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4 months 1 week ago

Women . . . have . . . small and narrow chests, and broad hips, to the end they should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children. . . . A woman is, or at least should be, a friendly, courteous, and a merry companion in life . . . the honor and ornament of the house, and inclined to tenderness, for thereunto are they chiefly created, to bear children, and to be the pleasure, joy and solace of their husbands.

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-- Table Talk, quoted in Luther On "Woman"
2 weeks 5 days ago

Take your fill when the cask is first opened and when it is nearly spent, but midways be sparing: it is poor saving when you come to the lees.

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Line 5 This quote is often directly attributed to Seneca, but he is referring to lines 368-369 of Works and Days by the Greek poet Hesiod, (translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White)
4 months 5 days ago

We need not suppose that when po+B40wer resides in an exclusive class, that class will knowingly and deliberately sacrifice the other classes to themselves: it suffices that, in the absence of its natural defenders, the interest of the excluded is always in danger of being overlooked: and, when looked at, is seen with very different eyes from those of the persons whom it directly concerns.

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Ch. III: The Ideally Best Polity
5 months 5 days ago

Even Plato assumes that the genuinely perfect condition of man means no sex distinction (and how strange this is for people like Feuerbach who are so occupied with affirming sex-differentiation, regarding which they would do best to appeal to paganism). He assumes that originally there was only the masculine (and when there is no thought of femininity, sex-distinction is undifferentiated), but through degeneration and corruption the feminine appeared. He assumes that base and cowardly men became women in death, but he still gives them hope of being elevated again to masculinity. He thinks that in the perfect life the masculine, as originally, will be the only sex, that is, that sex-distinction is a matter of indifference. So it is in Plato, and this, the idea of the state notwithstanding, was the culmination of his philosophy. How much more so, then, the Christian view.

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The two processes by which Science is constructed are the 'Explication of Conceptions' and the 'Colligation of Facts'.

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2 months 1 week ago

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

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Simon, H. A. (1971) "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World" in: Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore. MD: The Johns Hopkins Press. pp. 40-41.
4 months 4 days ago

Who is going to educate the human race in the principles and practice of conservation?

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Chapter 12 (p. 112)
2 weeks 5 days ago

You are doing an excellent thing, one which will be wholesome for you, if, as you write me, you are persisting in your effort to attain sound understanding; it is foolish to pray for this when you can acquire it from yourself. We do not need to uplift our hands towards heaven, or to beg the keeper of a temple to let us approach his idol's ear, as if in this way our prayers were more likely to be heard. A god is near you, with you, and in you. This is what I mean, Lucilius: there sits a holy spirit within us, one who marks our good and bad deeds, and is our a guardian.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

A global transition to a cruelty-free vegan diet won't just help non-human animals. The transition will also help malnourished humans who could benefit from the grain currently fed to factory-farmed animals. For factory-farming is not just cruel; it's energy-inefficient. Let's take just one example. Over the past few decades, millions of Ethiopians have died of "food shortages" while Ethiopia grew grain to sell to the West to feed cattle. Western meat-eating habits prop up the price of grain so that poor people in the developing world can't afford to buy it. In consequence, they starve by the millions.In my work, I explore futuristic, hi-tech solutions to the problem of suffering. But anybody who seriously wants to reduce human and non-human suffering alike should adopt a cruelty-free vegan lifestyle today.

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"A World Without Suffering?", Instituto Humanitas Unisinos, Jan. 2011
3 weeks 5 days ago

Not a May-game is this man's life; but a battle and a march, a warfare with principalities and powers. No idle promenade through fragrant orange-groves and green flowery spaces, waited on by the choral Muses and the rosy Hours: it is a stern pilgrimage through burning sandy solitudes, through regions of thick-ribbed ice. He walks among men; loves men, with inexpressible soft pity,-as they cannot love him: but his soul dwells in solitude, in the uttermost parts of Creation. In green oases by the palm-tree wells, he rests a space; but anon he has to journey forward, escorted by the Terrors and the Splendours, the Archdemons and Archangels. All Heaven, all Pandemonium are his escort. The stars keen-glancing, from the Immensities, send tidings to him; the graves, silent with their dead, from the Eternities. Deep calls for him unto Deep.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

All of us, I believe, are fortunate to have been born.

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"Death" (1970), p. 7.
3 months 4 days ago

The Age of Empty Freedom ... does not know that man must first through labour, industry, and art, learn how to know; but it has a certain fixed standard for all conceptions, and an established Common Sense of Mankind always ready and at hand, innate within itself and there present without trouble on its part;-and those conceptions and this Common Sense are to it the measure of the efficient and the real. It has this great advantage over the Age of Science, that it knows all things without having learned anything; and can pass judgment upon whatever comes before it at once and without hesitation,-without needing any preliminary evidence:-'That which I do not immediately comprehend by the conceptions which dwell within me, is nothing,'-says Empty Freedom.

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p. 20
5 months 1 day ago

If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

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3 weeks 5 days ago

A million blockheads looking authoritatively into one man of what you call genius, or noble sense, will make nothing but nonsense out of him and his qualities, and his virtues and defects, if they look till the end of time. He understands them, sees what they are; but that they should understand him, and see with rounded outline what his limits are,-this, which would mean that they are bigger than he, is forever denied them. Their one good understanding of him is that they at last should loyally say, "We do not quite understand thee; we perceive thee to be nobler and wiser and bigger than we, and will loyally follow thee."

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3 months 1 day ago

I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.

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2 months 1 week ago

In the process of decision those alternatives are chosen which are considered to be appropriate means of reaching desired ends. Ends themselves, however, are often merely instrumental to more final objectives. We are thus led to the conception of a series, or hierarchy, of ends. Rationality has to do with the construction of means-ends chains of this kind.

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p. 62.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Whit Meynell was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

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The Philosopher's Pupil (1983) p. 165.
2 months 2 weeks ago

One gloomy and pessimistic writer with a powerful style affects a whole generation of writers, who in turn affect almost every educated person in the country.

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p. 79
3 weeks 3 days ago

Space, subjectively, is the coexistence of perceptions - perceiving two objects at once.

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Ch. 6 : Our Souls
4 months 5 days ago

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?

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Works and Days
3 months 3 weeks ago

Truthfulness under oath is, by now, a matter of our civic religion, our relation to our fellow citizens rather than our relation to a nonhuman power.

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"John Searle on Realism and Relativism." Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).
2 months 4 days ago

Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

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Thoughts of Prince Andrew Bk XII, Ch. 16
2 months 2 weeks ago

Power is more 'spacious' than violence. And violence becomes power if it 'gives itself more time.' Looked at from this perspective, power rests on an excess of space and time.

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4 months 6 days ago

The animals are much more content with mere existence than we are; the plants are wholly so; and man is so according to how dull and insensitive he is. The animal's life consequently contains less suffering but also less pleasure than the human's, the direct reason being that on the one hand it is free from care and anxiety and the torments that attend them, but on the other is without hope and therefore has no share in that anticipation of a happy future which, together with the enchanting products of the imagination which accompany it, is the source of most of our greatest joys and pleasures. The animal lacks both anxiety and hope because its consciousness is restricted to what is clearly evident and thus to the present moment: the animal is the present incarnate.

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Vol. 2 "On the Suffering of the World" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
2 months 2 weeks ago

The poor, stupid, free American citizen! Free to starve, free to tramp the highways of this great country, he enjoys universal suffrage, and, by that right, he has forged chains about his limbs. The reward that he receives is stringent labor laws prohibiting the right of boycott, of picketing, in fact, of everything, except the right to be robbed of the fruits of his labor.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.

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"Le monde où l'on catche"
3 months 3 weeks ago

If I had followed the multitude, I should not have studied philosophy.

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As quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, vii. 182.
3 months 3 weeks ago

There is one story left, one road: that it is. And on this road there are very many signs that, being, is uncreated and imperishable, whole, unique, unwavering, and complete.

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Frag. B 8.1-4, quoted by Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics, 144
5 months 2 days ago

When you write a short story ... you had better know the ending first. The end of a story is only the end to the reader. To the writer, it's the beginning. If you don't know exactly where you're going every minute you're writing, you'll never get there or anywhere.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Functional communication is only the outer layer of the one- dimensional universe in which man is trained to target-to translate the negative into the positive so that he can continue to function, reduced but fit and reasonably well. The institutions of free speech and freedom of thought do not hamper the mental coordination with the established reality. What is taking place is a sweeping redefinition of thought itself, of its function and content. The coordination of the individual with his society reaches into those layers of the mind where the very concepts are elaborated which are designed to comprehend the established reality. These concepts are taken from the intellectual tradition and translated into operational terms-a translation which has the effect of reducing the tension between thought and reality by weakening the negative power of thought.

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p. 104
4 months 2 weeks ago

For freedom is not acquired by satisfying yourself with what you desire, but by destroying your desire.

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Book IV, ch. 1, 175.
2 months 2 weeks ago

The dominant, almost general, idea of revolution - particularly the Socialist idea - is that revolution is a violent change of social conditions through which one social class, the working class, becomes dominant over another class, the capitalist class. It is the conception of a purely physical change, and as such it involves only political scene shifting and institutional rearrangements. Bourgeois dictatorship is replaced by the "dictatorship of the proletariat" - or by that of its "advance guard," the Communist Party. Lenin takes the seat of the Romanovs, the Imperial Cabinet is rechristened Soviet of People's Commissars, Trotsky is appointed Minister of War, and a labourer becomes the Military Governor General of Moscow. That is, in essence, the Bolshevik conception of revolution, as translated into actual practice.

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2 months 1 week ago

For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their simulation models.

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"The Precession of Simulacra," pp. 1-2
4 weeks 1 day ago

In the 1980s and 90s there was an extension of the autonomy of individual property owners in... a movement towards neoliberalism represented by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and... by the Chicago school of economics that denigrated... the role of the state in the economy, that said the private markets would be able to solve most social distribution problems and the like. This was true in many ways. The world did become much richer in this period, but it also became much more unequal... Without adequate regulation and... effort to protect people against the excesses of market capitalism, you had people... left behind, even as their societies as a whole, grew. ...This ...became one of the triggers for the kind of populism we've seen arise in many rich countries.

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14:13
2 weeks 2 days ago

The last fact which knowledge can discover is that the world is a manifestation, and in every way a puzzling manifestation, of the universal will to live.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The educated man is the man who does not live in immediate intuition, but in his recollection so that little is new to him any longer.

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Chapter 4, Philosophy As Writing: The Case Of Hegel, p. 74
2 months 2 days ago

It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.

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(1957) from "Classroom Without Walls", Explorations Vol. 7, 1957; reprinted in Explorations in Communication ed. E. Carpenter & M. McLuhan, (Boston: Beacon, 1960); and again in McLuhan: Hot and Cool ed. G. E. Stearn (NY: Dial, 1967).
2 months 3 weeks ago

You have to study a great deal to know a little.

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I
4 months 3 days ago

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

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Act 2, sc. 3
3 months 1 day ago

A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.

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The question is frequently asked: why there is a school of theology attached to every University? The answer is easy: It is, that the Universities may subsist, and that the instruction may not become corrupt. Originally, the Universities were only schools of theology, to which other faculties were joined, as subjects around their Queen. The edifice of public instruction, placed on such a foundation, has continued even to our day. Those who have subverted it among themselves, will repent it, in vain, for a long time to come. To burn a city, there is needed only a child or a madman; but to rebuild it, architects, materials, workmen, money, and especially time, will be required.

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XXXVIII, p. 111
3 months 1 day ago

No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.

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2 months 4 days ago

And therefore just as a brigand caught in broad daylight in the act cannot persuade us that he did not lift his knife in order to rob his victim of his purse, and had no thought of killing him, we too, it would seem, cannot persuade ourselves or others that the soldiers and policemen around us are not to guard us, but only for defense against foreign foes, and to regulate traffic and fetes and reviews; we cannot persuade ourselves and others that we do not know that the men do not like dying of hunger, bereft of the right to gain their subsistence from the earth on which they live; that they do not like working underground, in the water, or in the stifling heat, for ten to fourteen hours a day, at night in factories to manufacture objects for our pleasure. One would imagine it impossible to deny what is so obvious. Yet it is denied.

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Chapter XII, Conclusion-Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand
2 weeks 5 days ago

I never read a book before reviewing it: it prejudices a man so.

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Reported in Bon-Mots of Sydney Smith and R. Brinsley Sheridan, edited by Walter Jerrold with grotesques by Aubrey Beardsley (London: J. M. Dent and Company, 1893), p. 24
5 months 5 days ago

The reason I cannot really say that I positively enjoy nature is that I do not quite realize what it is that I enjoy. A work of art, on the other hand, I can grasp. I can - if I may put it this way - find that Archimedian point, and as soon as I have found it, everything is readily clear for me. Then I am able to pursue this one main idea and see how all the details serve to illuminate it.

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5 months 2 days ago

The division between human and robot is perhaps not as significant as that between intelligence and nonintelligence.

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3 months 1 week ago

We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.

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"Conversation Between D'Alembert and Diderot"

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