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4 months 2 weeks ago

The position of the revolutionary party in Germany is certainly difficult at the moment, but, with some critical analysis of the circumstances, clear nevertheless. As to the "governments," it is obvious from every point of view, if only for the sake of Germany's existence, that the demand must be put to them not to remain neutral, but, as you rightly say, to be patriotic. But the revolutionary point is to be given to the affair simply by emphasising the antagonism to Russia more strongly than the antagonism against Boustrapa.

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Letter to Friedrich Engels (18 May 1859), quoted in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895 (1943), p. 122
2 months 1 week ago

I heard what you were saying. You - you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.

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Cameo appearance as himself in Woody Allen's 1977 film Annie Hall

The Perception of Time involves a constant and latent kind of memory, which may be termed a 'Sense of Succession'. The Perception of Number also involves this Sense of Succession, although in small numbers we appear to apprehend the units simultaneously and not successively.

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3 months 1 week ago

Hegel's philosophy was an integral part of the culture which authoritarianism had to overcome. It is therefore no accident that the National Socialist assault on Hegel begins with the repudiation of his political theory.

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P. 411
3 months 2 weeks ago

What a hell of an economic system! Some are replete with everything while others, whose stomachs are no less demanding, whose hunger is just as recurrent, have nothing to bite on. The worst of it is the constrained posture need puts you in. The needy man does not walk like the rest; he skips, slithers, twists, crawls.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.

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Culture
2 months 4 weeks ago

It is a conceded fact that woman is being reared as a sex commodity, and yet she is kept in absolute ignorance of the meaning and importance of sex.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

I think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas look mysterious - you write backward Es!

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Putnam as quoted in: Julian Baggini, Jeremy Stangroom (2005) What Philosophers Think. p. 233
3 months 1 week ago

The political freedom of conscience and of the press, so far from being as it is commonly supposed an extension, is a new case of the limitation of rights and discretion. Conscience and the press ought to be unrestrained, not because men have a right to deviate from the exact line that duty prescribes, but because society, the aggregate of individuals, has no right to assume the prerogative of an infallible judge, and to undertake authoritatively to prescribe to its members in matters of pure speculation.

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Vol. 1, bk 2 : Principles of Society , Ch. 5 : Of Rights
3 months 2 weeks ago

Throughout all organic nature there is at work a modifying influence of the kind... as the cause, these specific differences: an influence which, though slow in its action, does, in time, if the circumstances demand it, produce marked changes-an influence, which to all appearance, would produce in the millions of years, and under the great varieties of condition which geological records imply, any amount of change.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

There are two kinds of people, killers, and everybody else.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It's not local at all. I suppose if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn't notice it much more in any one food more than another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

My lectures are published and not published; they will be intelligible to those who heard them, and to none beside.

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Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.

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Introduction to the Critical Journal of Philosophy, cited in W. Kaufmann, Hegel (1966), p. 56
4 months 2 weeks ago

The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. For this, indeed, is the main source of our ignorance - the fact that our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite. Variant translation: The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, clear, and well-defined will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. The main source of our ignorance lies in the fact that our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

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Act 11, sc. 2
3 months 2 weeks ago

It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.

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Every man knows that in his work he does best and accomplishes most when he has attained a proficiency that enables him to work intuitively. That is, there are things which we come to know so well that we do not know how we know them. So it seems to me in matters of principle. Perhaps we live best and do things best when we are not too conscious of how and why we do them.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.

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F 120
1 month 6 days ago

They indicate the saddest spiritual paralysis, and mere death-life of the souls of men: more godless theory, I think, was never promulgated in this Earth. A false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build a brick house!

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4 months 5 days ago

Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.

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p. 16.
1 month 1 week ago

It is the simple hypotheses of which one must be most wary; because these are the ones that have the most chances of passing unnoticed.

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Thermodynamique: Leçons professées pendant le premier semestre 1888-1889 (1892), Preface
4 months 2 weeks ago

The institution of religion exists only to keep mankind in order, and to make men merit the goodness of God by their virtue. Everything in a religion which does not tend towards this goal must be considered foreign or dangerous.

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"The Ecclesiastical Ministry"
4 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing is yet in its true form.

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1 month 1 week ago

If you could see the earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon.

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Salviati, p. 88
4 months 1 week ago

A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 123
3 months 2 weeks ago

All became so jealous of the rights of their own personality that they did their very utmost to curtail and destroy them in others, and made that the chief thing in their lives. Slavery followed, even voluntary slavery; the weak eagerly submitted to the strong, on condition that the latter aided them to subdue the still weaker. Then there were saints who came to these people, weeping, and talked to them of their pride, of their loss of harmony and due proportion, of their loss of shame. They were laughed at or pelted with stones.

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1 month 1 week ago

Benevolence is the tranquil habitation of man, and righteousness is his straight path.

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Justice and Truth, no. 100
1 month 3 weeks ago

The equation of religion with belief is rather recent.

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Christianity Among the Religions of the World (New York: Scribner's, 1957) p. 7
2 months 2 weeks ago

Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.

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Bk. X, ch. 16
3 months 2 weeks ago

The Whigs of this day have before them, in this Appeal, their constitutional ancestors: They have the doctors of the modern school. They will choose for themselves. The author of the Reflections has chosen for himself. If a new order is coming on, and all the political opinions must pass away as dreams, which our ancestors have worshipped as revelations, I say for him, that he would rather be the last (as certainly he is the least) of that race of men, than the first and greatest of those who have coined to themselves Whig principles from a French die, unknown to the impress of our fathers in the constitution.

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p. 476
1 month 1 week ago

Perhaps some day soon we will have arrived at the point when we can look back with irony at the barbaric old times when in order to be free we had to keep our own brothers and sisters slaves or to be equal we were constrained to inhuman sacrifices of freedom.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

It is not calling the landed estates, possessed by old prescriptive rights, the 'accumulations of ignorance and superstition', that can support me in shaking that grand title, which supersedes all other title, and which all my studies of general jurisprudence have taught me to consider as one principal cause of the formation of states; I mean the ascertaining and securing prescription. But these are donations made in 'ages of ignorance and superstition'. Be it so. It proves that these donations were made long ago; and this is prescription; and this gives right and title.

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Letter to Captain Thomas Mercer (26 February 1790), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), p. 95
1 month 1 week ago

Therefore tolerance of diversity, of people that don't believe the same thing that you do, has always been at the core of this pragmatic project to enable diverse populations to live with one another.

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9:00

But it isn't just a matter of faith, but of faith and works. Each is necessary. For the demons also believe you heard the apostle and tremble (Jas 2:19); but their believing doesn't do them any good. Faith alone is not enough, unless works too are joined to it: Faith working through love (Gal 5:6), says the apostle.

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16A:11:2

Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, And in their pleasure takes joy, even as though 'twere his own. Not in the morning alone, not only at mid-day he charmeth; Even at setting, the sun is still the same glorious planet.

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Distichs in The Poems of Goethe (1853) as translated in the original metres by Edgar Alfred Bowring
5 months 2 weeks ago
Unpleasant, even dangerous, qualities can be found in every nation and every individual: it is cruel to demand that the Jew be an exception. In him, these qualities may even be dangerous and revolting to an unusual degree; and perhaps the young stock-exchange Jew is altogether the most disgusting invention of mankind.
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2 months 2 weeks ago

People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing-refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.

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p. 210
2 months 2 weeks ago

If the thought enunciates an object as a truth, it is only as a challenge to this object's own self-fulfillment.

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2 months 1 week ago

Why is it after a century of socialist disasters, and an intellectual legacy that has been time and again exploded, the left-wing position remains, as it were, the default position to which thinking people gravitate when called upon for a comprehensive philosophy? Why are "right-wingers" marginalised in the educational system, denounced in the media and regarded by our political class as untouchable, fit only to clean up after the orgies of luxurious nonsense indulged in by their moral superiors?

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3 months 1 week ago

The way in which the vast mass of the poor are treated by modern society is truly scandalous. They are herded into great cities where they breathe a fouler air than in the countryside which they have left.

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3 months 1 week ago

Life is a disease of the spirit; a working incited by Passion. Rest is peculiar to the spirit.

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3 months 1 week ago

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

It is not my aim to surprise or shock you - but the simplest way I can summarize is to say that there are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until - in a visible future - the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied.

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Newell & Simon (1958), quoted in AI, by Daniel Crevier
1 month 1 week ago

Agricultural association, which in all ages has been deemed impossible, would produce results of unbounded magnificence the rigorous demonstrations, the mathematical calculations by which these results will be verified, will not, however, prevent the picture of the future harmony and happiness which they present from repelling minds habituated to the miseries and wretchedness of our present civilization. The Theory of Social Organization.

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Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier, p. 5.
2 months 4 weeks ago

One gloomy and pessimistic writer with a powerful style affects a whole generation of writers, who in turn affect almost every educated person in the country.

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p. 79
4 months 2 weeks ago

It is so rare to meet with a man out-doors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his hands.

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I lie on the beach like a crocodile and let myself be roasted by the sun. I never see a newspaper and don't give a damn for what is called the world.

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Letter to Max Born, 1918, from The Born-Einstein Letters: Friendship, Politics and Physics in Uncertain Times, Macmillan (2005 edition), pg 7.
2 months 1 week ago

All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!

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Henderson the Rain King (1959) [Viking/Penguin, 1984, ISBN 0-140-07269-1], ch. XVIII, p. 271
4 months 2 weeks ago

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.

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p. 485

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