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1 month 5 days ago

These reasonings are unconnected: "I am richer than you, therefore I am better"; "I am more eloquent than you, therefore I am better." The connection is rather this: "I am richer than you, therefore my property is greater than yours;" "I am more eloquent than you, therefore my style is better than yours." But you, after all, are neither property nor style.

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1 week 4 days ago

As we speak cruel time is fleeing. Seize the day, believing as little as possible in the morrow.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

It is a want of feeling to talk of priests and bells while so many infants are perishing in the hospitals, and aged and infirm poor in the streets, from the want of necessaries.

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2 weeks 2 days ago

Free-market fundamentalism trivializes the concern for public interest. It puts fear and insecurity in the hearts of anxiety-ridden workers. It also makes money-driven, poll-obsessed elected officials deferential to corporate goals of profit - often at the cost of the common good. ... The free-market fundamentalism that prevails in the United States today promotes the pervasive sleepwalking of the populace. People see that the false prophets are handsomely rewarded - with money, status and access to more power. ... We are experiencing the sad gangsterization of America - an unbridled grasp at power, wealth and status.

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2 weeks 6 days ago

I am to talk about Apologetics. Apologetics means of course Defence. The first question is - what do you propose to defend? Christianity, of course...

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3 weeks ago

Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

The actor's realm is that of the fleeting.

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1 month ago

"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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3 weeks 3 days ago

The method of the science not being practiced much nowadays, except what logic prescribes to all sciences generally, that fitted for the peculiar nature of metaphysics being simply ignored, it is no wonder that those who everlastingly turn the Sisyphean stone of this inquiry do not seem so far to have made much progress. Though here I neither can nor will expatiate upon so important and extensive a subject, I shall briefly shadow forth what constitutes no despicable part of this method, namely, the infection between sensuous and intellectual cognition, not only as creeping in on those incautious in the application of principles, but even producing spurious principles under the appearance of axioms.

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2 weeks 6 days ago

My form remains one, though the matter in it changes continually. I am, in that respect, like a curve in a waterfall.

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3 weeks 4 days ago

There are several passages in Hobbes's translation of Homer, which, if they had been writ on purpose to ridicule that poet, would have done very well. Alexander Pope, as quoted in Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters, of Books and Men (1820) by Joseph Spence, p. 285

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1 week 4 days ago

By Thy perfect Intelligence, O MazdaThou didst first create us having bodies and spiritual consciences,And by Thy Thought gave our selves the power of thought, word, and deed.Thus leaving us free to choose our faith at our own will.

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2 days ago

When a reasonable Soul forsaketh his divine nature, and becometh beast-like, it dieth. For though the substance of the Soul be incorruptible: yet, lacking the use of Reason, it is reputed dead; for it loseth the Intellective Life.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

Why has the Revolution of France been stained with crimes, which the Revolution of the United States of America was not? Men are physically the same in all countries; it is education that makes them different. Accustom a people to believe that priests or any other class of men can forgive sins, and you will have sins in abundance.

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2 weeks 6 days ago

The consciousness of being betrayed is to the collective consciousness of a sacred group what a certain form of schizophrenia is to the individual...it is a form of madness.

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1 month 1 week ago

When you serve your mother and father it is okay to try to correct them once in a while. But if you see that they are not going to listen to you, keep your respect for them and don't distance yourself from them. Work without complaining.

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3 weeks 1 day ago

The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists in the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself.

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4 weeks 1 day ago

To turn one's eyes away from Jesus means to turn them to the Law.

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3 weeks 4 days ago

Truth is a standard both of itself and of falsity.

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3 weeks 1 day ago

Instead of noble men, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, round a little there and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us'

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2 weeks 6 days ago

The intolerant can be viewed as free-riders, as persons who seek the advantages of just institutions while not doing their share to uphold them.

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2 weeks 6 days ago

All that we call human history-money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery-the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

It seems to be almost an invariable rule that as real power declines, the symbols of power multiply and intensify in compensation.

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1 week 4 days ago

Kripke tries to sober us up by denying that meaning determines reference. Rather, we name things by confronting them and baptising them, not by creating them out of a list of qualities. Names are not, pace Russell, shorthand for such lists. They are not abbreviations for descriptions, but (in Kripke's coinage) 'rigid designators' - that is, they would name the same things in any possible world, including worlds in which their bearers did not have the properties we, in this world, use to identify them.

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2 weeks 6 days ago

The standard of permanent Christianity must be kept clear in our minds and it is against that standard that we must test all contemporary thought. In fact, we must at all costs not move with the times.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

You must do nothing before him, which you would not have him imitate. If any thing escape you, which you would have pass as a fault in him, he will be sure to shelter himself under your example, and shelter himself so as that it will not be easy to come at him, to correct it in him the right way.

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2 weeks 6 days ago

For Genet, Beauty will be the offensive weapon that will enable him to beat the just on their own ground: that of value.

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2 weeks 6 days ago

The Guide sang:Nearly they stood who fall; Themselves as they look back See always in the track The one false step, where all Even yet, by lightest swerve Of foot not yet enslaved, By smallest tremor of the smallest nerve, Might have been saved.Nearly they fell who stand, And with cold after fear Look back to mark how near They grazed the Siren's land, Wondering that subtle fate, By threads so spidery fine, The choice of ways so small, the event so great, Should thus entwine.Therefore oh, man, have fear Lest oldest fears be true, Lest thou too far pursue The road that seems so clear, And step, secure, a hair-breadth bourne, Which, being once crossed forever unawares, Denies return.

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1 week 4 days ago

There are many who know many things, yet are lacking in wisdom.

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3 weeks 1 day ago

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

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4 weeks 1 day ago

Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.

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3 weeks 4 days ago

Grief and disappointment give rise to anger, anger to envy, envy to malice, and malice to grief again, till the whole circle be completed.

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There are two laws discrete Not reconciled, Law for man, and law for thing.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

The Indians, whom we call barbarous, observe much more decency and civility in their discourses and conversation, giving one another a fair silent hearing till they have quite done; and then answering them calmly, and without noise or passion. And if it be not so in this civiliz'd part of the world, we must impute it to a neglect in education, which has not yet reform'd this antient piece of barbarity amongst us.

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1 month ago

Sir Amice Pawlet, when he saw too much haste made in any matter, was wont to say. "Stay a while, that we may make an end the sooner."

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The necessities of the time have accorded to the petty interests of every day life such overwhelming attention : the deep interests of actuality and the strife respecting these have engrossed all the powers and the forces of the mind - as also the necessary means - to so great an extent, that no place has been left to the higher inward life, the intellectual operations of a purer sort; and the better natures have thus been stunted in their growth, and in great measure sacrificed.

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Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.

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3 weeks ago

The concrete man has but one interest - to be right. That to him is the art of all arts, and all means are fair which help him to it.

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3 weeks 2 days ago

If a man makes the press utter atrocious things he becomes as answerable for them as if he had uttered them by word of mouth. Mr. Jefferson has said in his inaugural speech, that "error of opinion might be tolerated, when reason was left free to combat it." This is sound philosophy in cases of error. But there is a difference between error and licentiousness.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that's all.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The life-giving Spirit is the very one who slays you; the first thing the life-giving Spirit says is that you must enter into death, that you must die to, it is this way in order that you many not take Christianity in vain. A life-giving Spirit, that is the invitation; who would not willingly take hold of it! But die first, that is the halt!

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2 weeks 6 days ago

The hatefulness of a hated person is "real"-in hatred you see men as they are; you are disillusioned; but the loveliness of a loved person is merely a subjective haze concealing a "real" core of sexual appetite or economic association. Wars and poverty are "really" horrible; peace and plenty are mere physical facts about which men happen to have certain sentiments.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

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3 weeks 1 day ago

When the husk gets separated from the kernel, almost all men run after the husk and pay their respects to that. It is only the husk of Christianity that is so bruited and wide spread in this world; the kernel is still the very least and rarest of all things. There is not a single church founded on it.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.

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1 month 6 days ago

If thou shouldst say, 'It is enough, I have reached perfection,' all is lost. For it is the function of perfection to make one know one's imperfection.

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3 weeks 4 days ago

And this Feare of things invisible, is the naturall Seed of that, which every one in himself calleth Religion; and in them that worship, or feare that Power otherwise than they do, Superstition.

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2 weeks 2 days ago

Kant speaks of the "thing-in-itself" (Ding an sich) in order to distinguish it from the "thing-for-us" (Ding fur uns), that is, as a "phenomenon." A thing-in-itself is that which is not approachable through experience as are the rocks, plants, and animals. Every thing-for-us is as a thing and also a thing-in-itself, which means that it is recognized absolutely withing the absolute knowledge of God. But not every thing-in-itself is also a thing-for-us: God, for instance, is a thing-in-itself, as Kant uses the word, according to the meaning of Christian theology.

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It is an uphill race, and a race against time, for if the American form of democracy overtakes us first, the majority will no more relax their despotism than a single despot would. But our only chance is to come forward as Liberals, carrying out the democratic idea, not as Conservatives, resisting it.

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3 weeks ago

The plain fact is that men's minds are built, as has been often said, in water-tight compartments. Religious after a fashion, they yet have many other things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements and associations inevitably obtain. The basenesses so commonly charged to religion's account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to religion's wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion's wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in theoretic system. The ecclesiastical spirit in general is the sum of these two spirits of dominion.

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