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2 months 3 weeks ago

Did you not read our articles about the June revolution, and was not the essence of the June revolution the essence of our paper? Why then your hypocritical phrases, your attempt to find an impossible pretext? We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable.

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The final issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung (18 May 1849)''Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, Vol. VI, p. 503
3 months 1 week ago

Reviewing what you have learned and learning anew, you are fit to be a teacher.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.

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Creative Evolution (1907), Chapter III. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911, p. 271
6 months 4 weeks ago

If we merely wait for the appropriate moment we will never live to see it, because this [appropriate moment] cannot arrive without the subjective conditions of the maturity of the revolutionary force being fulfilled - it can only arrive after a series of failed attempts.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.

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Chapter II, p. 14.
2 months 3 weeks ago

We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.

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Old Age
2 months 3 weeks ago

In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven. But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

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8:10-12 (KJV) Said about the officer.
2 weeks 1 day ago

In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings - about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes - and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty consciousness of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight.

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"The Distracted Public" (1990), p. 156
1 month 3 weeks ago

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.

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Aphorism 26, as translated in Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms (1968)
1 month 1 week ago

The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anesthesia.

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p. 284.
2 months 1 week ago

There are two sentences inscribed upon the Delphic oracle, hugely accommodated to the usages of man's life: "Know thyself," and "Nothing too much;" and upon these all other precepts depend.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.

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Ch. 25
1 month 3 weeks ago

Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those they have slain.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Formerly, it was held by philosophers and mathematicians alike that the proofs in Geometry depended on the figure; nowadays, this is known to be false. In the best books there are no figures at all. The reasoning proceeds by the strict rules of formal logic from a set of axioms laid down to begin with.

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Ch. 5: Mathematics and the Metaphysicians
1 month 2 weeks ago

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.

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Education: What Knowledge Is of Most Worth?
2 months 1 week ago

Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.

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Concealment and Exposure and Other Essays (1998).
2 weeks 6 days ago

Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies.

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(p. 86)
1 month 1 week ago

Movement in direct experience is alteration in the qualities of objects, and space as experienced is an aspect of this qualitative change. Up and down, back and front, to and fro, this side and that- or right and left- here and there, feel differently. The reason they do is that they are not static points in something itself static, but objects in movement, qualitative changes of value. For "back" is short for backwards and front for forwards. So with velocity. Mathematically there are no such things as fast and slow. They mark simply greater and less on a number scale. As experienced they are qualitatively as unlike as noise and silence, heat and cold, black and white. To be forced to wait a long time for an important event to happen is a length very different from that measured by the movements of the hands of a clock. It is something qualitative.

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1 month 1 day ago

The fact that goals may be dependent for their force on other more distant ends leads to the arrangement of these goals in a hierarchy - each level to be considered as an end relative to the levels below it and as a mean to the levels above it.

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p. 62.
2 months 4 days ago

To use Virtue is perfect blessedness.

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1 month 4 days ago

I believe that the fundamental alternative for man is the choice between "life" and "death"; between creativity and destructive violence; between reality and illusions; between objectivity and intolerance; between brotherhood-independence and dominance-submission.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The doctrine that there is as much science in a subject as... mathematics in it, or as much... measurement or 'precision' in it, rests upon... misunderstanding.

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2 months 1 week ago

A life without a holiday is like a long journey without an inn to rest at.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity, a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.

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3 weeks 1 day ago

What! all of us, Christians, not only profess to love one another, but do actually live one common life; we whose social existence beats with one common pulse-we aid one another, learn from one another, draw ever closer to one another to our mutual happiness, and find in this closeness the whole meaning of life!-and to-morrow some crazy ruler will say some stupidity, and another will answer in the same spirit, and then I must go expose myself to being murdered, and murder men-who have done me no harm-and more than that, whom I love. And this is not a remote contingency, but the very thing we are all preparing for, which is not only probable, but an inevitable certainty.

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Chapter V, Contradiction Between our Life and our Christian Conscience
2 months 3 weeks ago

But since he has decided to have the impossibility of living, every misfortune is an opportunity which lays this importance of living before his eyes and obliges him to decide, once again, to die.

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p. 158
1 month 1 week ago

My purpose here is to denounce an idea which seems to be dangerous and false. ... Revolutionary trade unionists and orthodox communists are at one in considering everything that is purely theoretical as bourgeois. ... The culture of a socialist society would be a synthesis of theory and practice; but to synthesize is not the same as to confuse together; it is only contraries that can be synthesized. ... Marx's principal glory is to have rescued the study of societies not only from Utopianism but also and at the same time from empiricism. ... Humanity cannot progress by importing into theoretical study the processes of blind routine and haphazard experiment by which production has so long been dominated. ... The true relation between theory and application only appears when theoretical research has been purged of all empiricism.

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"The teaching of mathematics," p. 71-72
2 weeks 4 days ago

No doubt some of your cousins and great-uncles died in childhood, but not a single one of your ancestors did. Ancestors just don't die young!

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Ch. 3. Immortal Coils
1 month 2 weeks ago

But yet they that have no Science, are in better, and nobler condition with their naturall Prudence; than men, that by their mis-reasoning, or by trusting them that reason wrong, fall upon false and absurd generall rules.

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The First Part, Chapter 5, p. 21
1 month 2 weeks ago

Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

And happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

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Vol. 2 "Further Psychological Observations" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
2 weeks 4 days ago

Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.

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An Inland Voyage (1878).
2 months 3 weeks ago

Thus there is nothing waste, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearence. We might compare this to the appearence of a pond in the distance, where we can see the confused movement and swarming of the fish, without distinguishing the fish themselves.Thus we are that each living body has a dominante entelechy, which in case of an animal is the soul, but the members of this living body are full of other living things, plants and animals, of which each has in turn ita dominant entelechy or soul.

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Monadology (69-70).
1 month 2 weeks ago

Often it is only after immense intellectual effort, which may have continued over centuries, that humanity at last succeeds in achieving knowledge of a concept in its pure form, by stripping off the irrelevant accretions which veil it from the eye of the mind.

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Translation J. L. Austin (Oxford, 1950) as quoted by Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (1972) Vol. 1, p. 56.
2 weeks 6 days ago

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which humans communicate than by the content of the communication.

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(p. 23)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Let him sensibly perceive, that the kindness he shews to others, is no ill husbandry for himself; but that it brings a return in kindness both from those that receive it, and those who look on. Make this a contest among children, who shall out-do one another in this way: and by this means, by a constant practise, children having made it easy to themselves to part with what they have, good nature may be settled in them into a habit, and they may take pleasure, and pique themselves in being kind, liberal and civil, to others.

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Sec. 110
1 month 5 days ago

Man should possess an infinite appetite for life. It should be self-evident to him, all the time, that life is superb, glorious, endlessly rich, infinitely desirable. At present, because he is in a midway position between the brute and the truly human, he is always getting bored, depressed, weary of life. He has become so top-heavy with civilisation that he cannot contact the springs of pure vitality. Control of the prefrontal cortex will change all of this. He will cease to cast nostalgic glances towards the womb, for he will realise that death is no escape. Man is a creature of life and the daylight; his destiny lies in total objectivity.

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pp. 317-318
2 months 3 weeks ago

The question here is not, "How conscience ought to be guided? For Conscience is its own General and Leader; it is therefore enough that each man have one. What we want to know is, how conscience can be her own Ariadne, and disentangle herself from the mazes even of the most raveled and complicated casuistical theology. Here is an ethical proposition that stands in need of no proof: No Action May At Any Time Be Hazarded On The Uncertainty That Perchance It May Not Be Wrong (Quod dubitas, ne feceris! Pliny - which you doubt, then neither do) Hence the Consciousness, that Any Action I am about to perform is Right, is in itself a most immediate and imperative duty. What actions are right, - what wrong - is a matter for the understanding, not for conscience.

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p. 251 Book IV, Part 2, Section 4
2 months 3 weeks ago

It often happens that reforms merely have the effect of transferring the undesirable tendencies of individuals from one channel to another channel. An old outlet for some particular wickedness is closed; but a new outlet is opened. The wickedness is not abolished; it is merely provided with a different set of opportunities for self-expression.

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Ch. 3, p. 20 [2012 reprint]
1 month 5 days ago

Poems are magic ceremonies of language.

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1 month 2 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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1 week 5 days ago

Those who cannot find moral clarity are likely to settle for the far more dangerous simplicity, or purity, instead.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.

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Mark 2:27 (KJV)

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