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4 months 3 weeks ago

Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

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3 months 1 week ago

The thinking man must ... oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. True manhood is too precious a spiritual good for us to surrender any part of it to thoughtlessness. p. 305; also in The Animal World of Albert Schweitzer (1950), p. 179 Variant : The thinking man must oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another, even the lowliest creature; to do so is to renounce our manhood and shoulder a guilt which nothing justifies.

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As quoted in Becoming Vegan : The Complete Guide to Adopting a Healthy Plant-based Diet (2000) by Brenda Davis and Vesanto Melina, p. 261
3 months 3 weeks ago

Our claim is that a common political project is possible. This possibility of course will have to be verified and realized in practice. ... We are capable of democracy. The challange is to organize it politically.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

The difference principle, for example, requires that the higher expectations of the more advantaged contribute to the prospects of the least advantaged.

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Chapter II, Section 16, pg. 95
7 months 3 weeks ago

The absurd ... is an experience to be lived through, a point of departure, the equivalent, in existence of Descartes' methodical doubt. Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation, and in the process of reasoning then pursues the same course. I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest. The first and only evidence that is supplied me, within the terms of the absurdist experience, is rebellion ... Rebellion is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Here's the thing, if you're arguing against fundamental human rights...I don't care if the argument is good enough for you. In fact, certain hand gestures are relevant, and we'll work back from that.....

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6 months 4 weeks ago

Yet it seems extraordinary that the justice of increasing the expectations of the better placed by a billion dollars, say, should turn on whether the prospects of the least favored increase or decrease by a penny.

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Chapter III, Section 26, pg. 157
7 months 1 week ago

I know that a Christian should be humble, but against the Pope I am going to be proud and say to him: "You, Pope, I will not have you for my boss, for I am sure that my doctrine is divine."

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Chapter 2, Verse 6
7 months 1 week ago

But plants, though they have not powers of perception, yet, as they have life, certainly approach very nearly to those things which are endowed with sentient faculties. What then is so completely insensible as stony substance? yet even in this, there appears to be a desire of union. Thus the loadstone attracts iron to it, and holds it fast in its embrace, when so attracted. Indeed, the attraction of cohesion, as a law of love, takes place throughout all inanimate nature.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

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4:4 (KJV) Said to Satan. The reference is to Deuteronomy 8:3, "... that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live." (KJV)
3 months 3 weeks ago

The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolate persons.

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Ch. XVII: "On This Rock", §2, p. 375
5 months 3 weeks ago

One of the most marked features about the law of mind is that it makes time to have a definite direction of flow from past to future. ...This makes one of the great contrasts between the law of mind and the law of physical force, where there is no more distinction between the two opposite directions in time than between moving northward and moving southward.

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3 months 1 day ago

A slave's soul has no worth, my brothers; it lacks strengthto tread on this great earth with gallantry and freedom.I pity the poor slaves, they're nought but airy mist,a light breeze scatters them, a fragrance knocks them down;it's only just they crawl on the earth on hands and knees.Today I'll write a hymn to God and pray for this great grace.

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Egyptian high priest, Book X, line 90
5 months 3 weeks ago

We know that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique; but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction.

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Ch. 10, p. 148
5 months 2 weeks ago

When I first read The Wretched of the Earth I heard a new history spoken-the voice of the decolonised subject raised in resistance. That voice . . . articulated a yearning for freedom that was so intense and a quality of emotional hunger that was so fierce that it was overwhelming. Dying into the text, I abandoned and forgot myself. The lust for freedom in those pages awakened and resurrected me.

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Gender and Decolonization in the Congo (2010) ISBN 978-0-230-11040-3
4 months 1 week ago

God may not play dice but he enjoys a good round of Trivial Pursuit every now and again.

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"God"
8 months 3 days ago
We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us.
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5 months 3 weeks ago

It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range.

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3 weeks 4 days ago

Don't be a dick....

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7 months 4 weeks ago

I shall assume that your silence gives consent.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The philosopher will ask himself ... if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history.

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p. 47
6 months 1 day ago

A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.

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Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (3 April 1777); as published in The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (1899), vol. 2, p. 206

The bank mania is one of the most threatening of these imitations. It is raising up a moneyed aristocracy in our country which has already set the government at defiance, and although forced at length to yield a little on this first essay of their strength, their principles are unyielded and unyielding. These have taken deep root in the hearts of that class from which our legislators are drawn, and the sop to Cerberus from fable has become history. Their principles lay hold of the good, their pelf of the bad, and thus those whom the Constitution had placed as guards to its portals, are sophisticated or suborned from their duties.

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Letter to Josephus B. Stuart (May 10, 1817) ME 15:112; reported in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb (1904), vol. 15, p. 112
7 months 2 days ago

It requires twenty years for a man to rise from the vegetable state in which he is within his mother's womb, and from the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of reason begins to appear. It has required thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him.

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"Man: General Reflection on Man", 1771
5 months 3 weeks ago

Even the most elevated psychological understanding is not a loving understanding.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

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p. 53e
5 months 3 weeks ago

The universal view melts things into a blur.

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3 months 1 week ago

Are you not aware that all offerings whether great or small that are brought to the gods with piety have equal value, whereas without piety, I will not say hecatombs, but, by the gods, even the Olympian sacrifice of a thousand oxen is merely empty expenditure and nothing else?

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Oration to the Cynic Heracleios
4 months 1 week ago

I think television has betrayed the meaning of democratic speech, adding visual chaos to the confusion of voices. What role does silence have in all this noise?

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"Television"
6 months 2 weeks ago

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

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3, 20, 7
8 months 3 days ago
It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!
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6 months 1 day ago

We want no foreign examples to rekindle in us the flame of liberty. The example of our own ancestors is abundantly sufficient to maintain the spirit of freedom in its full vigour, and to qualify it in all its exertions. The example of a wise, moral, well-natured, and well-tempered spirit of freedom, is that alone which can be useful to us, or in the least degree reputable or safe. Our fabric is so constituted; one part of it bears so much on the other, the parts, are so made for one another, and for nothing else, that to introduce any foreign matter into it, is to destroy it.

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p. 471

I know now that I shall. But all Actual Knowledge brings with it, by its formal nature, its schematised apposition; - although I now know of the Schema of God, yet I am not yet immediately this Schema, but I am only a Schema of the Schema. The required Being is not yet realised. I shall be. Who is this I? Evidently that which is, - the Ego gives in Intuition, the Individual. This shall be. What does its Being signify? It is given as a Principle in the World of Sense. Blind Instinct is indeed annihilated, and in its place there now stands the clearly perceived Shall. But the Power that at first set this Instinct in motion remains, in order that the Shall my now set it (the Power) in motion, and become its higher determining Principle. By means of this Power, I shall therefore, within its sphere, - the World of Sense, - produce and make manifest that which I recognise as my true Being in the Supersensuous World.

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7 months 1 day ago

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

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p. 375
6 months 4 weeks ago

Admit it, it is your youth that you regret, more even than your crime; it is my youth you hate, even more than my innocence.

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Electra to her mother Clytemnestra, Act 1
7 months 1 day ago

Everything great glitters, glitter begets ambition, and ambition can easily have caused the inspiration or what we thought to be inspiration. But reason can no longer restrain one who is lured by the fury of ambition. He tumbles where his vehement drive calls him; no longer does he choose his position, but rather chance and luster determine it.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences-for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect-if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack!

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Pt. I, ch. III
7 months 3 weeks ago

When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. ... there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Everything should be made simple as possible but no simpler.

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7 months 2 days ago

Love is of all the passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the body.

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Le Dernier Volume Des Œuvres De Voltaire: Contes - Comédie - Pensées - Poésies - Lettres, 1862
6 months 1 day ago

It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.

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7 months 1 day ago

The real point at issue always is Turkey in Europe - the great peninsula to the south of the Save and Danube. This splendid territory [the Balkans] has the misfortune to be inhabited by a conglomerate of different races and nationalities, of which it is hard to say which is the least fit for progress and civilization. Slavonians, Greeks, Wallachians, Arnauts, twelve millions of men, are all held in submission by one million of Turks, and up to a recent period, it appeared doubtful whether, of all these different races, the Turks were not the most competent to hold the supremacy which, in such a mixed population, could not but accrue to one of these nationalities.

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The Russian Menace to Europe, From Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, edited by Paul Blackstock and Bert Hoselitz, and published by George Allen and Unwin, London, 1953
4 months 4 weeks ago

There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.

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Letter to Harold Adam Innis (14 March 1951), published in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 223

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