hurt to the Commonwealth, shall acquire to himself. And this is intended should be done, not by care applied to individuals, further than their protection from injuries when they shall complain; but by a general providence, contained in public instruction, both of doctrine and example; and in the making and executing of good laws to which individual persons may apply their own cases.

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The Second Part, Chapter 30: Of the Office of the Sovereign Representative
3 months 1 week ago

How does the light of a star set out and plunge into black eternity in its immortal course? The star dies, but the light never dies; such also is the cry of freedom. Out of the transient encounter of contrary forces which constitute your existence, strive to create whatever immortal thing a mortal may create in this world - a Cry. And this Cry, abandoning to the earth the body which gave it birth, proceeds and labors eternally.

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7 months 1 week ago

Enthusiasm is supernatural serenity.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 74
3 months 3 weeks ago

The Great Man here too, as always, is a Force of Nature. Whatsoever is truly great in him springs up from the inarticulate deeps.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The supreme effort of the avant-guard is onward, ever onward.

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Light and Shadows in the Life of an Avant-Guard
3 months 3 weeks ago

Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.

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p. 5
3 months 6 days ago

The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.

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Letter to William Hunter
5 months 2 days ago

To this day, and in quarters where they should know better, Darwinism is widely regarded as a theory of 'chance'.It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn't work. You don't need to be a mathematician or physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck. Far from being a difficulty peculiar to Darwinism, the astronomic improbability of eyes and knees, enzymes and elbow joints and the other living wonders is precisely the problem that any theory of life must solve, and that Darwinism uniquely does solve.

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Chapter 3, "The Message from the Mountain" (p. 77)
7 months 1 week ago

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

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3 months 3 days ago

Rememberest the gods, and that they wish not to be flattered, but wish all reasonable beings to be made like themselves; and... rememberest that what does the work of a fig-tree is a fig-tree, and that what does the work of a dog is a dog, and that what does the work of a bee is a bee, and that what does the work of a man is a man.

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X, 8
7 months 2 weeks ago

Cato said the best way to keep good acts in memory was to refresh them with new.

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No. 247
5 months 4 weeks ago

To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.

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p. 51
7 months 1 week ago

In the name of national security, the Commission's hearings were held in secret, thereby continuing the policy which has marked the entire course of the case. This prompts my second question: If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security? Indeed, precisely the same question must be put here as was posed in France during the Dreyfus case: If the Government is so certain of its case, why has it conducted all its inquiries in the strictest secrecy? "

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16 Questions on the Assassination" in The Minority of One, ed. M.S. Arnoni (1964-09-06), pp. 6-8
3 months 3 weeks ago

What is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?

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Carlyle, Essays, On History. Quote reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 419-23.
7 months 2 weeks ago

God only pours out his light into the mind after having subdued the rebellion of the will by an altogether heavenly gentleness which charms and wins it.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

As we shall see later, the most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur. To maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted inquiry ― these are the essentials of thinking.

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Chapter 1: "What Is Thought?"
7 months 2 weeks ago

It is not the pleasure of curiosity, nor the quiet of resolution, nor the raising of the spirit, nor victory of wit, nor faculty of speech that are the true ends of knowledge, but it is a restitution and reinvesting, in great part, of man to the sovereignty and power, for whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names, he shall again command them.

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Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature (ca. 1603), in Works, Vol. I, p. 83; The Works of Francis Bacon (1819), Vol. 2, p. 133
8 months 1 week ago

That body is heavier than another which, in an equal bulk, moves downward quicker.

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7 months 1 week ago

The reasons for legal intervention in favour of children, apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind, the lower animals.

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Book V, Chapter 11, Section 9
6 months 2 days ago

The only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature and for uniformity in general is to suppose them results of evolution. This supposes them not to be absolute, not to be obeyed precisely. It makes an element of indeterminacy, spontaneity, or absolute chance in nature. Just as, when we attempt to verify any physical law, we find our observations cannot be precisely satisfied by it, and rightly attribute the discrepancy to errors of observation, so we must suppose far more minute discrepancies to exist owing to the imperfect cogency of the law itself, to a certain swerving of the facts from any definite formula.

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7 months 1 week ago

No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rare in the history of the world. There are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak who is capable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day.

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7 months 1 week ago

Theologian: But what is to love? Philosopher: To be delighted by the happiness of another.

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Confessio philosophi, 1673
6 months 3 weeks 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
3 months 2 weeks ago

I must interpret the life about me as I interpret the life that is my own. My life is full of meaning to me. The life around me must be full of significance to itself. If I am to expect others to respect my life, then I must respect the other life I see, however strange it may be to mine. And not only other human life, but all kinds of life: life above mine, if there be such life; life below mine, as I know it to exist. Ethics in our Western world has hitherto been largely limited to the relations of man to man. But that is a limited ethics. We need a boundless ethics which will include the animals also.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

If...we look at the essential characteristics of the Whig and the Tory, we may consider each of them as the representative of a great principle, essential to the welfare of nations. One is, in an especial manner, the guardian of liberty, and the other, of order. One is the moving power, and the other the steadying power of the state. One is the sail, without which society would make no progress, the other the ballast, without which there would be small safety in a tempest.

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The Earl of Chatham', The Edinburgh Review (October 1844), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review: A New Edition (1852), p. 725
4 months 3 weeks ago

I do not advocate burning your ship to get rid of the cockroaches.

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Said in reference to those who wished to abolish all religious teaching, rather than freeing state education from Church controls, in Critiques and Addresses (1873) p. 90
8 months 1 week ago

It's gravity is the cause; and that which is heavy abides in the middle, and the earth is in the middle: in like manner also, the infinite will abide in itself, through some other cause... and will itself support itself. ..The places of the whole and the part are of the same species; as of the whole earth and a clod, the place is downward; and of the whole of fire, and a spark, the place is upward. So that if the place of the infinite is in itself, there will be the same place also of a part of the infinite.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Our true Deity is Mechanism. It has subdued external Nature for us, and we think it will do all other things. We are Giants in physical power: in a deeper than metaphorical sense, we are Titans, that strive, by heaping mountain on mountain, to conquer Heaven also.

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3 months 1 week ago

My prayer is not the whimpering of a beggar nor a confession of love. Nor is it the petty reckoning of a small tradesman: Give me and I shall give you. My prayer is the report of a soldier to his general: This is what I did today, this is how I fought to save the entire battle in my own sector, these are the obstacles I encountered, this is how I plan to fight tomorrow.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Serious reflexion about one's own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.)

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Ch. 8, p. 119
7 months 5 days ago

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

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Book I, Chapter 5, "We Have Cause to Be Uneasy"
7 months 1 day ago

I don't really know what they mean by "intellectuals," all the people who describe, denounce, or scold them. I do know, on the other hand, what I have committed myself to, as an intellectual, which is to say, after all, a cerebro-spinal individual: to having a brain as supple as possible and a spinal column that's as straight as necessary.

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