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6 months 5 days ago

A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language ... not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.

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Militarism in both its forms - as war and as armed peace - is a legitimate child, a logical result of capitalism, which can only be overcome with the destruction of capitalism, and that hence whoever honestly desires world peace and liberation from the tremendous burden of armaments must also desire Socialism. Only in this way can real Social Democratic enlightenment and recruiting be carried on in connection with the armaments debate.

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4 months 5 days ago

A diversity of opinion upon almost every principle of politics, had indeed drawn a strong line of separation between them and some others. However, they were desirous not to extend the misfortune by unnecessary bitterness; they wished to prevent a difference of opinion on the commonwealth from festering into rancorous and incurable hostility. Accordingly they endeavoured that all past controversies should be forgotten; and that enough for the day should be the evil thereof. There is however a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue. Men may tolerate injuries, whilst they are only personal to themselves. But it is not the first of virtues to bear with moderation the indignities that are offered to our country.

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Describing the Government's position at a previous time of deep division in British politics in fact over policy on America, Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769), page 2
2 months 2 weeks ago

Biopiracy is biological theft; illegal collection of indigenous plants by corporations who patent them for their own use.

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On biopiracy, from the booklet "No Patents on Seeds: A Handbook For Activists"
3 months 2 weeks ago

Such words as spontaneity, sincerity, gratuitousness, richness, enrichment - words which imply an almost total indifference to contrasts of value - have come more often from their [the surrealists'] pens than words which contain a reference to good and evil. Moreover, this latter class of words has become degraded, especially those which refer to the good, as Valéry remarked some years ago. Words like virtue, nobility, honor, honesty, generosity, have become almost impossible to use or else they have acquired bastard meanings; language is no longer equipped for legitimately praising a man's character.

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"The responsibility of writers," p. 168
2 months 3 weeks ago

A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political , legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge.

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"What is Culture?" (p. 2)
4 months ago

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

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2 months 1 week ago

The belief that torture is always wrong is a prejudice inherited from an obsolete philosophy. We need to shed the belief that human rights are violated when a terrorist is tortured. As Rawls and others have shown, basic freedoms must form a coherent whole. Self-evidently, there can be no right to attack basic human rights. Therefore, once the proper legal procedures are in place, torturing terrorists cannot violate their rights. In fact, in a truly liberal society, terrorists have an inalienable right to be tortured.This is what demonstrates the moral superiority of liberal societies over others, past and present. Other societies have degraded terrorists by subjecting them to lawless and unaccountable power. In the new world that is taking shape, terrorists, although they themselves degrade human rights by practising terrorism, will be afforded the full dignity of due legal process, even while being tortured.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.

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F 100
1 month 2 weeks ago

There stood Mucius, despising the enemy and despising the fire, and watched his hand as it dripped blood over the fire on his enemy's altar, until Porsenna, envying the fame of the hero whose punishment he was advocating, ordered the fire to be removed against the will of the victim.

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5 months 1 week ago

My mind is calm, for my fortune is not my felicity. I know I have clean hands and a clean heart, and I hope a clean house for friends or servants; but Job himself, or whoever was the justest judge, by such hunting for matters against him as hath been used against me, may for a time seem foul, especially in a time when greatness is the mark and accusation is the game.

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Quoted by Thomas Fowler in "Francis Bacon 1561-1626
4 months ago

Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Seek after the good, and with much toil shall ye find it; the evil turns up of itself without your seeking it.

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5 months 6 days ago

The best is the enemy of the good.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

We must wish either for that which actually exists or for that which cannot in any way exist - or, still better, for both. That which is and that which cannot be are both outside the realm of becoming.

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p. 154
3 months 3 weeks ago

Even to-day, in spite of some signs which are making a tiny breach in that sturdy faith, even to-day, there are few men who doubt that motorcars will in five years' time be more comfortable and cheaper than to-day. They believe in this as they believe that the sun will rise in the morning. The metaphor is an exact one. For, in fact, the common man, finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes that it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly-endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice.... These traits together make up the well-known psychology of the spoilt child. Chap.

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VI: The Dissection Of The Mass-Man Begins
5 months 5 days ago

Since reasoning, or inference, the principal subject of logic, is an operation which usually takes place by means of words, and in complicated cases can take place in no other way: those who have not a thorough insight into both the signification and purpose of words, will be under chances, amounting almost to certainty, of reasoning or inferring incorrectly.

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p. 11: Cited in Gaines (1976) "Foundations of fuzzy reasoning" in: International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 8(6), p. 623
3 months 2 days ago

Confidence is the only bond of friendship.

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Maxim 34

The Geschick of being: a child that plays... Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into view in the aiôn? It plays, because it plays. The "because" withers away in the play. The play is without "why." It plays since it plays. It simply remains a play: the most elevated and the most profound. But this "simply" is everything, the one, the only... The question remains whether and how we, hearing the movements of this play, play along and accommodate ourselves to the play.

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The Principle of Reason (1955-1956) as translated by Reginald Lilly
1 month 3 weeks ago

A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.

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Metaphysical Horror
5 months 2 weeks ago

What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.

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As quoted in Quote, Unquote (1977) by Lloyd Cory, p. 197
1 month 1 day ago

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

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IV, 43
4 months 4 weeks ago

Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

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Discipline and Punish (1977) as translated by Alan Sheridan, p. 228
6 months 5 days ago

What if the equality between us human being, in which we completely resemble one another, were that none of us really thinks about his being loved?

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1 month 1 week ago

The secret of contentment is knowing how to enjoy what you have, and to be able to lose all desire for things beyond your reach.

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As quoted in Remarks of Famous People (1965) by Jacob Morton Braude, p. 23
3 months 2 weeks ago

Objectification is above all exteriorization, the alienation of spirit from itself.

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p. 63
5 months 3 days ago

Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.

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p. 12

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

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p. 36e
5 months 1 week ago

Of all those expensive and uncertain projects, however, which bring bankruptcy upon the greater part of the people who engage in in them, there is none perhaps more perfectly ruinous than the search after new silver and gold mines. It is perhaps the most disadvantageous lottery in the world, or the one in which the gain of those who draw the prizes bears the least proportion to the loss of those who draw the blanks: for though the prizes are few and the blanks are many, the common price of a ticket is the whole fortune of a very rich man.

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Chapter VII, Part First, p. 610.
3 months 3 weeks ago

The ontological concept of truth is in the centre of a logic which may serve as a model of pre- technological rationality. It is the rationality of a two-dimensional universe of discourse which, contrasts with the of thought and behavior that develop in the execution of the technological project.

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p. 130
1 month 2 weeks ago

I am of course confident that I will fulfil my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.

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Open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers' Congress (16 May 1967); as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz
4 months 2 days ago

True anarchy is the generative element of religion. Out of the annihilation of all existing institutions she raises her glorious head, as the new foundress of the world.

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English translation as quoted in The Dublin Review Vol. III (July-October 1837)
2 months 3 weeks ago

It is odd that the last twenty-five years which have witnessed the greatest progress ever made in physical science-the greatest victories ever achieved by mind over matter-should have produced hardly a volume that will be remembered in 1900.

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Journal entry (9 March 1850), quoted in Thomas Macaulay, The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay: Volume 5, January 1849-December 1855, ed. Thomas Pinney (1981), p. 99
5 months 3 days ago

Her face seems ravaged by both lightning and hail. But on yours there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone.

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Act 1
5 months 5 days ago

The Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.

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1 month 1 week ago

A good traveler is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from.

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p. 332
3 months 4 days ago

Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.

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Bk. X, ch. 16
3 months 3 weeks ago

He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

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8:7 (King James Version)
1 month 4 days ago

Happy in the prospect of a restoration of primitive Christianity, I must leave to younger athletes to encounter and lop off the false branches which have been engrafted into it by the mythologists of the middle and modern ages.

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Letter to Doctor Waterhouse
4 months 3 weeks ago

In the weightiest matters we must go to school to the animals, and learn spinning and weaving from the spider, building from the swallow, singing from the birds,-from the swan and the nightingale, imitating their art.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Faith makes us live by showing us that life, although it is dependent upon reason, has its well spring and source of power elsewhere, in something supernatural and miraculous. Cournot the mathematician, a man of singularly well-balanced and scientifically equipped mind has said that it is this tendency towards the supernatural and miraculous that gives life, and that when it is lacking, all the speculations of reason lead to nothing but affliction of the spirit. ...And in truth we wish to live.

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Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?

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p. 14e
6 months 2 days ago

There is no way of being almost funny or mildly funny or fairly funny or tolerably funny. You are either funny or not funny and there is nothing in between. And usually it is the writer who thinks he is funny and the reader who thinks he isn't.

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6 months 5 days ago

It is of this sort of divine service I used the expression that, in comparison with the Christianity of the New Testament, it is playing Christianity. The expression is essentially true and characterizes the thing perfectly. For what does it mean to play, when one reflects how the word must be understood in this connection? It means to imitate, to counterfeit, a danger when there is no danger, and to do it in such a way that the more art is applied to it, the more delusive the pretense is that the danger is present.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

When a philosopher addresses himself to... a tyrant, and tells him... tyranny is incompatible with justice, then the philosopher speaks... and believes he is speaking the truth, and... takes a risk...

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[T]hat was Plato's situation with Dionysius in Syracuse... reference... Plato's Seventh Letter, and... The Life of Dion by Plutarch. Ref: 1) Ludwig Edelstein, Plato's seventh letter (1966) 2) Plutarch, Life of Dion
4 months 5 days ago

Resolved to die in the last dike of prevarication.

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Speech on the sixth article of charge in the impeachment of Warren Hastings (7 May 1789), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Tenth (1899), p. 406

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