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3 months ago

I have repeatedly stressed that the rape of the Earth and rape of women are intimately linked - both metaphorically, in shaping world-views, and materially, in shaping women's everyday lives. The deepening economic vulnerability of women makes them more vulnerable to all forms of violence, including sexual assault, as we found out during a series of public hearings on the impact of economic reforms on women organized by the National Commission on Women and the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology.

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Ecofeminism, by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, 1993, (full text pdf)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Don't judge the future of a person based on his present conditions, because time has the power to change black coal to shiny diamond.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

To preserve the freedom of the human mind then and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will, and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement. The generation which is going off the stage has deserved well of mankind for the struggles it has made, and for having arrested the course of despotism which had overwhelmed the world for thousands and thousands of years. If there seems to be danger that the ground they have gained will be lost again, that danger comes from the generation your contemporary. But that the enthusiasm which characterizes youth should lift its parricide hands against freedom and science would be such a monstrous phenomenon as I cannot place among possible things in this age and country.

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Letter to William Green Mumford
1 month 3 weeks ago

The wise man who has charge of governing the empire should know the cause of disorder before he can put it in order. Unless he knows its cause, he cannot regulate it.

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Book 4; Universal Love I
3 months 3 weeks ago

To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.

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K 42
3 months 4 weeks ago

Though he made a joke when asked to do the right thing, he always did it. He was so much more in earnest than he appeared. He did not do himself justice.

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On Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, as quoted in Victorian England : Aspects of English and Imperial History, 1837-1901 (1973) by Lewis Charles Bernard Seaman, p. 108
1 month 2 weeks ago

Never have nations been civilized, except by religion.

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XXXIII, p. 99
1 month 3 days ago

This is how I feel about the discussion of being. It's using words to describe.. not prescribe or prohibit...

AI: A nosegay is a small bouquet of flowers, usually fragrant ones, traditionally held in the hand or pinned to clothing. 

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4 months 1 week ago

The revolution, Stahl declared, is the 'world-historic mark of our age.' It would found 'the entire State on the will of man instead of on the commandment and ordinance of God.'

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p. 364
2 months 2 weeks ago

Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just.

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Ch. 7 : Distributive Justice, Section I, The Entitlement Theory, p. 151
5 months 2 weeks ago

My basis is supported by the authority of the greatest moralist of modern times; for such, undoubtedly, J. J. Rousseau is,-that profound reader of the human heart, who drew his wisdom not from books, but from life, and intended his doctrine not for the professorial chair, but for humanity; he, the foe of all prejudice, the foster-child of nature, whom alone she endowed with the gift of being able to moralise without tediousness, because he hit the truth and stirred the heart.

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Part III, Ch. VIII, 9, p. 230
2 months 4 weeks ago

It doesn't matter that it can't last, that we don't find it more often. To know that there is such perfection, that there has been such perfection - it is worth living for. It exists. It has been - it is. One can contemplate it and feel complete peace.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Goodbye, friend Elijiah, and remember that, although people apply the phrase to Aurora, it is, from this point on, Earth itself that is the true World of the Dawn.

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2 months 1 week ago

Of this Shakspeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think the best judgement not of this country only, but of Europe at large, is slowly pointing to the conclusion, That Shakspeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of Literature. On the whole, I know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take all the characters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness of depth; placid joyous strength; all things imaged in that great soul of his so true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea!

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5 months 1 week ago

In speaking of the move from subjective to objective characterization, I wish to remain noncommittal about the existence of an endpoint, the completely objective intrinsic nature of the thing, which one might or might not be able to reach. It may be more accurate to think of objectivity as a direction in which the understanding can travel. And in understanding a phenomenon like lightning, it is legitimate to go as far away as one can from a strictly human viewpoint.But in the case of experience, on the other hand, the connexion with a particular point of view seems much closer. It is difficult to understand what could be meant by the objective character of an experience, apart from the particular point of view from which its subject apprehends it. After all, what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat?

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p. 173.
4 months 3 weeks ago

There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.

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Book One, Chapter XIII.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Tis only from the selfishness and confin'd generosity of men, along with the scanty provision nature has made for his wants, that justice derives its origin.

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Part 2, Section 2
2 months 1 week ago

The advance of science is not comparable to the changes of a city, where old edifices are pitilessly torn down to give place to new, but to the continuous evolution of zoologic types which develop ceaselessly and end by becoming unrecognizable to the common sight, but where an expert eye finds always traces of the prior work of the centuries past. One must not think then that the old-fashioned theories have been sterile or vain.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The saying that beauty is but skin deep is but a skin-deep saying.

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Vol. 2, Ch. XIV, Personal Beauty
5 months 2 weeks ago

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.

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Correspondence with Helen Keller, 1908, in The Correspondence of William James: April 1908-August 1910, Vol. 12
6 months 1 day ago

Little is needed to ruin and upset everything, only a slight aberration from reason.

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Book IV, ch. 3, 4.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Always put the best interpretation on a tenet. Why not on Christianity, wholesome, sweet, and poetic? It is the record of a pure and holy soul, humble, absolutely disinterested, a trutn-speaker, and bent on serving, teaching, and uplifting men. Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to Jove the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love him was happiness,-to love him in other's virtues.

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4 months ago

On the whole, the scientist is better off if he collects his facts by accident, little by little, so he can study them before he tries to fit them into a jigsaw puzzle, This is how the late Tom Lethbridge came to arrive at his theories about other dimensions of reality. It is also how Guy Lyon Playfair came to develop his own theories about the nature of the poltergeist.

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p. 196
5 months 3 weeks ago

As to the people; in all these countries the greater part of the people certainly detest war, and most devoutly wish for peace. A very few of them, indeed, whose unnatural happiness depends upon the public misery, may wish for war; but be it yours to decide, whether it is equitable or not, that the unprincipled selfishness of such wretches should have more weight than the anxious wishes of all good men united.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

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Commonly attributed to Mere Christianity, where it is not found. Earliest reference seems to be an unsourced attribution to George MacDonald in an 1892 issue of the Quaker periodical The British Friend.

"If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein

See biography for Ludwig Wittgenstein:
https://civilsimian.com/LudwigWittgenstein

Read Ludwig Wittgenstein's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/81/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

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4 months 3 days ago

Reason, that which we call reason, reflex and reflective knowledge, the distinguishing mark of man, is a social product.

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4 months ago

A screen bans reality.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Faith is not in power but in truth.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

It is better to suffer, than to do, wrong.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The human understanding is unquiet; it cannot stop or rest, and still presses onward, but in vain. Therefore it is that we cannot conceive of any end or limit to the world, but always as of necessity it occurs to us that there is something beyond... But he is no less an unskilled and shallow philosopher who seeks causes of that which is most general, than he who in things subordinate and subaltern omits to do so.

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Aphorism 48
5 months 2 weeks ago

...this Jewish doctrine of the primacy of economic values has found the widest acceptance and been most whole-heartedly acted upon. From America it has begun to infect the rest of the world. We may be pardoned for wishing that the Jews had remained not forty, but four thousand years in their repulsive wilderness.

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"One and Many," pp. 18
2 months 1 week ago

Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.

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Ch. IV: "The Golden Rule and After", p. 110.
6 months 2 weeks ago

My parents, both of whom spoke Russian fluently, made no effort to teach me Russian, but insisted on my learning English as rapidly and as well as possible. They even set about learning English themselves, with reasonable, but limited, success.In a way, I am sorry. It would have been good to know the language of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevski. On the other hand, I would not have been willing to let anything get in the way of the complete mastery of English. Allow me my prejudice: surely there is no language more majestic than that of Shakespeare, Milton, and the King James Bible, and if I am to have one language that I know as only a native can know it, I consider myself unbelievably fortunate that it is English.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Death's dry bones glowed with light in the erotic darkbut he woke not nor felt the two warm bodies merge;the male worm then took heart and in his wife's ear whispered:"With one sweet kiss, dear wife, we've conquered conquering Death!"

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Orpheus' song, Book III, line 178
5 months 2 weeks ago

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

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4 months 1 day ago

Sensitiveness without impulse spells decadence, and impulse without sensitiveness spells brutality.

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Ch. 13: "Requisites for Social Progress", p. 280
5 months 2 weeks ago

There is a kind of latent omniscience not only in every man but in every particle.

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p. 263
5 months 2 weeks ago

The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. Of that larger script part is already visible, part is still unsolved. In other words, some of the miracles do locally what God has already done universally: others do locally what He has not yet done, but will do. In that sense, and from our human point of view, some are reminders and others prophecies.

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"Miracles" (1942), p. 29
4 months 1 week ago

Lichtenberg ... held something of the following kind: one should neither affirm the existence of God nor deny it. ... It is not that he wished to leave certain perspectives open, nor to please everyone. It is rather that he was identifying himself, for his part, with a consciousness of self, of the world, and of others that was "strange" (the word is his) in a sense which is equally well destroyed by the rival explanations.

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pp. 45-46
2 months 1 week ago

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.

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Preface, Dover abridged edition (1952), p. xxii
5 months 2 weeks ago

The statesman who should attempt to direct people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.

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Chapter II
6 months 2 weeks ago

Parmenides: If anyone, with his mind fixed on all these objections and others like them, denies the existence of ideas of things, and does not assume an idea under which each individual thing is classed, he will be quite at a loss, since he denies that the idea of each thing is always the same, and in this way he will utterly destroy the power of carrying on discussion... Then what will become of philosophy? To what can you turn, if these things are unknown?

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4 months 3 weeks ago

For those endowed with insight there is in reality no object of love but God, nor does anyone but He deserve love Love, Longing, Intimacy and Contentment.

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Islamic Texts Society. 2011. p. 23. ISBN 978-1-903682-27-2. Translated with an introduction and notes by Eric Ormsby.
4 months 1 week ago

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

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6 months 5 days ago

Natural inclinations are present in things from God, who moves all things. So it is impossible for the natural inclinations of a species to be toward evil in itself. But there is in all perfect animals a natural inclination toward carnal union. Therefore it is impossible for carnal union to be evil in itself.

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III, 126, 3
5 months 2 weeks ago

The foundations on which several duties are built, and the foundations of right and wrong from which they spring, are not perhaps easily to be let into the minds of grown men, not us'd to abstract their thoughts from common received opinions. Much less are children capable of reasonings from remote principles. They cannot conceive the force of long deductions. The reasons that move them must be obvious, and level to their thoughts, and such as may be felt and touched. But yet, if their age, temper, and inclination be consider'd, they will never want such motives as may be sufficient to convince them.

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Sec. 81
5 months 2 weeks ago

Pi's face was masked, and it was understood that none could behold it and live. But piercing eyes looked out from the mask, inexorable, cold and enigmatic.

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"The Mathematician's Nightmare", Nightmares of Eminent Persons and Other Stories, 1954

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