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5 months 1 week ago

Democracy is the road to socialism.

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Attributed to Marx in recent years, including in Communism (2007) by Tom Lansford, p. 48
5 months 1 week ago

There are but few points in which the English, as a people, are entitled to the moral pre-eminence with which they are accustomed to compliment themselves at the expense of other nations: but, of these points, perhaps the one of greatest importance is, that the higher classes do not lie, and the lower, though mostly habitual liars, are ashamed of lying. To run any risk of weakening this feeling, a difficult one to create, or, when once gone, to restore, would be a permanent evil too great to be incurred for so very temporary a benefit as the ballot would confer, even on the most exaggerated estimate necessity.

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Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859), pp. 48-49
5 months 1 week ago

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others. It is much more nearly certain that we are assembled here tonight than it is that this or that political party is in the right. Certainly there are degrees of certainty, and one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter skepticism, and complete skepticism would, of course, be totally barren and completely useless.

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"Skepticism"
3 months 1 week ago

It is not sufficient to observe our mysteries in the seclusion of our lodge-we must act-act! We are drowsing, but we must act. (Pierre raised his notebook and began to read.) For the dissemination of pure truth and to secure the triumph of virtue," he read, "we must cleanse men from prejudice, diffuse principles in harmony with the spirit of the times, undertake the education of the young, unite ourselves in indissoluble bonds with the wisest men, boldly yet prudently overcome superstitions, infidelity, and folly, and form of those devoted to us a body linked together by unity of purpose and possessed of authority and power.

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4 months 1 week ago

If I understand at all the true Spirit of the present contest, We are engaged in a Civil War ... I consider the Royalists of France, or, as they are (perhaps more properly) called, the Aristocrates, as of the party which we have taken in this civil war.

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Letter to Sir Gilbert Elliot (22 September 1793), quoted in P. J. Marshall and John A. Woods (eds.)
2 months 2 days ago

The Noble in the high place, the Ignoble in the low; that is, in all times and in all countries, the Almighty Maker's Law.

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4 months 1 week ago

It is only natural that I should constantly have revolved in my mind the question of the relationship of the symbolism of the unconscious to Christianity as well as to other religions. Not only do I leave the door open for the Christian message, but I consider it of central importance for Western man. It needs, however, to be seen in a new light, in accordance with the changes wrought by the contemporary spirit.

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5 months 2 weeks 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.
2 months 6 days ago

Jesus, in some respects, was an anarchist, for he had no idea of civil government. That government seems to him purely and simply an abuse.

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Ch. 7.
4 months 3 days ago

So that every Crime is a sinne; but not every sinne a Crime.

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The Second Part, Chapter 27, p. 151
5 months 6 days ago

It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.

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p. 96
5 months 2 weeks ago

The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing.

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5 months 1 week ago

Only a neutral, who is indifferent to the stake and perhaps to all stakes, can appreciate aesthetically the grandeur of a fine disaster

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p. 212
5 months 1 week ago

Most people, at a crisis, feel more loyalty to their nation than to their class.

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Ch. 8: Economic Power
5 months 1 week ago

The facts of science, as they appeared to him [Heraclitus], fed the flame in his soul, and in its light, he saw into the depths of the world.

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Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
4 months 1 week ago

Only through blind Instinct, in which the only possible guidance of the Imperative is awanting, does the Power in Intuition remain undetermined; where it is schematised as absolute it becomes infinite; and where it is presented in a determinate form, as a principle, it becomes at least manifold. By the above-mentioned act of Intelligising, the Power liberates itself from Instinct, to direct itself towards Unity.

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5 months 5 days ago

If there is a kind of "proof" of the sincerity of the parrhesiastes, it is his courage... Saying something dangerous-different from what the majority believes-is a strong indication that he is a parrhesiastes.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

I think television has betrayed the meaning of democratic speech, adding visual chaos to the confusion of voices. What role does silence have in all this noise?

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"Television"
5 months 1 day ago

He was seized and dragged off to King Philip, and being asked who he was, replied, "A spy upon your insatiable greed."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 43. Cf. Plutarch, Moralia, 70CD.
5 months 1 week ago

No one has the right to obey.

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in a radio interview with Joachim Fest (9 November 1964)
1 month 1 week ago

I allow nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently take credit four per cent. per annum, for their increase over and above keeping up their own numbers.

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On his profits from slavery as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson, by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine,
3 months 3 weeks ago

Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.

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Philosophy of Logic
3 months 6 days ago

It seems as if marriage were the royal road through life, and realised, on the instant, what we have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They think it will sober and change them. Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy it needs but an act to be out of the coil and clamour for ever. But this is a wile of the devil's. To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep calling and calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in this - that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

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Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 1.
5 months 1 week ago

If the many, the specialists, gain the day, it will be the end of science as we know it - of great science. It will be a spiritual catastrophe comparable in its consequences to nuclear armament.

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K. Popper, The Myth of the Framework, London: Routledge. As quoted in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Popper (2016) by J. Shearmur, G. Stokes
3 months 1 week ago

The selfish gene theory is Darwin's theory, expressed in a way that Darwin did not choose but whose aptness, I should like to think, he would instantly have recognized and delighted in. It is in fact a logical outgrowth of orthodox neo-Darwinism, but expressed as a novel image. Rather than focus on the individual organism, it takes a gene's eye view of nature. It is a different way of seeing, not a different theory.

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Preface to Second Edition
5 months 3 weeks ago

For it still seemed to me that it is not we who sin, but some other nature sinned in us. And it gratified my pride to be beyond blame, and when I did anything wrong not to have to confess that I had done wrong. I loved to excuse my soul and to accuse something else inside me (I knew not what) but which was not I. But, assuredly, it was I, and it was my impiety that had divided me against myself. That sin then was all the more incurable because I did not deem myself a sinner.

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A. Outler, trans. (Dover: 2002), Book 5, Chapter 10, p. 77
5 months 1 week ago

As for large landed property, its defenders have always, sophistically, identified the economic advantages offered by large-scale agriculture with large-scale landed property, as if it were not precisely as a result of the abolition of property that this advantage, for one thing, would receive its greatest possible extension, and, for another, only then would be of social benefit.

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Rent of Land, p. 66.
4 months 3 days ago

... I once shook hands with Longfellow at a garden party in 1881; and I often saw Dr. Holmes, who was our neighbor in Beacon Street: but Emerson I never saw.

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p. 50

The, diverse states of the soul are always correlative with those of the body.

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1 month 1 day ago

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Intellectuals ... advertise their superiority to political practice but are absolutely in its thrall. ... It is no accident that Marxist theory and practice use the intellectuals as tools and keep them in brutal subservience.

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"Commerce and Culture," p. 281.
5 months 2 weeks ago

God never sends evils.

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Ch. 12
6 months 1 week ago

Just you think first, and don't bother to speak afterward, either.

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5 months 1 week ago

The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.

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Circles
1 month 1 week ago

Note that Unitarianism rejects concepts such as Hell, the Trinity, Original Sin, the infallability of the Bible, as well as claims that any one religion has a monopoly on theological truth and the Holy Spirit. At the same time, it accepts the notion that reason, rational thought, science, and philosophy can coexist with faith in God.

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Thomas Jefferson, letter to Benjamin Waterhouse (26 June 1822), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12, pp. 241-243.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.

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H 13
4 months 3 days ago

Simon Peter said to Him, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of Life." Jesus said, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

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5 months 3 weeks ago

For on these matters we should not trust the multitude who say that none ought to be educated but the free, but rather to philosophers, who say that the educated alone are free.

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Book II, ch. 1, 22.
1 month 1 day ago

No man can visualize four dimensions, except mathematically ... I think in four dimensions, but only abstractly. The human mind can picture these dimensions no more than it can envisage electricity. Nevertheless, they are no less real than electro-magnetism, the force which controls our universe, within, and by which we have our being.

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4 months 1 week ago

Modern man may assert that he can dispense with them, and he may bolster his opinion by insisting that there is no scientific evidence of their truth. But since we are dealing with invisible and unknowable things (for God is beyond human understanding, and there is no mean of proving immortality), why should we bother with evidence?

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p. 75-76
2 months 6 days ago

Finally, and... somewhat belatedly, there is the growing of a left that... has now been energized and is increasingly vocal... in certain quarters of the cultural community, in the arts and the universities, in Hollywood, in the media... where in some versions it also engages in a kind of illiberal... politics.

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20:21
2 months 2 weeks ago

As the Genesis story teaches, knowledge cannot save us from ourselves. If we know more than before, it means only that we have greater scope to enact our fantasies. But - as the Genesis myth also teaches - there is no way we can rid ourselves of what we know. If we try to regain a state of innocence, the result can only be a worse madness. The message of Genesis is that in the most vital areas of human life there can be no progress, only an unending struggle with our own nature.

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An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (pp. 79-80)
1 month 1 week 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 1 week ago

I do not overlook the fact that there are irrationalists who love mankind, and that not all forms of irrationalism engender criminality. But I hold that he who teaches that not reason but love should rule opens up the way for those who rule by hate. (Socrates, I believe, saw something of this when he suggested that mistrust or hatred of argument is related to mistrust or hatred of man).

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Vol. 2, Ch. 24 "Oracular Philosophy and the Revolt against Reason"

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