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8 months 1 week ago

Of how much more passion than reason has Jupiter composed us? putting in, as one would say, "scarce half an ounce to a pound."

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8 months 2 days ago

Political independence, as the right to owe his existence and continuance in society not to the arbitrary will of another, but to his own rights and powers as a member of the commonwealth.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.

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p. 4
9 months ago

The truly good and wise man will bear all kinds of fortune in a seemly way, and will always act in the noblest manner that the circumstances allow.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

There is no nature which is inferior to art, the arts imitate the nature of things.

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XI, 10
5 months 2 weeks ago

The man of science who commits himself to even one statement which turns out to be devoid of good foundation loses somewhat of his reputation among his fellows, and if he be guilty of the same error often he loses not only his intellectual, but his moral standing among them. For it is justly felt that errors of this kind have their root rather in the moral than in the intellectual nature.

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The Evidence of the Miracle of the Resurrection

If the State, modeled after the universe, is split into two spheres or classes of beings - wherein the free represent the ideas and the unfree the concrete and sensate things - then the ultimate and uppermost order remains unrealized by both. By using sensate things as tools or organs, the ideas obtain a direct relationship to the apparitions and enter into them as souls. God, however, as identity of the highest order, remains above all reality and eternally has merely an indirect relationship. If then in the higher moral order the State represents a second nature, then the divine can never have anything other than an indirect relationship to it, never can it bear any real relationship to it, and religion, if it seeks to preserve itself in unscathed pure ideality, can therefore never exist - even in the most perfect State - other than esoterically in the form of mystery cults.

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P. 51
7 months ago

For my part for one, though I make no doubt of preferring the antient Course, or almost any other to this vile chimera, and sick mans dream of Government yet I could not actively, or with a good heart, and clear conscience, go to the establishment of a monarchical despotism in the place of this system of Anarchy.

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Letter to Richard Burke (26 September 1791), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), p. 414
3 months 2 weeks ago

I have only two rules which I regard as principles of conduct. The first is: Have no rules. The second is: Be independent of the opinion of others.

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8 months 1 week ago

T is one and the same Nature that rolls on her course, and whoever has sufficiently considered the present state of things might certainly conclude as to both the future and the past.

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

Commit no slander; so that infamy and wickedness may not happen unto thee.

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(p. 59)
4 months 1 week ago

Let us not admit discourses by Epicureans or Pyrrhonists - though indeed the gods have already in their wisdom destroyed their works, so that most of their books are no longer available. Nevertheless, there is no reason why I should not, by way of example, mention these works too, to show what sort of discourses priests must especially avoid; and if such discourses, then much more must they avoid such thoughts.

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Fragmentum Epistulae, 288a-305d
6 months 1 week ago

Man's life cannot "be lived" by repeating the pattern of his species; he must live. Man is the only animal that can be bored, that can be discontented, that can feel evicted from paradise. Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve and from which he cannot escape. He cannot go back to the prehuman state of harmony with nature; he must proceed to develop his reason until he becomes the master of nature, and of himself.

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Ch. 3 "Human Nature and Character
3 months 3 weeks ago

Every being ought to do that which is according to its constitution; and all other things have been constituted for the sake of the superior, but the rational for the sake of one another.

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VII, 55
6 months 3 weeks ago

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

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7 months 4 days ago

The more man ascends through the past, and the more he launches into the future, the greater he will be, and all these philosophers and ministers and truth-telling men who have fallen victims to the stupidity of nations, the atrocities of priests, the fury of tyrants, what consolation was left for them in death? This: That prejudice would pass, and that posterity would pour out the vial of ignominy upon their enemies. O Posterity! Holy and sacred stay of the unhappy and the oppressed; thou who art just, thou who art incorruptible, thou who findest the good man, who unmaskest the hypocrite, who breakest down the tyrant, may thy sure faith, thy consoling faith never, never abandon me!

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As quoted in "Diderot" in The Great Infidels (1881) by Robert Green Ingersoll; The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll Vol. III (1900), p. 367
4 months 3 weeks ago

If we study the history of science we see happen two inverse phenomena... Sometimes simplicity hides under complex appearances; sometimes it is the simplicity which is apparent, and which disguises extremely complicated realities....No doubt, if our means of investigation should become more and more penetrating, we should discover the simple under the complex, then the complex under the simple, then again the simple under the complex, and so on, without our being able to foresee what will be the last term. We must stop somewhere, and that science may be possible, we must stop when we have found simplicity. This is the only ground on which we can rear the edifice of our generalizations.

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8 months 3 days ago

A propensity to hope and joy is real riches: One to fear and sorrow, real poverty.

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Part I, Essay 18: The Sceptic
6 months 3 weeks ago

Self-knowledge - the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Insurrection, never so necessary, is a most sad necessity; and governors who wait for that to instruct them are surely getting into the fatalest courses,-proving themselves sons of Nox and Chaos, of blind Cowardice, not of seeing Valour! How can there be any remedy in insurrection? It is a mere announcement of the disease,-visible now even to sons of Night. Insurrection usually gains little; usually wastes how much. One of its worst kinds of waste, to say nothing of the rest, is that of irritating and exasperating men against each other, by violence done, which is always sure to be injustice done; for violence does even justice unjustly. Book I, Chap. III

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9 months ago

May not we then confidently pronounce that man happy who realizes complete goodness in action, and is adequately furnished with external goods? Or should we add, that he must also be destined to go on living not for any casual period but throughout a complete lifetime in the same manner, and to die accordingly, because the future is hidden from us, and we conceive happiness as an end, something utterly and absolutely final and complete? If this is so, we shall pronounce those of the living who possess and are destined to go on possessing the good things we have specified to be supremely blessed, though on the human scale of bliss.

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6 months 1 day ago

Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread. Undoing Gender.

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Psychology Press. 2004. p. 29. ISBN 978-0-415-96922-2.
6 months 3 weeks ago

The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him.

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p. 60
7 months 4 weeks ago

The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.

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Ch. 5

To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.

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Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.

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Ch. 11 - Clifford's Lectures and Essays, 1879
4 months 1 week ago

I strongly suspect that the average reader does not suspect India has as rich a culture, as creative an imagination and wit and humor as any China has to offer, and that India was China's teacher in religion and imaginative literature, and the world's teacher in trigonometry, quadratic equations, grammar, phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables, chess, as well as in philosophy, and that she inspired Boccaccio, Goethe, Herder, Schopenhauer, Emerson, and probably also old Aesop.

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The Wisdom Of China And India by ) Lin Yutang

Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself.

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Difference of the Fichtean and Schellingean System of Philosophy, cited in W. Kaufmann, Hegel (1966), p. 49
7 months 3 weeks ago

If we compare the third-person attitude of someone who simply says how things stand (this is the attitude of the scientist, for example) with the performative attitude of someone who tries to understand what is said to him (this is the attitude of the interpreter, for example), the implications ... become clear. ... First, interpreters relinquish superiority that observers have by virtue of their privileged position, in that they themselves are drawn, at least potentially, into negotiations about the meaning and validity of utterances. By taking part in communicative action, they accept in principle the same status as those whose utterances they are trying to understand. ... It is impossible to decide a priori who is to learn from whom.

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p. 26
7 months ago

Nothing made a happy slave, but a degraded man. In proportion as the mind grew callous to its degradation, and all sense of manly pride was lost, the slave felt comfort. In fact, he was no longer a man. If he were to define a man, he would say with Shakspeare,"Man is a being, holding large discourse,Looking before and after."A slave was incapable of either looking before or after.

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Speech in the House of Commons (12 May 1789), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXVIII (1816), column 71
7 months 6 days ago

To a body of infinite size there can be ascribed neither centre nor boundary... Thus the Earth no more than any other world is at the centre.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Democratic socialists are either proletarians who are not yet sufficiently clear about the conditions of the liberation of their class, or they are representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, a class which, prior to the achievement of democracy and the socialist measures to which it gives rise, has many interests in common with the proletariat. It follows that, in moments of action, the communists will have to come to an understanding with these democratic socialists, and in general to follow as far as possible a common policy with them - provided that these socialists do not enter into the service of the ruling bourgeoisie and attack the communists. It is clear that this form of co-operation in action does not exclude the discussion of differences.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

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8 months 1 week ago

All passions that suffer themselves to be relished and digested are but moderate.

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Ch. 2. Of Sorrow, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842

He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.

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K 41

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

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January 5, 1856

It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise!

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Part 4, Chapter 5
8 months 3 weeks ago

The foundation of all technology is fire.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

With a foolish man make no dispute.

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It was the period of my mental progress which I have now reached that I formed the friendship which has been the honour and chief blessing of my existence, as well as the source of a great part of all that I have attempted to do, or hope to effect hereafter, for human improvement. My first introduction to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty years, consented to become my wife, was in 1830, when I was in my twenty-fifth and she in her twenty-third year.

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(p. 184)
6 months 1 week ago

Administration is not unlike play-acting. The task of the good actor is to know and play his role, although different roles may differ greatly in content. The effectiveness of the performance will depend on the effectiveness of the play and the effectiveness with which it is played. The effectiveness of the administrative process will vary with the effectiveness of the organization and the effectiveness with which its members play their parts.

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p. 252; As cited in: Herbert Simon (1996) The Sciences of the Artificial. page xii.
7 months 4 weeks ago

The totalitarian movements aim at and succeed in organizing masses-not classes, like the old interest parties of the Continental nation-states; not citizens with opinions about, interests in, the handling of public affairs, like the parties of Anglo-Saxon countries.

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Part 3, Ch. 10

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