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1 month 3 weeks ago

I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more as I grow older.

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Book iii. Chap 2. Of Repentance
2 weeks 4 days ago

Every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberties by every other man.

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Pt. II, Ch. 4 : Derivation of a First Principle, § 3
2 months 3 days ago

So it is more useful to watch a man in times of peril, and in adversity to discern what kind of man he is; for then at last words of truth are drawn from the depths of his heart, and the mask is torn off, reality remains.

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Book III, lines 55-58 (reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations)
2 weeks 2 days ago

If our Bodily Life is a burning, our Spiritual Life is a being burnt, a Combustion (or, is precisely the inverse the case?); Death, therefore, perhaps a Change of Capacity.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

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

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Education
2 months 4 days ago

The light will not shame you, if it shows you your own ugliness, and that ugliness so offends you that you perceive the beauty of the light.

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First Homily, as translated by John Burnaby (1955), p. 262
1 month 2 weeks ago

I am against a League war in present circumstances, because the anti-League powers are strong. The analogy is not King v. Barons, but the War of the Roses. If the League were strong enough I should favour sanctions, because the effect would suffice, or the war would be short and small. The whole question is quantitative.

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Letter to Kingsley Martin shortly before the Italo-Abyssinian War (7 August 1935), quoted in Kingsley Martin, Editor: A Second Volume of Autobiography, 1931-45 (1968), p. 207
1 month 3 weeks ago

Secrecy is an instrument of conspiracy; it ought not, therefore, to be the system of a regular government.

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On Publicity from The Works of Jeremy Bentham volume 2, part 2, 1839
2 months 2 weeks ago

It was a purely Christian satisfaction to me that if ordinarily there was no one else there was one who in action tried a little to do the doctrine about loving the neighbor, alas, one who precisely by his act also received a frightful into what an illusion Christendom is and indeed, particularly later, also into how the common people let themselves be seduced by wretched journalists, whose striving and fighting for equality can only lead, if it leads to anything, since it is in the service of the lie, to making the elite, in self-defense, proud of their aloofness from the common man, and the common man brazen in his rudeness.

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2 months 4 days ago

When the Head and members are despised, then the whole Christ is despised, for the whole Christ, Head and body, is that just man against whom deceitful lips speak iniquity (Ps. 30:19).

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p.425
1 month 2 weeks ago

I do not say this, that I think there should be no difference of opinions in conversation, nor opposition in men's discourses... 'Tis not the owning one's dissent from another, that I speak against, but the manner of doing it.

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Sec. 145
1 month 2 weeks ago

Last words are for fools who haven't said enough.

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Various attributions,
2 weeks ago

Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.

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2 weeks 6 days ago

Universities employ PhDs on poverty wages with no benefits or job security while administrators make six figures. Adjuncts are exploited for their passion, trapped by years of educational investment. Academic labor exploitation proves even education institutions prioritize profit over people.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?

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Montaigne; or, The Skeptic
3 weeks 2 days ago

Good music is very close to primitive language.

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"Correspondence of Ideas with the Motion of Organs"
2 weeks ago

Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral...

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom.

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Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge (25 January 1843)
2 weeks 2 days ago

Where children are, there is a golden age.

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Fragment No. 97
2 weeks ago

Boredom is connected naturally with time, with the horror of time, with the experience and the consciousness of time. Those who are not aware of time do not become bored. Basically life is only possible if one is not aware of time. If one should happen to want to experience consciously one of those moments that pass, one would be lost; life would become unbearable.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.

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Ch. 4
2 months 3 weeks ago
The reasons and purposes for habits are always lies that are added only after some people begin to attack these habits and to ask for reasons and purposes. At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies.
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1 month 2 weeks ago

People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

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Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 17 December, 1920
1 month 2 weeks ago

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

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Pt II, p. 223 of the 1968 English edition
1 month 2 weeks ago

Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.

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Robert Gould Shaw: Oration upon the Unveiling of the Shaw Monument
1 month 2 weeks ago

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 21, § 255
2 months 2 weeks ago

"My field," said Goethe, "is time." That is indeed the absurd speech. What, in fact, is the Absurd Man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

After all, in the poets love has its priests, and sometimes one hears a voice which knows how to defend it; but of faith one hears never a word. Who speaks in honor of this passion? Philosophy goes further. Theology sits rouged at the window and courts its favor, offering to sell her charms to philosophy. it is supposed to be difficult to understand Hegel, but to understand Abraham is a trifle. To go beyond Hegel's is a miracle, but to get beyond Abraham is the easiest thing of all.

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Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.

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2 weeks 1 day ago

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy. Variant translation: We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

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Conclusion, p. 628
1 month 1 week ago

Wise people are in want of nothing, and yet need many things. On the other hand, nothing is needed by fools, for they do not understand how to use anything, but are in want of everything.

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As quoted in Moral Epistles by Seneca, iii. 10.
1 month 2 weeks 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
2 months 2 weeks ago

Be attentive therefore, according to the instruction of the Gospel, to learn obedience from the lily and the bird. Be not affrighted, do no despair, when thou comparest thy life with these teachers. There is nothing to despair about, for indeed thou shalt learn from them; and the Gospel first comforts thee by telling thee that God is the God of patience, and then it adds: 'Thou shalt learn from the lilies and the birds, learn to be absolutely obedient like the lilies and the birds, learn not to serve two masters; for no man can serve two masters, he must either ... or.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.

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March 1845
1 month 3 weeks ago

Abbot Terrasson tells us that if the size of a book were measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required to understand it, then we could say about many books that they would be much shorter were they not so short.

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A xix
4 days ago

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.

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Lectures in philosophy [Leçons de philosophie] (1959) as translated by Hugh Price p. 103
4 days ago

There is a certain kind of morality which is even more alien to good and evil than amorality is.

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"The responsibility of writers," p. 169
2 months 2 weeks ago

Science fiction may be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the response of human beings to advances in science and technology. Actual change in science and technology, occurring quickly enough and striking deeply enough to affect a human being in the course of his normal lifetime, is a phenomenon peculiar to the world only since the Industrial Revolution ... The first well-known writer who responded to this new factor in human affairs by dealing regularly with science fiction, by studying the effect of additional scientific advance upon mankind ... was Jules Verne. In the English language, the early master was H. G. Wells. Between them, they laid the foundation for every theme upon which science fiction writers have been ringing variations ever since.

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1 month 1 week ago

The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.

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Vol. I, p. 59
2 weeks ago

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.

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Preface, A vii
1 month 3 weeks ago

A prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent.

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The Prince (1513), Ch. 6; translated by Luigi Ricci
2 weeks ago

I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.

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1 week 3 days ago

Almost anything that consoles us is a fake.

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The Sovereignty of Good (1970) p. 59.

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

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The Authoritarian Personality (1950), p. 976, co-written with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford
1 month 1 week ago

The need of black conservatives to gain the respect of their white peers deeply shapes certain elements of their conservatism. In this regard, they simply want what most people want, to be judged by the quality of their skills, not by the color of their skin. But the black conservatives overlook the fact that affirmative action policies were political responses to the pervasive refusal of most white Americans to judge black Americans on that basis.

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(p52)
1 month ago

Evil destroyeth itself.

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3 weeks 3 days ago

I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof; 'tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures, that in a moment can so disfigure us that our nearest friends, Wife, and Children stand afraid and start at us.

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Section 40

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