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4 months 1 day ago

Nature paints the best part of a picture, carves the best parts of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.

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Art
3 months 3 weeks ago

In France at least, the history of science and thought gives pride of place sciences, sciences of the necessary, all close to philosophy: one can observe in their history the almost uninterrupted emergence of truth and pure reason. The other disciplines, however - those, for example, that concern living beings, languages, or economic facts - are considered too tinged with empirical thought, too exposed to the vagaries of chance or imagery to age old traditions and external events, for it to be supposed that their history could be anything other irregular. At most, they are expected to provide evidence of a state of mind, an intellectual fashion, a mixture of archaism and bold conjecture, of intuition and blindness. But what if empirical knowledge, at a given time and in a given culture, did possess a well defined regularity.

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Foreword to the English edition
1 week 4 days ago

Einstein's theory of relativity has advanced our ideas of the structure of the cosmos a step further. It is as if a wall which separated us from Truth has collapsed. Wider expanses and greater depths are now exposed to the searching eye of knowledge, regions of which we had not even a presentiment. It has brought us much nearer to grasping the plan that underlies all physical happening.

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From the Author's Preface to First Edition
1 month 4 weeks ago

There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.

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4 months 5 days ago

Now, as there is an infinity of possible universes in the Ideas of God, and as only one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for God's choice, which determines him toward one rather than another. And this reason can be found only in the fitness, or the degrees of perfection, that these worlds contain, since each possible thing has the right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection it involves.

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La monadologie (53 & 54).
3 months 6 days ago

The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and ... people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.

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4 months 5 days ago

I pass, at length, to the third and perfectly absolute dominion, which we call democracy.

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Ch. 11, Of Democracy
4 months 2 days ago

We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side; one which we preach but do not practise, and another which we practise but seldom preach.

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Ch. 8: Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness
4 months 1 week ago

For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself.

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Book I, i, 3
2 months 3 weeks ago

The quality of the human that precludes identifying the individual with the class is 'metaphysical' and has no place in empiricist epistemology. The pigeon hole into which a man is shoved circumscribes his fate.

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p. 23.
1 month 3 weeks ago

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.

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A Gossip on Romance, printed in Longman's Magazine (November 1882).
4 months 1 week ago

This world, the whole of the planet called earth, is the common country of all who live and breathe upon it.

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3 months 2 days ago

France had for some time been guilty of a continued series of hostile acts against this country, both external and internal: first, she directed her pursuits to universal empire, under the name of fraternity, in order to overturn the fabric of our laws and government.

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Speech in the House of Commons (12 February 1793)
2 months 1 day ago

The only thing that we know is that we know nothing - and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.

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Book V, Ch. I
1 week 5 days ago

It is very difficult to understand proletarian violence as long as we try to think in terms of the ideas disseminated by bourgeois philosophy; according to this philosophy, violence is a relic of barbarism which is bound to disappear under the progress of enlightenment.

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p. 65
3 weeks 4 days ago

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

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3 months 1 day ago

The purpose of the State is, as we have already shown in our last lecture, no other than that of the Human Race itself:-to order all its relations according to the Laws of Reason. It is only after the Age of Reason as Science shall have been traversed, and we shall have arrived at the Age of Reason as Art, that the State can reflect upon this purpose with clear consciousness. Till then it constantly promotes this purpose, but without its own knowledge, or free pre meditated design; prompted thereto by the natural law of the development of our Race, even while it has a totally different purpose in view;-with which purpose of its own, Nature has indissolubly bound up the purpose of the whole Race.

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p. 168
3 months 1 day ago

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.

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Act I.
4 months 3 weeks ago

To no one but the Son of Heaven does it belong to order ceremonies, to fix the measures, and to determine the written characters.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature's meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal.

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Ch. 3 "Mechanism"
2 months 3 weeks ago

This language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction; by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary; it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood.

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p. 103
2 months 4 weeks ago

Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.

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Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype
1 month 4 weeks ago

People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.

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ARTnews annual, Volume 31, Art Foundation, 1966, p. 56
2 months 2 weeks ago

We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that it will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations. Such is the logic of patriotism.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

The fact is that I've never called myself a genius, and I think the term has been cheapened by overuse into meaninglessness. If other people want to call me that, that's their problem.

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What we do need to worry about is the possibility that we will be reduced, in the face of the enormities of our time, to silence or to mere protest.

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A Poem of Difficult Hope
5 months 4 days ago
That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.
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3 months 3 weeks ago

Bernie Sanders is...an anti-racist in his heart. Two, he's old-school. He's like me. He doesn't know the buzzwords. He doesn't endorse reparations, one moment in the last 30 years, silent on it. He has the consistency over the years decade after decade and therefore it's true in his language, in his rhetoric. There are times in which he doesn't... use the same kind of buzzwords. But when it comes to his fight against racism, going to jail in Chicago as a younger brother and he would go to jail again. He and I would go to jail together again in terms of fighting against police brutality. So in that sense, I would just tell my brothers and sisters, but especially my chocolate ones that they shouldn't be blinded by certain kinds of words they're looking for, that in the end, he is a long distance runner in the struggle against white supremacy.

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Quoted in: Cornel West on Bernie, Trump, and Racism, The Intercept, Mehdi Hasan
2 weeks 2 days ago

To be angry with a man is to hate him; to hate him is to wish him harm; but to wish him well, even if he has done you harm, is the mark of a great mind.

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Seneca, On Anger (De Ira) 2.34.5 (translated by John W. Basore)
4 months 1 week ago

As far as physicians go, chance is more valuable than knowledge.

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Ch. 37
2 months 3 weeks ago

Art can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.

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p. 62
2 months 2 weeks ago

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race..

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ch. 5
2 months 3 weeks ago

When we come to inanimate elements, the prevailing view has been that time and sequential change are entirely foreign to their nature. According to this view they do not have careers; they simply change their relations is space. We have only to think of the classic conception of atoms. The Newtonian atom, for example, moved and was moved, thus changing its position in space, but it was unchangeable in its own being. ... In itself it was like a God, the same yesterday, today, and forever.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

To-day is the parent of to-morrow. The present casts its shadow far into the future. That is the law of life, individual and social. Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society. The means used to prepare the future become its cornerstone.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to empty abstraction.

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2 months 3 days ago

Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.

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"The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary" (1993), later published in The Judith Butler Reader (2004) edited by Sarah Salih with Judith Butler

One has to do something new in order to see something new.

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J 1770
2 months 2 weeks ago

The term many presupposes the term one, and the term one presupposes the term many.

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Pt. I, ch. 2, sec. 2.
4 months 2 days ago

Our words tend to conceal what is private and particular in our impressions, and to make us believe that different people live in a common world to a greater extent than is in fact the case.

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An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics, 1927
1 month 3 weeks ago

The errors of the times of superstition and bigotry still hold some sway, and compel those who wish to preserve a regard to their respectability in society to an over strained demeanor; and this demeanor sometimes degenerates into hypocrisy, and is often the cause of great inconsistency. It is destructive of every open, honest, generous, and manly feeling. It disgusts many, and drives them to the opposite extreme. It is sometimes the cause of insanity. It is founded in ignorance. While erroneous customs prevail in any country, it would evince an ignorance of human nature in any individual to offend against them, until he has convinced the community of their error.

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Essay Third
2 months 3 weeks ago

When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The first and most necessary topic in philosophy is that of the use of moral theorems, such as, "We ought not to lie;" the second is that of demonstrations, such as, "What is the origin of our obligation not to lie;" the third gives strength and articulation to the other two, such as, "What is the origin of this is a demonstration." For what is demonstration? What is consequence? What contradiction? What truth? What falsehood? The third topic, then, is necessary on the account of the second, and the second on the account of the first. But the most necessary, and that whereon we ought to rest, is the first. But we act just on the contrary. For we spend all our time on the third topic, and employ all our diligence about that, and entirely neglect the first.

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(51).

The Constitution of the United States asserts that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty.

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Letter to Justice William Johnson
2 weeks 2 days ago

No furniture so charming as books.

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Vol. I, ch. 9, p. 289
2 months 1 week ago

Men and women meet now to be idle. Is it extraordinary that they do not know each other, and that, in their mutual ignorance, they form no surer friendships? Did they meet to do something together, then indeed they might form some real tie. But, as it is, they are not there, it is only a mask which is there - a mouth-piece of ready-made sentences about the "topics of the day"; and then people rail against men for choosing a woman "for her face" - why, what else do they see?

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2 weeks 2 days ago

What else is there which you would regret to have taken from you? Friends? But who can be a friend to you? Country? What? Do you think enough of your country to be late to dinner? The light of the sun? You would extinguish it, if you could; for what have you ever done that was fit to be seen in the light?

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

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§ 112

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