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Karl Marx
Karl Marx
1 month 3 weeks ago
The aggregate capital appears as the...

The aggregate capital appears as the capital stock of all individual capitalists combined. This joint stock company has in common with many other stock companies that everyone knows what he puts in, but not what he will get out of it.

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Vol. II, Ch. XX, p. 437.
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
2 months 1 week ago
The silent treasuring up of...

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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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
2 months 1 week ago
Recompense hatred with justice, and...

Recompense hatred with justice, and recompense kindness with kindness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
1 week 5 days ago
Long after Plato's time the concept...

Long after Plato's time the concept of the Ideas still represented the sphere of aloofness, independence, and in a certain sense even freedom, an objectivity that did not submit to 'our' interests.

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p. 46.
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
1 month 1 week ago
Sweet exists….

Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention, colour by convention; atoms and Void [alone] exist in reality.

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(trans. Freeman 1948), p. 92.
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 2 weeks ago
There is no version of primeval...

There is no version of primeval history, preceding the discoveries of modern science, that is as rational and as inspiring as that of the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
1 month 3 weeks ago
The individual produces an object and,...

The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production.

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Introduction, p. 14.
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
2 months 1 day ago
"You err, not knowing the Scriptures...

"You err, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God" This canon is the mother of all canons against heresy; the causes of error are two; the ignorance of the will of God, and the ignorance or not sufficient consideration of his power.

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Of Heresies
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
1 month 3 weeks ago
Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional,...

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
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
1 month 3 weeks ago
Wisdom and contrivance are shown in...

Wisdom and contrivance are shown in overcoming difficulties, so there is no place for them in a Being for whom no difficulties exist.

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pages 176-177; Early Modern Texts page 16
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
2 months 1 week ago
Now what has been said about...

Now what has been said about the Jews is also to be understood about Cahorsins, and anyone else depending upon the depravity of usury.

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art. 4
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 1 day ago
Among the celestial...
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Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
6 days ago
The chief danger to philosophy is...

The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.

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Pt. V, ch. 1, sec. 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
1 month 3 weeks ago
Communism is for us not a...

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

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Vol. I, Part 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Montesquieu
Montesquieu
1 week 2 days ago
Not to be loved is a...

Not to be loved is a misfortune, but it is an insult to be loved no longer.

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No. 3. (Zachi writing to Usbek)
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 3 weeks ago
Perhaps the best hope for the...

Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 3 weeks ago
I should say that the universe...

I should say that the universe is just there, and that is all.

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BBC Radio Debate on the Existence of God, Bertrand Russell v. Frederick Copleston, 1948
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
3 weeks 1 day ago
Volumes might be written upon the...

Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.

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Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. V, The Reconciliation
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 2 weeks ago
Civilizations have always been pyramidal in...

Civilizations have always been pyramidal in structure. As one climbs toward the apex of the social edifice, there is increased leisure and increasing opportunity to pursue happiness. As one climbs, one finds also fewer and fewer people to enjoy this more and more. Invariably, there is a preponderance of the dispossessed. And remember this, no matter how well off the bottom layers of the pyramid might be on an absolute scale, they are always dispossessed in comparison with the apex.So there is always social friction in ordinary human societies. The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
1 month 3 weeks ago
It would be too ridiculous to...

It would be too ridiculous to go about seriously to prove that wealth does not consist in money, or in gold and silver; but in what money purchases, and is valuable only for purchasing. Money no doubt, makes always a part of the national capital; but it has already been shown that it generally makes but a small part, and always the most unprofitable part of it.

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Chapter I, p. 470.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
1 month 3 weeks ago
Consider MacArthur and his Republican supporters....

Consider MacArthur and his Republican supporters. So limited is his intelligence and his imagination that he is never puzzled for one moment. All we have to do is to go back to the days of the Opium War. After we have killed a sufficient number of millions of Chinese, the survivors among them will perceive our moral superiority and hail MacArthur as a saviour. But let us not be one-sided. Stalin, I should say, is equally simple- minded and equally out of date. He, too, believes that if his armies could occupy Britain and reduce us all to the economic level of Soviet peasants and the political level of convicts, we should hail him as a great deliverer and bless the day when we were freed from the shackles of democracy. One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

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Part I: Man and Nature, Ch. 1: Current Perplexities, pp. 4-5
Philosophical Maxims
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
1 month 2 weeks ago
The dissimulation of the woven texture...

The dissimulation of the woven texture can in any case take centuries to undo its web: a web that envelops a web, undoing the web for centuries; reconstituting it too as an organism, indefinitely regenerating its own tissue behind the cutting trace, the decision of each reading. There is always a surprise in store for the anatomy or physiology of any criticism that might think it had mastered the game, surveyed all the threads at once, deluding itself, too, in wanting to look at the text without touching it, without laying a hand on the "object," without risking- which is the only chance of entering into the game, by getting a few fingers caught- the addition of some new thread.

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Plato's Pharmacy
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
1 month 2 weeks ago
Recalling all the erroneous things that...

Recalling all the erroneous things that doctors have been able to say about sex or madness does us a fat lot of good. I think that what is currently politically important is to determine the regime of verediction established at a given moment ... on the basis of which you can now recognize, for example, that doctors in the nineteenth century said so many stupid things about sex. ... It is not so much the history of the true or the history of the false as the history of verediction which has a political significance.

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Lecture 2, January 17, 1979, p. 36
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
1 month 3 weeks ago
I do not know but it...

I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day.

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p. 491
Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
2 months 1 week ago
All those of you who rejoice...

All those of you who rejoice in peace, now it is time to judge the truth....Undoubtedly in days gone by there were holy men as Scripture tells,For God stated that he left behind seven thousand men in safety,And there are many priests and kings who are righteous under the law,There you find so many of the prophets, and many of the people too.Tell me which of the righteous of that time claimed an altar for himself?That wicked nation perpetrated a very large number of crimes,They sacrificed to idols and may prophets were put to death,Yet not a single one of the righteous withdrew from unity.The righteous endured the unrighteous while waiting for the winnower:They all mingled in one temple but were not mingled in their hearts;They said such things against them yet they had a single altar.

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Early Christian Latin Poets, 2000, Carolinne White, Routledge, London, ISBN 0415187826 ISBN 9780415187824 p. 55.
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
3 weeks 1 day ago
The secret of Hegel's dialectic lies...

The secret of Hegel's dialectic lies ultimately in this alone, that it negates theology through philosophy in order then to negate philosophy through theology. Both the beginning and the end are constituted by theology; philosophy stands in the middle as the negation of the first positedness, but the negation of the negation is again theology. At first everything is overthrown, but then everything is reinstated in its old place, as in Descartes. The Hegelian philosophy is the last grand attempt to restore a lost and defunct Christianity through philosophy, and, of course, as is characteristic of the modern era, by identifying the negation of Christianity with Christianity itself.

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Part II, Section 21
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
1 month 3 weeks ago
The First [Friend] is the alter...

The First [Friend] is the alter ego, the man who first reveals to you that you are not alone in the world by turning out (beyond hope) to share all your most secret delights. There is nothing to be overcome in making him your friend; he and you join like raindrops on a window. But the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything... Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle. he has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one... How can he be so nearly right, and yet, invariably, just not right? He is as fascinating (and infuriating) as a woman.

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Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
2 months 3 weeks ago
It is the duty of the...

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
2 weeks 1 day ago
The precarious ontological link between Logos...

The precarious ontological link between Logos and Eros is broken, and scientific rationality emerges as essentially neutral.

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p. 147
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
1 month 3 weeks ago
This actual world of what is...

This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration.

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Vol I, Ch. 4, The World As Will: Second Aspect, § 53, as translated by Eric F. J. Payne, 1958
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
5 days ago
With Puritanism as the constant check...

With Puritanism as the constant check upon American life, neither truth nor sincerity is possible. Nothing but gloom and mediocrity to dictate human conduct, curtail natural expression, and stifle our best impulses.

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 2 weeks ago
Of all the books I have...

Of all the books I have ever worked on, I think Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare gave me the most pleasure, day in, day out. For months and months I lived and thought Shakespeare, and I don't see how there can be any greater pleasure in the world, any pleasure, that is, that one can indulge in for as much as ten hours without pause, day after day indefinitely.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
1 month 3 weeks ago
We all remember how many religious...

We all remember how many religious wars were fought for a religion of love and gentleness; how many bodies were burned alive with the genuinely kind intention of saving souls from the eternal fire of hell. Only if we give up our authoritarian attitude in the realm of opinion, only if we establish the attitude of give and take, of readiness to learn from other people, can we hope to control acts of violence inspired by piety and duty.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
1 month 3 weeks ago
Rights are, then, the fruits of...

Rights are, then, the fruits of the law, and of the law alone. There are no rights without law-no rights contrary to the law-no rights anterior to the law. Before the existence of laws there may be reasons for wishing that there were laws-and doubtless such reasons cannot be wanting, and those of the strongest kind;-but a reason for wishing that we possessed a right, does not constitute a right. To confound the existence of a reason for wishing that we possessed a right, with the existence of the right itself, is to confound the existence of a want with the means of relieving it. It is the same as if one should say, everybody is subject to hunger, therefore everybody has something to eat.

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Pannomial Fragments (c. 1831), quoted in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. III (1838), p. 221
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel
3 weeks 2 days ago
One can only become a philosopher,...

One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.

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"Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaeum (1798)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #54
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 month 3 weeks ago
The book written against fame and...

The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page.

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1857
Philosophical Maxims
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
2 weeks 6 days ago
It appears to me impossible that...

It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organised dust - ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable, and life is more than a dream.

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Philosophical Maxims
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
5 months 4 weeks ago
Terrifying impact of the Thing

The wreck of the Titanic functions as a sublime object: a positive, material object elevated to the status of the impossible Thing. And perhaps all the effort to articulate the metaphysical meaning of the Titanic is nothing but an attempt to escape this terrifying impact of the Thing, an attempt to domesticate the Thing by reducing it to its symbolic status, by providing it with a meaning. We usually say that the fascinating presence of a Thing obscures its meaning; here, the opposite is true: the meaning obscures the terrifying impact of its presence.

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Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
6 days ago
When contemporary feminist movement first began,...

When contemporary feminist movement first began, feminist writings and scholarship by black women was groundbreaking. The writings of black women like Cellestine Ware, Toni Cade Bambara, Michele Wallace, Barbara Smith, and Angela Davis, to name a few, were all works that sought to articulate, define, speak to and against the glaring omissions in feminist work, the erasure of black female presence.

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Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 month 3 weeks ago
Genius is always sufficiently the enemy...

Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence.

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par. 19
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
2 months 2 weeks ago
Science is a systematic method for...

Science is a systematic method for studying and working out those generalizations that seem to describe the behavior of the universe. It could exist as a purely intellectual game that would never affect the practical life of human beings either for good or evil, and that was very nearly the case in ancient Greece, for instance. Technology is the application of scientific findings to the tools of everyday life, and that application can be wise or unwise, useful or harmful. Very often, those who govern technological decisions are not scientists and know little about science.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 days ago
The journalists have constructed for themselves...

The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.

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D 20
Philosophical Maxims
Plato
Plato
2 months 2 weeks ago
I do see one large and...

I do see one large and grievous kind of ignorance, separate from the rest, and as weighty as all the other parts put together. Thinking that one knows a thing when one does not know it. Through this, I believe, all the mistakes of the mind are caused in all of us.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
1 week 1 day ago
The Great Beast is the only...

The Great Beast is the only object of idolatry, the only ersatz of God, the only imitation of something which is infinitely far from me and which is I myself.

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p. 121; footnote in Gravity and Grace
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 month 3 weeks ago
The true test of civilization is,...

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

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Civilization
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon
1 day ago
During and after World War II,...

During and after World War II, a large number of academic economists were exposed directly to business life, and had more or less extensive opportunities to observe how decisions were actually made in business organizations. Moreover, those who became active in the development of the new management science were faced with the necessity of developing decision-making procedures that could actually be applied in practical situations. Surely these trends would be conducive to moving the basic assumptions of economic rationality in the direction of greater realism.

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Philosophical Maxims
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
5 months 4 weeks ago
Cyphered message

The symptom is not only a cyphered message, it is at the same time a way for the subject to organize his enjoyment - that is why, even after the completed interpretation, the subject is not prepared to renounce his symptom.

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Philosophical Maxims
Zeno of Citium
Zeno of Citium
1 month 4 days ago
We have two ears and one...

We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say.

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As quoted in Diogenes Laërtius Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, vii. 23.
Philosophical Maxims
Cornel West
Cornel West
1 month 2 weeks ago
To be a Christian - a...

To be a Christian - a follower of Jesus Christ - is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom.

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(p172)
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
6 days ago
As a black woman interested in...

As a black woman interested in feminist movement, I am often asked whether being black is more important than being a woman; whether feminist struggle to end sexist oppression is more important than the struggle to racism or vice versa. All such questions are rooted in competitive either/or thinking, the belief that the self is formed in opposition to an other. ... Most people are socialized to think in terms of opposition rather than compatibility. Rather than seeing anti-racist work as totally compatible with working to end sexist oppression, they often see them as two movements competing for first place.

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Philosophical Maxims
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