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This quote was written in the 60's. We really spend our lives reading now... a lot of us...😁...so, upping the quality would be good. I'm trying to contribute to that....

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6 months 4 weeks ago

The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.

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As quoted in The Communist Manifesto (1848), p.2

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

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April 3, 1852

New truth is often uncomfortable, especially to the holders of power; nevertheless, amid the long record of cruelty and bigotry, it is the most important achievement of our intelligent but wayward species.

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Religion and Science (1935), Ch. X: Conclusion
5 months 2 weeks ago

This was once revealed to me in a dream.

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7 months 2 days ago

What I had to say was so clear and I felt it so deeply that I am amazed by the tediousness, repetitiousness, verbiage, and disorder of this writing. What would have made it lively and vehement coming from another's pen is precisely what has made it dull and slack coming from mine. The subject was myself, and I no longer found on my own interest that zeal and vigor of courage which can exalt a generous soul only for another person's cause.

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On the Subject and Form of This Writing; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
3 months 3 weeks ago

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.

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Ch. IV: "The Line of Least Resistance", p. 51
5 months 1 week ago

Society triumphs over many. They wish to regenerate the world with their institutions, with their moral philosophy, with their love. Then they sink to living from breakfast till dinner, from dinner till tea, with a little worsted work, and to looking forward to nothing but bed. When shall we see a life full of steady enthusiasm, walking straight to its aim, flying home, as that bird is now, against the wind - with the calmness and the confidence of one who knows the laws of God and can apply them?

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success.

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"Eliot and Conservatism" (p. 194)
5 months 3 weeks ago

No explanation is required for Holy Writing. Whoso speaks truly is full of eternal life, and wonderfully related to genuine mysteries does his Writing appear to us, for it is a Concord from the Symphony of the Universe.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

Hitler never intended to defend 'the West' against Bolshevism but always remained ready to join 'the Reds' for the destruction of the West, even in the middle of the struggle against Soviet Russia.

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Part 3, Ch. 10
4 months 3 weeks ago

Solitude is the mother of anxieties.

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Maxim 222
4 months 4 weeks ago

When a person inflates his own importance, he does not see his own sins; and his sins get bigger right along with him.

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p. 108
4 months 3 weeks ago

The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.

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Avant-garde and Kitsch (p. 85)
3 months 2 weeks ago

Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity: men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.

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Pt. I, Bk. VII, ch. 4.
3 months 2 weeks ago

India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

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Book III, Chapter 10, "Hope"
3 months 3 weeks ago

This [experimentation] is the custom-and properly so-in those sciences where mathematical demonstrations are applied to natural phenomena, as is seen in the case of perspective, astronomy, mechanics, music, and others where the principles, once established by well-chosen experiments, become the foundations of the entire superstructure.

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Salviati, Third Day. Change of Position
7 months 1 day ago

I opened with that which good Catholics have more than once made to Huguenots. "My dear sir," said I, "were you ever baptized?" "No, friend," replied the Quaker, "nor any of my brethren." "Zounds!" said I to him, "you are not Christians then!" "Friend," replied the old man, in a soft tone of voice, "do not swear; we are Christians, but we do not think that sprinkling a few drops of water on a child's head makes him a Christian." "My God!" exclaimed I, shocked at his impiety, "have you then forgotten that Christ was baptized by St. John?" "Friend," replied the mild Quaker, "once again, do not swear. Christ was baptized by John, but He Himself never baptized any one; now we profess ourselves disciples of Christ, and not of John." "Mercy on us," cried I, "what a fine subject you would be for the holy inquisitor! In the name of God, my good old man, let me baptize you."

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Voltaire's account of his conversations with Andrew Pit
7 months 3 weeks ago

Of course, I had to own that he was right; I didn't feel much regret for what I'd done. Still, to my mind, he overdid it, and I'd have liked to have a chance of explaining to him, in a quite friendly, almost affectionate way, that I have never been able to really regret anything in all my life. I've always been far too much absorbed in the present moment, or the immediate future, to think back.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.

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Circles
6 months 3 weeks ago

I remind young people everywhere I go, one of the worst things the older generation did was to tell them for twenty-five years "Be successful, be successful, be successful" as opposed to "Be great, be great, be great". There's a qualitative difference.

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Speech in San Francisco: Democracy Matters
6 months 2 weeks ago

Mediocrity in poets has never been tolerated by either men, or gods, or booksellers.

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Lines 372-373
7 months 1 week ago

Leave the ass burdened with laws behind in the valley. But your conscience, let it ascend with Isaac into the mountain.

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Chapter 2, Verse 14
2 months 4 weeks ago

We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, self-preservation in the other.

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On slavery, in a letter to John Holmes
6 months 6 days ago

Heroic love is the property of those superior natures who are called insane not because they do not know, but because they over-know.

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As quoted in The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), by Miguel de Unamuno, as translated by J. E. Crawford
2 months 3 weeks ago

Epicurus... supposes not only all mixt bodies, but all others to be produced by the various and casual occursions of atoms, moving themselves to and fro by an internal principle in the immense or rather infinite vacuum.

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Carneades speaking
5 months 1 week ago

Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer. This position will be characterized by some as "overoptimistic," "utopian," or "unrealistic." In order to appreciate the merits of such criticism a discussion of the ambiguity of hope and the nature of optimism and pessimism seems called for.

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p. 483
6 months 4 weeks ago

Quietism is the attitude of people who say, "let others do what I cannot do." The doctrine I am presenting before you is precisely the opposite of this, since it declares that there is no reality except in action. It goes further, indeed, and adds, "Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is." Hence we can well understand why some people are horrified by our teaching.

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p. 41
5 months 3 weeks ago

Wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the bourgeoisie developed in wealth and power to the utmost and made itself the first class of the country. The result was that wherever this happened, the bourgeoisie took political power into its own hands and displaced the hitherto ruling classes, the aristocracy, the guildmasters, and their representative, the absolute monarchy. The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing the entailment of estates - in other words, by making landed property subject to purchase and sale, and by doing away with the special privileges of the nobility. It destroyed the power of the guildmasters by abolishing guilds and handicraft privileges. In their place, it put competition - that is, a state of society in which everyone has the right to enter into any branch of industry, the only obstacle being a lack of the necessary capital.

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Honour is the mysticism of legality.

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Aphorism 77, of Ideas as translated in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics (1996) edited by Frederick C. Beiser, p. 131
5 months 1 week ago

I realize the malady of the oppressed and disinherited masses only too well, but I refuse to prescribe the usual ridiculous palliatives which allow the patient neither to die nor to recover. One cannot be too extreme in dealing with social ills; besides, the extreme thing is generally the true thing. My lack of faith in the majority is dictated by my faith in the potentialities of the individual. Only when the latter becomes free to choose his associates for a common purpose, can we hope for order and harmony out of this world of chaos and inequality.

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5 months 1 week ago

The STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle, has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution. If I were to sum up my whole argument in one sentence I should say: The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. These two tendencies are incompatible and mutually destructive. The State idea killed the Russian Revolution and it must have the same result in all other revolutions, unless the libertarian idea prevail.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

If a man is mistaken, instruct him kindly and show him his error. But if thou art not able, blame thyself, or blame not even thyself.

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X, 4
6 months 2 weeks ago

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

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p. 165.

I surrender myself to everything. I love, I feel pain, I struggle. The world seems to me wider than the mind, my heart a dark and almighty mystery.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The characteristic activity of science is not construction, but induction. The more often something has occurred in the past, the more certain that it will in all the future. Knowledge relates solely to what is and to its recurrence. New forms of being, especially those arising from the historical activity of man, lie beyond empiricist theory. Thoughts which are not simply carried over from the prevailing pattern of consciousness, but arise from the aims and resolves of the individual, in short, all historical tendencies that reach beyond what is present and recurrent, do not belong to the domain of science.

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p. 144.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Technical progress and more comfortable living permit the systematic inclusion of libidinal components into the realm of commodity production and exchange. But no matter how controlled the mobilization of instinctual energy may be (it sometimes amounts to a scientific management of libido), no matter how much it may serve as a prop for the status quo-it is also gratifying to the managed individuals, just as racing the outboard motor, pushing the power lawn mower, and speeding the automobile are fun.

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p. 75
6 months 1 week ago

Envy has been, is, and shall be, the destruction of many. What is there, that Envy hath not defamed, or Malice left undefiled? Truly, no good thing.

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The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.

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Attributed to Russell in Crainer's The Ultimate Book of Business Quotations (1997), p. 258

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 1, Β§ 1
5 months 4 weeks ago

When... in the course of all these thousands of years has man ever acted in accordance with his own interests?

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Part 1, Chapter 7
5 months 3 weeks ago

Men have superior strength of body; but were it not for mistaken notions of beauty, women would acquire sufficient to enable them to earn their own subsistence, the true definitions of independence; and to bear those bodily inconveniences and exertions that are requisite to strengthen the mind. Let us then, by being allowed to take the same exercise as boys, not only during infancy, but youth, arrive at perfection of body, that we may know how far the nation superiority of man extends . For what reason or virtue can be expected from a creature when the seed-time of life is neglected? None; did not the winds of heaven casually scatter many useful seeds in fallow ground.

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Ch.5

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