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Karl Marx
Karl Marx
4 months 3 weeks ago
Communism differs from all previous movements...

Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. Its organisation is, therefore, essentially economic, the material production of the conditions of this unity; it turns existing conditions into conditions of unity. The reality, which communism is creating, is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals, insofar as reality is only a product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves.

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Vol. I, Part 4.
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
4 months 3 weeks ago
The secret of being….

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

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"Sixième discours: sur la nature de l'homme," Sept Discours en Vers sur l'Homme, 1738
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 2 weeks ago
The ideal being? An angel ravaged...

The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 months 1 week ago
Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence...

Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.

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p. 277
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 3 weeks ago
None believeth in the soul of...

None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.

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p. 25
Philosophical Maxims
Cisero
Cisero
5 months 1 week ago
Since our leading men think themselves...

since our leading men think themselves in a seventh heaven, if there are bearded mullets in their fish-ponds that will come to hand for food, and neglect everything else, do not you think that I am doing no mean service if I secure that those who have the power, should not have the will, to do any harm?

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Letters to Atticus, Book II, 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick
1 month 3 weeks ago
Individuals have rights and there are...

Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state?

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Preface, p. ix
Philosophical Maxims
Max Stirner
Max Stirner
1 month 1 week ago
Man with the great M is...

Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of.

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Dover 2005, p. 182
Philosophical Maxims
Heraclitus
Heraclitus
5 months 1 week ago
Although the Law of Reason is...

Although the Law of Reason is common, the majority of people live as though they had an understanding of their own.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
2 months 2 days ago
My own sense of how to...

My own sense of how to behave in a simulation has more traditional roots in the theory of perception. I've long believed that each of us lives in an egocentric simulation of the world run by the mind/brain. Since the zombies of each (waking) simulation have sentient real world counterparts, one should treat them as though they were real. Nonetheless as an angst-ridden teenager, my dawning acceptance of an inferential realist theory of perception made me feel as if I'd been condemned to solitary confinement for life. The sense of loneliness was indescribable. Naïve realism is better for one's mental health.

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Origins and Theory of the World Transhumanist Association, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 26 Dec. 2007
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
5 months 3 weeks ago
It is well said, then, that...

It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good. But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
4 months 3 weeks ago
Christian philosophers have found no difficulty...

Christian philosophers have found no difficulty in justifying imperialism, war, the capitalist system, the use of torture, the censorship of the press and ecclesiastical tyrannies of every sort, from the tyranny of Rome to the tyrannies of Geneva and New England.

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Ch. 14, p. 315 [2012 reprint]
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
4 months 3 weeks ago
By means of ever more effective...

By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manip­ulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms- elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest-will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitari­anism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slo­gans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial-but democracy and free­dom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of sol­diers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.

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Chapter 3, p. 25
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
3 months 3 weeks ago
On condition that you protect my...

On condition that you protect my rights, I will protect your rights. How, then, does some party obtain the right to claim the protection of the other? Evidently, by actually protecting the rights of the other. But if this is so, no party will ever obtain a strictly legal claim to the protection of the other.

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P. 220
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
4 months 3 weeks ago
With what consistency, or decency they...

With what consistency, or decency they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery; and annually enslave many thousands more, without any pretence of authority, or claim upon them?

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 3 weeks ago
The two parties which divide the...

The two parties which divide the State, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made ... Now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities ... Innovation is the salient energy; Conservatism the pause on the last movement.

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Via Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (Houghton Mifflin, 1986) p. 23
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 3 weeks ago
Too little liberty brings stagnation, and...

Too little liberty brings stagnation, and too much brings chaos.

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Authority and the Individual (1949), p. 37
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
3 months 6 days ago
Society creates the victims that it...

Society creates the victims that it afterwards vainly attempts to get rid of.

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
5 months 2 days ago
For man seeketh in society comfort,...

For man seeketh in society comfort, use, and protection: and they be three wisdoms of divers natures, which do often sever: wisdom of the behaviour, wisdom of business, and wisdom of state.

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Book II, xxiii
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 months 1 week ago
The thought of being under absolute...

The thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience. ... It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation. ... Moreover, the master is deceived too by the fallacy of devotion.

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p. 142
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
3 months 2 weeks ago
We are so captivated by and...

We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.

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The Symbolic Life (1953); also in Man and His Symbols
Philosophical Maxims
Porphyry
Porphyry
4 months 1 week ago
The Pythagoreans made kindness to beasts...

The Pythagoreans made kindness to beasts a training in humanity and pity.

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3, 20, 7
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 months 3 weeks ago
Deny them this participation of freedom,...

Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond, which originally made, and must still preserve the unity of the empire.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
2 months 2 weeks ago
Falling in love is the one...

Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other's eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the experience of either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centrepoint of God's creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature.

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Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 3.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
3 weeks 2 days ago
I advance with obedience to the...

I advance with obedience to the work, ready to retire from it whenever you become sensible how much better choice it is in your power to make.

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Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
4 months 3 weeks ago
All registers which, it is acknowledged,...

All registers which, it is acknowledged, ought to be kept secret, ought certainly never to exist.

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Chapter II, Part II, Appendix to Articles I and II, p. 935.
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 3 weeks ago
He thought it happier to be...

He thought it happier to be dead, To die for Beauty, than live for bread.

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Beauty
Philosophical Maxims
A. J. Ayer
A. J. Ayer
3 months 2 weeks ago
I saw a Divine Being. I'm...

I saw a Divine Being. I'm afraid I'm going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.

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National Post (3 March 2001).
Philosophical Maxims
B. F. Skinner
B. F. Skinner
1 month 2 weeks ago
Education is what survives when what...

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

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"New methods and new aims in teaching", in New Scientist, 22(392) (21 May 1964), pp.483-4
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months 1 week ago
Eternal vigilance...
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Main Content / General
bell hooks
bell hooks
3 months 1 week ago
Black women control the world. We...

Black women control the world. We are through being discriminated against.

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Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002) ISBN 0-06-093829-3
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
4 months 3 weeks ago
The creed which accepts as the...

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.

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Ch. 2
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 3 weeks ago
The Vedas contain a sensible account...

The Vedas contain a sensible account of God." "The veneration in which the Vedas are held is itself a remarkable feat. Their code embraced the whole moral life of the Hindus and in such a case there is no other truth than sincerity. Truth is such by reference to the heart of man within, not to any standard without.

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A Tribute to Hinduism, 2008
Philosophical Maxims
Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
3 months 2 weeks ago
I am normally said to be...

I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind, or cannot understand the darker pages of Hegel, it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act.

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Philosophical Maxims
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
3 months 1 day ago
Even though the model referred to...

Even though the model referred to satisfies the theory, etc., it is 'unintended'; and we recognize that it is unintended from the description through which it is given (as in the intuitionist case). Models are not lost noumenal waifs looking for someone to name them; they are constructions within our theory itself. and they have names from birth.

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Models and Reality
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 2 weeks ago
However intimate we may be with...

However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; - unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them. The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
5 months 1 day ago
Observe, observe perpetually.

Observe, observe perpetually.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 2 weeks ago
If you want to go down...

If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.

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p. 50e
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4 months 2 weeks ago
A teacher who can show good,...

A teacher who can show good, or indeed astounding results while he is teaching, is still not on that account a good teacher, for it may be that, while his pupils are under his immediate influence, he raises them to a level which is not natural to them, without developing their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again once the teacher leaves the schoolroom.

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p. 43e
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 3 weeks ago
The hidden significance of these fables...

The hidden significance of these fables which is sometimes thought to have been detected, the ethics running parallel to the poetry and history, are not so remarkable as the readiness with which they may be made to express a variety of truths. As if they were the skeletons of still older and more universal truths than any whose flesh and blood they are for the time made to wear. It is like striving to make the sun, or the wind, or the sea symbols to signify exclusively the particular thoughts of our day. But what signifies it? In the mythus a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn. In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun's rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 3 weeks ago
Every man is a new method....

Every man is a new method.

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"The Natural History of Intellect", p. 28
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
3 months 1 week ago
To believe in God is to...

To believe in God is to yearn for His existence and, furthermore, it is to act as if He did exist.

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Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
3 months 3 weeks ago
Plants are Children of the Earth;...

Plants are Children of the Earth; we are Children of the Æther. Our Lungs are properly our Root; we live, when we breathe; we begin our life with breathing.

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Philosophical Maxims
Lin Yutang
Lin Yutang
1 month 1 day ago
One can learn such a lot...

One can learn such a lot and enjoy such a lot in seventy years, and three generations is a long, long time to see human follies and acquire human wisdom. Anyone who is wise and has lived long enough to witness the changes of fashion and morals and politics through the rise and fall of three generations should be perfectly satisfied to rise from his seat and go away saying, "It was a good show," when the curtain falls.

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p. 23-24
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
4 months 3 weeks ago
It goes without saying that the...

It goes without saying that the normal durability of fixed capital is calculated on the supposition that all the conditions under which it can perform its functions normally during that time are fulfilled, just as we assume, in placing a mans life at 30 years on the average,that he will wash himself.

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Volume II, Ch. VIII, p. 176-177.
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
3 months 3 days ago
We say that someone occupies an...

We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.

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F 47
Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
2 months ago
The repression of liberty that took...

The repression of liberty that took place in the countries in which Communist regimes were established cannot be adequately explained as a product of backwardness, or of errors in the application of Marxian theory. It was the result of a resolute attempt to realize an Enlightenment utopia - a condition of society in which no serious form of conflict any longer exists.

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'Isaiah Berlin: The Value of Decency' (p.99)
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 3 weeks ago
The best life is the one...

The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
1 month 2 weeks ago
That's... the crisis. The number of...

That's... the crisis. The number of liberal democracies measured by... Freedom House in its annual survey of freedom around the world has been in decline for 16 straight years, and the biggest declines recently have been in the two biggest liberal democracies, India and the United States. So... we're dealing with a big global problem.

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7:18
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
4 months 3 weeks ago
It is difficult, if not impossible,...

It is difficult, if not impossible, to define the limit of our reasonable desires in respect of possessions.

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E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 346
Philosophical Maxims
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