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4 months 4 days ago

With the conception that the Revolution was only a means of securing political power, it was inevitable that all revolutionary values should be subordinated to the needs of the Socialist State; indeed, exploited to further the security of the newly acquired governmental power.

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2 months 1 week ago

He seldom or never spoke except actually to convey an idea. Measured by quantity of words, he was a talker of fully average copiousness; by extent of meaning communicated, he was the most copious I have listened to. How in few sentences he would sketch you off an entire biography, an entire object or transaction, keen, clear, rugged, genuine, completely rounded In! His words came direct from the heart by the inspiration of the moment.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Without some affinity in human ideas art would certainly be impossible; but it can never be exactly determined how far the intentions of the poet are realized.

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Gottlob Frege (1892). On Sense and Reference.
5 months 2 weeks ago

"To stamp becoming with the character of being-that is the supreme will to power." (WM 617) This suggests that becoming only is if it is grounded in being as being: "That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to one of being."

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p. 19
4 months 3 weeks ago

Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Watergate was thus nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch its adversaries-a simulation of scandal for regenerative ends.

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"The Precession of Simulacra," p. 16
1 month 3 weeks ago

With silent strides Odysseus then shot back the bolt,passed lightly through the courtyard and sped down the street.Some saw him take the graveyard's zigzag mountain path,some saw him leap on rocks that edged the savage shore,some visionaries saw him in the dead of nightswimming and talking secretly with the sea-demons,but only a small boy saw him in a lonely dreamsit crouched and weeping by the dark sea's foaming edge.

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Book II, line 457
6 months 3 weeks ago

Socrates did not stop with a philosophical consideration of mankind; he addressed himself to each one individually, wrested everything from him, and sent him away empty-handed.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

No man must encroach upon my province nor I upon his. He may advise me, moderately and without perniciousness, but he must not expect to dictate to me. He may censure me freely and without reserve but he should remember that I am to act by my deliberation and not his. He may exercise a republican boldness in judging, but he must not be peremptory and imperious in prescribing. Force may never be resorted to but, in the most extraordinary and imperious emergency.

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Book II, "Of Rights"
5 months 3 weeks ago

We are not that we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for that we are capable of being.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 37
5 months 2 weeks ago

We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He has disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself.

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Book II, Chapter 4, "The Perfect Penitent"
3 months 2 weeks ago

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

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As quoted in The #1 New York Times Bestseller (1992) by John Bear, p. 93
5 months 4 weeks ago

When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?

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Book II, Ch. 12. Apology for Raimond Sebond
3 months 2 weeks ago

It is a very hard undertaking to seek to please everybody.

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Maxim 675
4 months 3 weeks ago

To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature.

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As quoted in The Anchor Book of French Quotations with English Translations (1963) by Norbert Gutermam
2 months 2 weeks ago

Carnap made a detailed analysis of Heidegger's statement, "Nothing nihilates," in order to show that it is purely verbal, devoid of empirical meaning. (Incidentally, this is the only sentence from existentialist philosophy the majority of contemporary positivists appear familiar with.)

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Chapter Eight, Logical Empiricism, p. 187
2 months 2 weeks ago

Ethical control may survive in small groups, but the control of the population as a whole must be delegated to specialists-to police, priests, owners, teachers, therapists, and so on, with their specialized reinforcers and their codified contingencies.

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Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), p. 155
2 months 2 weeks ago

Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.

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Ch. IV: "The Golden Rule and After", p. 110.
1 month 2 weeks ago

So then it is eternal and infinite and one and all alike.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

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16:17-19 (KJV)
5 months 4 weeks ago

He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

I could show, that the same faction has, in one reign, promoted popular seditions, and, in the next, been a patron of tyranny; I could show, that they have all of them betrayed the public safety at all times, and have very frequently with equal perfidy made a market of their own cause, and their own associates. I could show how vehemently they have contended for names, and how silently they have passed over things of the last importance.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

With this as its basic constitution, civilization achieved things of which gentile society was not even remotely capable. But it achieved them by setting in motion the lowest instincts and passions in man and developing them at the expense of all his other abilities. From its first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization; wealth and again wealth and once more wealth, wealth, not of society, but of the single scurvy individual-here was its one and final aim. If at the same time the progressive development of science and a repeated flowering of supreme art dropped into its lap, it was only because without them modern wealth could not have completely realized its achievements.

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The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) as translated by Ernest Untermann (1902)
3 months 2 weeks ago

There is simply too much to think about. It is hopeless - too many kinds of special preparation are required. In electronics, in economics, in social analysis, in history, in psychology, in international politics, most of us are, given the oceanic proliferating complexity of things, paralyzed by the very suggestion that we assume responsibility for so much. This is what makes packaged opinion so attractive.

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There Is Simply Too Much to Think About (1992), pp. 173-174
4 months 4 days ago

One cannot ignore half of life for the purposes of science, and then claim that the results of science give a full and adequate picture of the meaning of life. All discussions of 'life' which begin with a description of man's place on a speck of matter in space, in an endless evolutionary scale, are bound to be half-measures, because they leave out most of the experiences which are important to use as human beings.

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p. 309
4 months 2 weeks ago

If there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind.

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Vol. 1, bk. 1, ch.4
4 months 1 week ago

The discovery that mass changes with velocity, a discovery made when minute bodies came under consideration, finally forced surrender of the notion that mass is a fixed and inalienable possession of ultimate elements or individuals, so that time is now considered to be their fourth dimension.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

It is impossible to pursue this nonsense any further.

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(Bastiat and Carey), p. 813 (last text page, second last line).
6 months 6 days ago

Cease therefore to be dismayed by the mere novelty and so to reject reason from your mind with loathing: weigh the questions rather with keen judgment and if they seem to you to be true, surrender, or if the thing is false, gird yourself to the encounter.

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Book II, lines 1040-1043 (tr. Munro)
4 months 4 days ago

Capitalism lacks narrativity.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

We have an enemy, to whose virtues we can owe nothing; but on this occasion we are infinitely obliged to one of his vices. We owe more to his insolence than to our own precaution.

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p.3
3 months 2 weeks ago

For his purposes (and mine), scientific medicine is defined as the set of practices which submit themselves to the ordeal of being tested. Alternative medicine is defined as that set of practices which cannot be tested, refuse to be tested, or consistently fail tests. If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine. Conversely, if a technique devised by the President of the Royal College of Physicians consistently fails in double-blind trials, it will cease to be a part of 'orthodox' medicine. Whether it will then become 'alternative' will depend upon whether it is adopted by a sufficiently ambitious quack (there are always sufficiently gullible patients).

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Foreword to Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations by John Diamond, Vintage, 2001.
2 months 2 weeks ago

All wars today tend to be netwars.

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55
3 weeks 3 days ago

After years of study, consolidation, destruction, rebuilding, shifting, redefining….it eventually stops, I promise. It doesn’t go on forever, for all intents and purposes. Functionally we don’t have to know everything to know enough. We can know what is good, simply by knowing enough.

Studying objective reality, watching the consequences of subjectively driven beings setting certain principles but failing to evaluate the consequences of their insistence drove me to investigate to understand.

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4 months 4 days ago

The terrible struggle of the thinking man and woman against political, social and moral conventions owes its origin to the family, where the child is ever compelled to battle against the internal and external use of force. The categorical imperatives: You shall! you must! this is right! that is wrong! this is true! that is false! shower like a violent rain upon the unsophisticated head of the young being and impress upon its sensibilities that it has to bow before the long established and hard notions of thoughts and emotions.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.

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Book III, Ch. 9. Of Vanity
4 months 3 weeks ago

To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history.But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the Pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it.

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Chapter V
6 months 6 days ago

O slavish man! will you not bear with your own brother, who has God for his Father, as being a son from the same stock, and of the same high descent? But if you chance to be placed in some superior station, will you presently set yourself up for a tyrant?

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Book I, ch. 13, 3, 4.
5 months 2 weeks 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
6 months 1 week ago

The silent treasuring up of knowledge; learning without satiety; and instructing others without being wearied: which one of these things belongs to me? To keep silently in mind what one has seen and heard, to study hard and never feel contented, to teach others tirelessly; have I done (all of) these things?

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6 months 6 days ago

Know, first, who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.

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Book III, ch. 1, 25.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Art is a jealous mistress.

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Wealth
6 months 4 days ago

Rules for Axioms. I. Not to omit any necessary principle without asking whether it is admittied, however clear and evident it may be. II. Not to demand, in axioms, any but things that are perfectly evident in themselves.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you've got to keep your feet warm.

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6 months 4 days ago

Do not imagine that it is less an accident by which you find yourself master of the wealth which you possess, than that by which this man found himself king.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

There are not two kinds of human being, savage and civilized. There is only the human animal, forever at war with itself.

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An Old Chaos: Frozen Horses and Deserts of Brick (p. 25)
5 months 1 week ago

Strength and beauty are the blessings of youth; temperance, however, is the flower of old age.

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Fragment quoted in H. Diels and W. Kranz (eds.) Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Vol. II (1952), no. 294

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