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Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
1 month 1 week ago
In argument about moral problems, relativism...

In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.

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Some More -isms, p. 32
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
Just now
Therefore, my dear Lucilius, begin at...

Therefore, my dear Lucilius, begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 months 2 weeks ago
Every man I meet is in...

Every man I meet is in some way my superior, and in that, I can learn of him.

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As quoted in Think, Vol. 4-5 (1938), p. 32
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
2 months 1 week ago
If this superstitious fear of Spirits...

If this superstitious fear of Spirits were taken away, and with it, Prognostiques from Dreams, false Prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which, crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted then they are for civill Obedience.

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The First Part, Chapter 2, p. 8
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 1 week ago
If thou wilt be perfect, go...

If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.

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19:21 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
3 months 3 weeks ago
Unless I am convinced by the...

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen.

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Statement in defense of his writings at the Diet of Worms (19 April 1521), as translated in The Nature of Protestantism (1963) by Karl Heim, p. 78
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
3 months 2 weeks ago
It was the excess to which...

It was the excess to which imaginary systems of religion had been carried, and the intolerance, persecutions, burnings, and massacres, they occasioned, that first induced certain persons to propagate infidelity; thinking, that upon the whole, that it was better not to believe at all, than to believe a multitude of things and complicated creeds, that occasioned so much mischief in the world. But those days are past, persecution has ceased, and the antidote then set up against it has no longer even the shadow of apology. We profess, and we proclaim in peace, the pure, unmixed, comfortable, and rational belief of a God, as manifested to us in the universe. We do this without any apprehension of that belief being made a cause of persecution as other beliefs have been, or of suffering persecution ourselves. To God, and not to man, are all men to account for their belief.

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A Discourse, &c. &c.
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
2 months 2 weeks ago
The pursuit of wealth generally diverts...

The pursuit of wealth generally diverts men of great talents and strong passions from the pursuit of power; and it frequently happens that a man does not undertake to direct the fortunes of the state until he has shown himself incompetent to conduct his own.

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Chapter XIII.
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
2 months 1 week ago
Big industry has brought all the...

Big industry has brought all the people of the Earth into contact with each other, has merged all local markets into one world market, has spread civilization and progress everywhere and has thus ensured that whatever happens in civilized countries will have repercussions in all other countries. It follows that if the workers in England or France now liberate themselves, this must set off revolution in all other countries - revolutions which, sooner or later, must accomplish the liberation of their respective working class.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
2 months 1 week ago
Society is eliminating the prerogatives and...

Society is eliminating the prerogatives and privileges of feudal. aristocratic culture together with its content. The fact that the transcending truths of the fine arts, the aesthetics of life and thought, were accessible only to the few wealthy and educated was the fault of a repressive society. But this fault is not corrected by paperbacks, general education, long-playing records, and the abolition of formal dress in the theater and concert hall. The cultural privileges expressed the injustice of freedom, the contradiction between ideology and reality, the separation of intellectual from material productivity; but they also provided a protected realm in which the tabooed truths could survive in abstract integrity-remote from the society which suppressed them.

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pp. 64-65
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 2 days ago
The very same reason which one...

The very same reason which one man may regard as a motive for taking care to prolong his life may be regarded by another man as a motive for shooting himself.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
3 months 2 weeks ago
One thing I have frequently observed...

One thing I have frequently observed in children, that when they have got possession of any poor creature, they are apt to use it ill: they often torment, and treat it very roughly, young birds, butterflies, and such other poor animals which fall into their hands, and that with a seeming kind of pleasure. This I think should be watched in them, and if they incline to any such cruelty, they should be taught the contrary usage. For the custom of tormenting and killing of beasts, will, by degrees, harden their minds even towards men; and they will delight in the suffering and destruction of inferior creatures, will not be apt to be very compassionate or benign to those of their own kind. Our practice takes notice of this in the exclusion of butchers from juries of life and death.

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Sec. 116
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
3 months 1 week ago
I see the situation of man...

I see the situation of man in the world of planetary technicity not as an inexitricable and inescapable destiny, but I see the task of thought precisely in this, that within its own limits it helps man as such achieve a satisfactory relationship to the essence of technicity. National Socialism did indeed go in this direction. Those people, however, were far too poorly equipped for thought to arrive at a really explicit relationship to what is happening today and has been underway for the past 300 years.

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As translated by William Richardson in Risk and Meaning, Nicolas Bouleau (translated by Dené Oglesby and Martin Crossley), ed. Springer, 2011
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 2 weeks ago
The real nature of the present...

The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
2 months 2 weeks ago
There is in fact a manly...

There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.

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Chapter III, Part I
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
3 months 2 weeks ago
He yawned. He had finished the...

He yawned. He had finished the day and he had also finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism, smiling tolerance, resignation, common sense stoicism - all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life.

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L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason)
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
3 months 4 weeks ago
One man will say a thing...

One man will say a thing of himself without comprehending its excellence, in which another will discern a marvelous series of conclusions, which makes us affirm that it is no longer the same expression, and that he is no more indebted for it to the one from whom he has learned it, than a beautiful tree belongs to the one who cast the seed, without thinking of it, or knowing it, into the fruitful soil which caused its growth by its own fertility.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
2 months 2 weeks ago
General ideas are no proof of...

General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect.

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Book One, Chapter III.
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 2 weeks ago
It is entirely clear....
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Jesus
Jesus
2 months 1 week ago
Did ye never read in the...

Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes? Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.

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21:27-42 and 44 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 2 weeks ago
In the name of national security,...

In the name of national security, the Commission's hearings were held in secret, thereby continuing the policy which has marked the entire course of the case. This prompts my second question: If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security? Indeed, precisely the same question must be put here as was posed in France during the Dreyfus case: If the Government is so certain of its case, why has it conducted all its inquiries in the strictest secrecy? "

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16 Questions on the Assassination" in The Minority of One, ed. M.S. Arnoni (1964-09-06), pp. 6-8
Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
1 month 3 weeks ago
I believe that freedom is not...

I believe that freedom is not a constant attribute that "we have" or "we don't have"; perhaps there is only one reality: the act of liberating ourselves in the process of using choices. Every step in life that heightens the maturity of man heightens his ability to choose the freeing alternative. I believe that "freedom of choice" is not always equal for all men at every moment. The man with an exclusively necrophilic orientation; who is narcissistic; or who is symbiotic-incestuous, can only make a regressive choice. The free man, freed from irrational ties, can no longer make a regressive choice.

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Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
3 months 2 weeks ago
It is the privilege…

It is the privilege of true genius, and certainly of the genius that opens a new road, to make without punishment great mistakes.

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"Siècle de Louis XIV," ch. 32 (1751), qtd. in Arthur Schopenhauer, "The World as Will and Representation," Criticism of the Kantian philosophy, 1818
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
3 months 2 weeks ago
Good tests kill flawed theories; we...

Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.

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As quoted in My Universe : A Transcendent Reality (2011) by Alex Vary, Part II
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
3 months 1 week ago
The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties,...

The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 1 week ago
It is debasing to die the...

It is debasing to die the way one does; it is intolerable to be exposed to an end over which we have no control, an end which lies in wait for us, overthrows us, casts us into the unnameable.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 1 week ago
You get tragedy where the tree,...

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

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Philosophical Maxims
Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte
2 months 2 weeks ago
Reorganisation, irrespectively of God or king,...

Reorganisation, irrespectively of God or king, by the worship of Humanity, systematically adopted. Man's only right is to do his duty. The Intellect should always be the servant of the Heart, and should never be its slave.

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Title Page
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
3 months 2 weeks ago
Communism is for us not a...

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

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Vol. I, Part 1.
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 1 week ago
There are two godheads: the world...

There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist. A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in the face of death. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.

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Journal entry (8 July 1916), p. 74e
Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
2 months 1 week ago
The benefit of the governed is...

The benefit of the governed is made to lie on one side and the benefit of the governors on the other.

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Book III, Chapter 9
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
2 months 2 weeks ago
Am I a free agent, or...

Am I a free agent, or am I merely the manifestation of a foreign power? Neither appear sufficiently well founded.By the most courageous resolve of my life am I reduced to this! what Power can save me from it, from myself?

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Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 24
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
1 month 4 weeks ago
Christianity was an epidemic rather than...

Christianity was an epidemic rather than a religion. It appealed to fear, hysteria and ignorance. It spread across the Western world, not because it was true, but because humans are gullible and superstitious.

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p. 212
Philosophical Maxims
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
1 month 3 weeks ago
A leftist government doesn't exist because...

A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.

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from L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze: G comme Gauche ("Gilles Deleuze's Alphabet Book: Left-wing Politics"), 1988-1989.
Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
3 months 1 week ago
Discourses are tactical...

Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy.

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Vol I, pp. 101-102
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
2 months 1 week ago
This whole creation is essentially subjective,...

This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.

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General Aspects of Dream Psychology
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 2 weeks ago
If anyone would like to acquire...

If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

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Book III, Chapter 8, "The Great Sin"
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 month 1 week ago
Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy...

Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But it cannot have been the sort of God that we need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early.

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 5 days ago
They hate not to make use...

They hate not to make use of their abilities... they do not necessarily work for their own self-interest.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
1 month 2 weeks ago
In historical events great men -...

In historical events great men - so-called - are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.

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Bk. IX, ch. 1
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 2 weeks ago
The second doctrine of the Perennial...

The second doctrine of the Perennial Philosophy - that it is possible to know the Divine Ground by a direct intuition higher than discursive reasoning - is to be found in all the great religions of the world. A philosopher who is content merely to know about the ultimate Reality - theoretically and by hearsay - is compared by Buddha to a herdsman of other men's cows. Mohammed uses an even homelier barnyard metaphor. For him the philosopher who has not realized his metaphysics is just an ass bearing a load of books. Christian, Hindu, Taoist teachers wrote no less emphatically about the absurd pretensions of mere learning and analytic reasoning.

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Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
4 months 2 weeks ago
Consciousness presupposes itself, and asking about...

Consciousness presupposes itself, and asking about its origin is an idle and just as sophistical a question as that old one, "What came first, the fruit-tree or the stone? Wasn't there a stone out of which came the first fruit-tree? Wasn't there a fruit-tree from which came the first stone?

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Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
3 months 2 weeks ago
It is, therefore, a just political...

It is, therefore, a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave: Though at the same time, it appears somewhat strange, that a maxim should be true in politics, which is false in fact. But to satisfy us on this head, we may consider, that men are generally more honest in their private than in their public capacity, and will go greater lengths to serve a party, than when their own private interest is alone concerned. Honour is a great check upon mankind: But where a considerable body of men act together, this check is, in a great measure, removed; since a man is sure to be approved of by his own party, for what promotes the common interest; and he soon learns to despise the clamours of adversaries.

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Part I, Essay 6: Of The Independency of Parliament; first line often paraphrased as "It is a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave."
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig von Mises
Ludwig von Mises
1 day ago
...racial hatred is not a natural...

...racial hatred is not a natural phenomenon innate in man. It is the product of ideologies. But even if such a thing as a natural and inborn hatred between various races existed, it would not render social cooperation futile and would not invalidate Ricardo's theory of association. Social cooperation has nothing to do with personal love or with a general commandment to love one another. People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.

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Part 2, VIII.84
Philosophical Maxims
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
3 months 3 weeks ago
Bad company will…

Bad company will lead a man to the gallows!

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Act IV, scene vi
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 2 days ago
And what has Don Quixote left,...

And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I answer, he has left himself, and a man, a living and eternal man, is worth all the theories and all the philosophies. Other peoples have left chiefly institutions, books; we have left souls; St. Teresa is worth any institution, any Critique of Pure Reason.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
2 months ago
The ancient world takes its stand...

The ancient world takes its stand upon the drama of the Universe, the modern world upon the inward drama of the Soul.

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Ch. 9: "Science and Philosophy", p. 196
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 1 week ago
Faced with information overload, we have...

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

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(p. 132)
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
3 months 2 weeks ago
For many years I was self-appointed...

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully, though I never received one cent for it.

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After February 22, 1846
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
2 months 3 weeks ago
I am in no way facetious,...

I am in no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and galliardize of company, yet in one dream I can compose a whole Comedy, behold the action, apprehend the jests, and laugh myself awake at the conceits thereof.

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Section 11
Philosophical Maxims
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