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2 months 1 week ago

What the inventive genius of mankind has bestowed upon us in the last hundred years could have made human life care free and happy if the development of the organizing power of man had been able to keep step with his technical advances. As it is, the hardly bought achievements of the machine age in the hands of our generation are as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a three-year-old child. The possession of wonderful means of production has not brought freedom-only care and hunger.

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7 months 2 days ago

Silence is the virtue of a fool.

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Book VI, xxxi
6 months 2 weeks ago

The need of black conservatives to gain the respect of their white peers deeply shapes certain elements of their conservatism. In this regard, they simply want what most people want, to be judged by the quality of their skills, not by the color of their skin. But the black conservatives overlook the fact that affirmative action policies were political responses to the pervasive refusal of most white Americans to judge black Americans on that basis.

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(p52)
5 months 2 weeks ago

I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

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4 months 2 days ago

We are passengers, comprehended and displaced by metaphor.

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Chapter 8, Performative Reflexivity, p. 137
6 months 2 weeks ago

Generally speaking, all the authorities exercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive assignment, of differential distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized' how he is to be recognized' how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in a individual way, etc.).

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Part Four, Complete and austere institutions
3 months 2 weeks ago

It depends on what we read, after all manner of Professors have done their best for us.

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4 months 1 week ago

Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.

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1839
4 months 2 weeks ago

Schopenhauer argues that the empirical world exists only as a representation: 'every object, whatever its origin, is, as object, already conditioned by the subject, and thus is essentially only the subject's representation.' A representation is a subjective state that has been ordered according to space, time and causality - the primary forms of sensibility and understanding. So long as we turn our thoughts towards the natural world, and search for the thing-in-itself behind the representation is futile. Every argument and every experience leads only to the same end: the system of representations, standing like a veil between the subject and the thing-in-itself. No scientific investigation can penetrate the veil; and yet it is only a veil, Schopenhauer affirms, a tissue of illusions which we can, if we choose, penetrate by other means. The way to penetrate the veil was stumbled upon by Kant.

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A Short History of Modern Philosophy (1981; 2nd ed. 1995), p. 177
3 months 2 weeks ago

Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity.

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Quoted in: Fayek S. Hourani (2012) Daily Bread for Your Mind and Soul, p. 336
6 months 3 weeks ago

I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock, - that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things.

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p. 490
3 months 2 weeks ago

He that has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.

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Pt. II, Bk. I, ch. 7.
1 week 5 days ago

Plato's philosopher kings....

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.

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Ch. 9
5 months 5 days ago

You must go to Mahometanism, to Buddhism, to the East, to the Sufis & Fakirs, to Pantheism, for the right growth of mysticism.

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Letter (2 March 1853), quoted in Suggestions for Thought : Selections and Commentaries (1994), edited by Michael D. Calabria and Janet A. MacRae, p. xiii
5 months 2 weeks ago

Saints live in flames; wise men, next to them.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

There is a divergence between private and social accounting that the market fails to register. One essential task of law and government is to institute the necessary conditions.

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Chapter V, Section 42, p. 268
5 months 3 weeks ago

The education of the child must accord both in mode and arrangement with the education of mankind, considered historically. In other words, the genesis of knowledge in the individual, must follow the same course as the genesis of knowledge in the race. In strictness, this principle may be considered as already expressed by implication; since both being processes of evolution, must conform to those same general laws of evolution... and must therefore agree with each other. Nevertheless this particular parallelism is of value for the specific guidance it affords. To M. Comte we believe society owes the enunciation of it; and we may accept this item of his philosophy without at all committing ourselves to the rest.

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3 months 1 week ago

But he has no fear; unconquered he looks down from a lofty height upon his sufferings.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The process of aging can only be fruitful and satisfactory if the important transitions are accompanied by free resignation, by the renunciation of the values proper to the preceding stage of life. Those spiritual and intellectual values which remain untouched by the process of aging, together with the values of the next stage of life, must compensate for what has been lost. Only if this happens can we cheerfully relive the values of our past in memory, without envy for the young to whom they are still accessible. If we cannot compensate, we avoid and flee the "tormenting" recollection of youth, thus blocking our possibilities of understanding younger people. At the same time we tend to negate the specific values of earlier stages. No wonder that youth always has a hard fight to sustain against the ressentiment of the older generation.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 62-63
6 months 3 weeks ago

If slavery, barbarism and desolation are to be called peace, men can have no worse misfortune. No doubt there are usually more and sharper quarrels between parents and children, than between masters and slaves ; yet it advances not the art of household management to change a father's right into a right of property, and count children but as slaves. Slavery, then, and not peace, is furthered by handing the whole authority to one man.

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Ch. 6, On Monarchy
2 months 3 weeks ago

I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents... The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society... Every one, by his property, or by his satisfactory situation, is interested in the support of law and order. And such men may safely and advantageously reserve to themselves a wholesome control over their public affairs, and a degree of freedom, which, in the hands of the canaille [the masses] of the cities of Europe, would be instantly perverted to the demolition and destruction of everything public and private.

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Letter to John Adams
5 months 3 weeks ago

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to the good.

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Speech in opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings (18 February 1788), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Tenth (1899), p. 48
6 months 1 week ago

When one asked him what boys should learn, "That," said he, "which they shall use when men."

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Of Agesilaus the Great
5 months 3 weeks ago

Friendship and domestic happiness are continually praised; yet how little is there of either in the world, because it requires more cultivation of mind to keep awake affection, even in our own hearts, than the common run of people suppose. Besides, few like to be seen as they really are; and a degree of simplicity, and of undisguised confidence, which, to uninterested observers, would almost border on weakness, is the charm, nay the essence of love or friendship, all the bewitching graces of childhood again appearing.

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Letter 12
5 months 5 days ago

It seems as if the female spirit of the world were mourning everlastingly over blessings, not lost, but which she has never had, and which, in her discouragement she feels that she never will have, they are so far off.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

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Journal entry (12 October 1916), p. 84e
3 months 2 days ago

One of the commonplaces of modern historiography is the polemical exaltation of the civilization of the Renaissance over and against medieval civilization. This is not just the expression of a typical misunderstanding, since this mentality is the effect of one among the innumerable deceptions purposely spread in modern culture by the leaders of global subversion. The truth is that after the collapse of the ancient world, if there ever was a civilization that deserves the name of Renaissance, this was the civilization of the Middle Ages. In its objectivity, its virile spirit, its hierarchical structure, its proud antihumanistic simplicity so often permeated by the sense of the sacred, the Middle Ages represented a return to the origins.

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p.309
6 months 5 days ago

None but God is wise.

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As quoted in The Diegesis (1829) by Robert Taylor, p. 219
6 months 3 weeks ago

Compared with the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically far more poets than he.

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(p. 149)
6 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophy hasn't made any progress?-If someone scratches where it itches, do we have to see progress? Is it not genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?

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p. 98e
7 months 6 days ago

As soon as the soul has been made to perceive that a thing can conduct it to that which it loves supremely, it must inevitably embrace it with joy.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

All exercise of authority perverts, and submission to authority humiliates.

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As quoted in Michael Bakunin (1937), E.H. Carr, p. 453
7 months 1 week ago

It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.

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4 months 1 week ago

Regarded anatomically, the resemblances between the foot of Man and the foot of the Gorilla are far more striking and important than the differences. ...be the differences between the hand and foot of Man and those of the Gorilla what they may-the differences between those of the Gorilla and those of the lower Apes are much greater.

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Ch.2, p. 110
4 months 1 week ago

I believe Gandhi is the only person who knew about real democracy - not democracy as the right to go and buy what you want, but democracy as the responsibility to be accountable to everyone around you. Democracy begins with freedom from hunger, freedom from unemployment, freedom from fear, and freedom from hatred. To me, those are the real freedoms on the basis of which good human societies are based.

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1998
5 months 1 week ago

Marriage as a community of interests unfailingly means the degradation of the interested parties, and it is the perfidy of the world's arrangements that no one, even if aware of it, can escape such degradation. The idea might therefore be entertained that marriage without ignominy is a possibility reserved for those spared the pursuit of interests, for the rich. But the possibility is purely formal, for the privileged are precisely those in whom the pursuit of interests has become second-nature-they would not otherwise uphold privilege.

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E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 10
7 months 3 weeks ago

It built itself up endlessly, like a chess game, and the telemetrists began to use a computer to program the computer that designed the program for the computer that programmed the robot-controlling computer.

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6 months ago

Abstract terms (however useful they may be in argument) should be discarded in meditation, and the mind should be fixed on the particular and the concrete, that is, on the things themselves.

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Paragraph 4
4 months 3 weeks ago

Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.

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(p. 36)
6 months 3 weeks ago

...happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination, resting solely on empirical grounds.

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Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics (1785), Second Section.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Hope is the normal form of delirium.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

They made me take cod liver oil: that is the height of luxury: a medicine to make you hungry while the others, in the street, would have sold themselves for a beefsteak. I saw them passing my window with their signs: "Give me bread".

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Act 3, sc. 3

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