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6 months 3 weeks ago

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

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As quoted in The Beginning of the End (2004) by Peter Hershey, p. 109 Also, as quoted in "The Relentless Rise of Science as Fun", by Jeremy Burgess, in New Scientist, Volume 143, Issues 1932-1945, originally published 1994.
4 months 2 weeks ago

We have classical associations and great names of our own which we can confidently oppose to the most splendid of ancient times. Senate has not to our ears a sound so venerable as Parliament. We respect the Great Charter more than the laws of Solon. The Capitol and the Forum impress us with less awe than our own Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey... The list of warriors and statesmen by whom our constitution was founded or preserved, from De Montfort down to Fox, may well stand a comparison with the Fasti of Rome. The dying thanksgiving of Sydney is as noble as the libation which Thrasea poured to Liberating Jove: and we think with far less pleasure of Cato tearing out his entrails than of Russell saying, as he turned away from his wife, that the bitterness of death was past.

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'History', The Edinburgh Review (May 1828), quoted in The Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay, Vol. I (1860), p. 252
6 months 3 weeks ago

Do the essences of proposition and of the truth determine themselves from out of the essence of the thing, or does the essence of the thing determine itself from out of the essence of the proposition? The question is posed as an either/or. However does this either/or itself suffice? Are the essence of the thing and the essence of the proposition only built as mirror images because both of them together determine themselves from out of the same but deeper lying root? However, what and where can be this common ground for the essence of the thing and of the proposition and of their origin? The unconditioned (Unbedingt)? We stated at the beginning that what conditions the essense of the thing in its thingness can no longer itself be thing and conditioned, it must be an unconditioned (Un-bedingtes).

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p. 47
5 months 1 day ago

One reason an egalitarian approach to the value of life is important is that it draws from ideals of radical democracy at the same time that it enters into ethical considerations about how best to practice nonviolence. The institutional life of violence will not be brought down by a prohibition, but only by a counter-institutional ethos and practice.

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p. 61
7 months 3 weeks ago

It's better to bet on this life than on the next.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

The naturalists, you know, distribute the history of nature into three kingdoms or departments: zoology, botany, mineralogy. Ideology, or mind, however, occupies so much space in the field of science, that we might perhaps erect it into a fourth kingdom or department. But inasmuch as it makes a part of the animal construction only, it would be more proper to subdivide zoology into physical and moral.

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Thomas Jefferson, Letter (24 Mar 1824) to Mr. Woodward. Collected in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Correspondence (1854), 339.
5 months 1 week ago

A truly powerful holder of power does not simply elicit agreement, but enthusiasm and excitement.

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Only a man who is at one with the world can be at one with himself.

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"Ideas," Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), § 130
2 months 4 weeks ago

Our laws, language, religion, politics, & manners are so deeply laid in English foundations, that we shall never cease to consider their history as a part of ours, and to study ours in that as it's origin.

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Letter to William Duane
6 months 4 weeks ago

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.

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"Walter Savage Landor", from The Dial, xii, 1841
7 months 3 weeks ago

First, there must be an end to war and national rivalry and only then could one turn to the internal miseries that, after all, had external conflict as their chief cause.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

And every man, in love or pride, Of his fate is ever wide.

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Nemesis
7 months 3 days ago

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

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Chapter X, Part II, p. 152.

The fact that a belief has a good moral effect upon a man is no evidence whatsoever in favor of its truth.

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BBC Radio Debate on the Existence of God, Russell vs. Copleston, 1948
5 months 2 weeks ago

The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration, essentially mystical, medieval, Quixotesque, has been called a demi-mondaine philosophy. Leave out the demi; call it mondaine, mundane. Mundane - yes, a philosophy for the world and not for philosophers, just as chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone. The world desires illusion (mundus vult decipi) - either the illusion antecedent to reason, which is poetry, or the illusion subsequent to reason, which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whosoever wishes to delude will always find someone willing to be deluded. Blessed are they who are easily befooled!

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Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?

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E 32
6 months 4 weeks ago

Act, if you like,-but you do it at your peril. Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament. The fiery reformer embodies his aspiration in some rite or covenant, and he and his friends cleave to the form, and lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established Quakerism, the Shaker has established his monastery and his dance; and, although each prates of spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is anti-spiritual.

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Goethe; or, the Writer
6 months 2 weeks ago

And I will tell you something else: there is no birth of all mortal things, nor any end in wretched death, but only a mixing and dissolution of mixtures; 'birth' is so called on the part of mankind.

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fr. 8
3 months 2 weeks ago

All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.

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Ch. 29, June 10, 1943.
4 months 3 weeks ago

I don't believe you until you tell me, do you really believe, for example, if they say they are Catholic, "Do you really believe that when a priest blesses a wafer, it turns into the body of Christ? Are you seriously telling me you believe that? Are you seriously saying that wine turns into blood?" Mock them. Ridicule them. In public. Don't fall for the convention that we're all too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion is not off limits. Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated and need to be challenged and, if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt.

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Reason Rally, National Mall, Washington, DC, 2012-03-24 Richard Dawkins and his Foundation at the Reason Rally, YouTube, 7 April 2012
5 months 4 weeks ago

We have busied ourselves and contented ourselves long enough with speaking and writing; now at last we demand that the word become flesh, the spirit matter; we are as sick of political as we are of philosophical idealism; we are determined to become political materialists.

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Lecture I, Occasion and Context
2 months 3 weeks ago

He would be the finer gentleman that should leave the world without having tasted of lying or pretence of any sort, or of wantonness or conceit.

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IX, 2
4 months 3 weeks ago

The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serves as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware.

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(p. 93)
6 months 4 weeks ago

Appealing to his [Einstein's] way of expressing himself in theological terms, I said: If God had wanted to put everything into the universe from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man's experience of change. But he seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one.

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As quoted in Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes by Charles Hartshorne
5 months 2 weeks ago

Uncertainty, doubt, perpetual wrestling with the mystery of our final destiny, mental despair, and the lack of any solid and stable foundation, may be the basis of an ethic.

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7 months ago

We suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside the modern evils, we are oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead.

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Preface to the First Edition, Capital Volume 1, Peinguin Classics edition 1976.
7 months ago

Capitals accumulate faster than the population; thus wages; thus population; thus grain prices; thus the difficulty of production and hence the exchange values.

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Notebook III, The Chapter on Capital, p. 271.
3 months 2 weeks ago

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.

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p 186
7 months 1 day ago

Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on no man's rights; he will rather have regard for every one, forgive every one, help every one as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness. ... In former times the English plays used to finish with a petition for the King. The old Indian dramas close with these words: "May all living beings be delivered from pain." Tastes differ; but in my opinion there is no more beautiful prayer than this.

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Part III, Ch. VIII, 4, pp. 213-214 First line often paraphrased as: Compassion is the basis of all morality.
3 months 2 weeks ago

See the foundations of the most celebrated cities hardly now to be discerned; they were ruined by anger. See deserts extending for many miles without an inhabitant: they have been desolated by anger.

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Religion is usually nothing but a supplement to or even a substitute for education, and nothing is religious in the strict sense which is not a product of freedom.

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"Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaeum (1798)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #233
6 months ago

There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity - the law of nature, and of nations.

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28 May 1794
5 months 2 weeks ago

But Don Quixote was converted. Yes - and died, poor soul. But the other, the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives among us with his spirit - this Don Quixote was not converted, this Don Quixote continues to incite us to make ourselves ridiculous, this Don Quixote must never die.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

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Letter to James Madison (30 January 1787); referring to Shays' Rebellion Lipscomb & Bergh ed. 6:65
6 months 4 weeks ago

Alexander's career was piracy pure and simple, nothing but an orgy of power and plunder, made romantic by the character of the hero. There was no rational purpose in it, and the moment he died his generals and governors attacked one another.

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7 months 1 day ago

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

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Letter to Jean le Rond d'Alembert, 8 February 1776
7 months 1 day ago

"...the church of England, when she baptizes any one, makes him not a Christian [...] the church of England is mistaken, and makes none but socinians Christians"

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279
8 months ago

The male has more teeth than the female in mankind, and sheep, and goats, and swine. This has not been observed in other animals.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

In the Greek conception of parrhesia... truth-having is guaranteed by the possession of... moral qualities... required... to know... and... convey such truth...

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4 months 3 weeks ago

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

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As quoted in The #1 New York Times Bestseller (1992) by John Bear, p. 93
5 months 3 weeks ago

And having said this, Jesus smote his face with both his hands, and then smote the ground with his head. And having raised his head, he said: "Cursed be every one who shall insert into my sayings that I am the son of God." At these words the disciples fell down as dead, whereupon Jesus lifted them up, saying: 'Let us fear God now, if we would not be affrighted in that day.'

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Ch. 53
2 months 2 weeks ago

I am happy because I want nothing from anyone. I do not care about money. Decorations, titles or distinctions mean nothing to me. I do not crave praise. The only thing that gives me pleasure, apart from my work, my violin, and my sailboat, is the appreciation of my fellow workers.

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6 months 1 week ago

Soul, indeed, is a certain medium between an impartible essence, and an essence which is divisible about bodies. But intellect is an impartible essence alone. And qualities and material forms are divisible about bodies. Not everything which acts on another, effects that which it does effect by approximation and contact; but those natures which effect any thing by approximation and contact, use approximation accidentally.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

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4:17 (KJV)

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