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3 months 2 days ago

India is pre-eminently distinguished for the many traits of original grandeur of thought and of the wonderful remains of immediate knowledge.

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quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture. New Delhi: Pragun Publication.
2 months 3 weeks ago

If the awareness of our limitations begins to limit or to dim our value consciousness as well-as happens, for instance, in old age with regard to the values of youth-then we have already started the movement of devaluation which will end with the defamation of the world and all its values. Only a timely act of resignation can deliver us from this tendency toward self-delusion.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 59
4 months 4 weeks ago

Milton Ashe is not the type to marry a head of hair and a pair of eyes.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Even after his conversion, the true 'apostate' is not primarily committed to the positive contents of his new belief and to the realization of its aims. He is motivated by the struggle against the old belief and lives on for its negation. The apostate does not affirm his new convictions for their own sake; he is engaged in a continuous chain of acts of revenge against his own spiritual past. In reality he remains a captive of this past, and the new faith is merely a handy frame of reference for negating and rejecting the old. As a religious type, the apostate is therefore at the opposite pole from the 'resurrected,' whose life is transformed by a new faith which is full of intrinsic meaning and value.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 66-67
4 months 3 days ago

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

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Dedicatory epistle, as quoted in Fred R Shapiro (2006). The Yale Book of Quotations. Yale University Press. p. 468. ISBN 0-300-10798-6.
3 months 3 weeks ago

My difficulty is only an - enormous - difficulty of expression.

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Journal entry (8 March 1915) p. 40
1 month 2 weeks ago

Owning our seeds through seed freedom, our own food through food freedom, our own minds and intelligence through intellectual freedom, our own economies through freedom to produce and consume ecologically and locally, is the 'barbarianism' that the 1% would like to extinguish.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.

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Vol. VI, par. 191

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.

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Letter to Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette
2 months 2 weeks ago

Our patriotism comes straight from the Romans. This is why French children are encouraged to seek inspiration for it in Corneille. It is a pagan virtue, if these two words are compatible. The word pagan, when applied to Rome, early possesses the significance charged with horror which the early Christian controversialists gave it. The Romans really were an atheistic and idolatrous people; not idolatrous with regard to images made of stone or bronze, but idolatrous with regard to themselves. It is this idolatry of self which they have bequeathed to us in the form of patriotism.

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p. 220, also in The Need for Roots : prelude towards a declaration of duties towards mankind
3 weeks 1 day ago

The rudest heathen that worshipped Canopus, or the Caabah Black-Stone, he, as we saw, was superior to the horse that worshipped nothing at all! Nay there was a kind of lasting merit in that poor act of his; analogous to what is still meritorious in Poets: recognition of a certain endless divine beauty and significance in stars and all natural objects whatsoever.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

To be honest, I was somewhat disappointed... It's had effects around the margins, of course, but they have mostly been minor. When I wrote it, I really thought the book would change the world. I know it sounds a little grand now, but at the time the sixties still existed for us. It looked as if real changes were possible, and I let myself believe that this would be one of them. All you have to do is walk around the corner to McDonald's to see how successful I have been.

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Quoted by Michael Specter on the impact of the book Animal Liberation, "The Dangerous Philosopher", The New Yorker, 6 September 1999.
2 months 2 weeks ago

No epoch is homogeneous; whatever you may have assigned as the dominant note of a considerable period, it will always be possible to produce men, and great men, belonging to the same time, who exhibit themselves as antagonistic to the tone of their age.

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Ch. 4: "The Eighteenth Century", p. 93
4 months 2 days ago

All's well that ends well; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive.

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Letter to Lucy Donnely, April 22, 1906
3 weeks 5 days ago

Nature has made a race of workers; that is the Chinese race, with a marvelous dexterity of hand and hardly any feeling of honor; govern this race with justice by exacting from them through the competence of such government an ample dowry to the conquering race; the subordinate race will be satisfied; a race of workers of the earth, such is the Negro; let us be for him good and human, and everything will be in order -- a race of masters and soldiers, that is the European race.

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94
2 months 2 weeks ago

You cannot think without abstractions; accordingly, it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction. It is here that philosophy finds its niche as essential to the healthy progress of society. It is the critic of abstractions. A civilisation which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility.

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Ch. 4: "The Eighteenth Century", pp. 82-83
4 months 3 days ago

Of all the ways whereby children are to be instructed, and their manners formed, the plainest, easiest, and most efficacious, is, to set before their eyes the examples of those things you would have them do, or avoid; which, when they are pointed out to them, in the practice of persons within their knowledge, with some reflections on their beauty and unbecomingness, are of more force to draw or deter their imitation, than any discourses which can be made to them.

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Sec. 82
2 months 3 weeks ago

The open society is one that is deemed in principle to embrace all humanity.

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Chapter IV

Self-interest, or rather self-love, or egoism, has been more plausibly substituted as the basis of morality. But I consider our relations with others as constituting the boundaries of morality. With ourselves, we stand on the ground of identity, not of relation, which last, requiring two subjects, excludes self-love confined to a single one. To ourselves, in strict language, we can owe no duties, obligation requiring also two parties. Self-love, therefore, is no part of morality. Indeed, it is exactly its counterpart.

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Letter to Thomas Law
1 month 1 week ago

No amount of happiness enjoyed by some organisms can notionally justify the indescribable horrors of Auschwitz. [...] Nor can the fun and games outweigh the sporadic frightfulness of pain and despair that occurs every second of every day. For there's nothing inherently wrong with non-sentience or [...] non-existence; whereas there is something frightfully and self-intimatingly wrong with suffering.

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2.7 Why Be Negative?
5 months 2 days ago

It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The heart, oddly enough, seems to be the essential organ concerned. When we are in a hurry or doing something we dislike, we clench the heart, exactly like clenching a fist, and nothing can get in. When we are filled with a sense of multiplicity and excitement we somehow 'open' the heart and allow reality to flow in. But in that state we only need to entertain the shadow of some unpleasant thought for it to close again. And human beings are so naturally prone to mistrust that it is hard to maintain the openness for very long. Children on the other hand find it easy to slip into states of wonder and delight when the heart finally opens so wide that the whole world seems magical. the 'trick' of the peak experience lies in this ability to relax out of our usual defensive posture and to 'open the heart'.

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p. 360

The political entity presupposes the real existence of an enemy and therefore coexistence with another political entity. As long as a state exists, there will thus always be in the world more than just one state. A world state which embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect.

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1 month 4 weeks ago

I don't explain-I explore.

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3 weeks 5 days ago

Colonization on a grand scale is a political necessity of absolutely the first order. A nation that does not colonize is irrevocably vowed to socialism, to war between rich and poor. The conquest of a nation of inferior race by a superior race, which establishes itself as the ruler, has nothing shocking about it.

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92-93
2 weeks 2 days ago

I am old, but I certainly have not that sign of old age, extolling the past at the expense of the present.

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Vol. I, ch. 11, p. 437
2 months 2 weeks ago

The Outsider's case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretense, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for truth.

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Chapter one, The Country of the Blind
4 months 2 days ago

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right. Variant translation: Every nation criticizes every other one - and they are all correct.

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As quoted by Wolfgang Pauli in a letter to Abraham Pais (17 August 1950) published in The Genius of Science (2000) by Abraham Pais, p. 242
4 months 4 days ago

The deceiver is really the fool.

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 101
3 months 1 week ago

Happy is that City that hath a wise man to govern it.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The power of God is the worship He inspires. The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", pp. 268-269
4 months 4 weeks ago

The best way to describe anyone is to give an example of the kind of thing he would do.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

A Covenant not to defend my selfe from force, by force, is always voyd.

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The First Part, Chapter 14, p. 69
4 months 2 weeks ago

Behold a God more powerful than I who comes to rule over me.

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Chapter I (tr. Barbara Reynolds); of love.
4 months 5 days ago

Marriage is encouraged in China, not by the profitableness of children, but by the liberty of destroying them.

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Chapter VIII, p. 87.

You will recollect that before the Revolution, Coke Littleton was the universal elementary book of law students, and a sounder Whig never wrote, nor of profounder learning in the orthodox doctrines of the British constitution, or in what were called English liberties. You remember also that our lawyers were then all Whigs. But when his black-letter text, and uncouth, but cunning learning got out of fashion, and the honeyed Mansfieldism of Blackstone became the students' hornbook, from that moment, that profession (the nursery of our Congress) began to slide into toryism, and nearly all the young brood of lawyers now are of that hue. They suppose themselves, indeed, to be Whigs, because they no longer know what Whigism or republicanism means.

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Letter to James Madison (February 17, 1826), quoted in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. XVI (1905; 1907), p. 156
3 months 1 day ago

I: My consciousness of the object is only a yet unrecognised consciousness of my production of the representation of an object. Of this production I know no more than that it is I who produce, and thus is all consciousness no more than a consciousness of myself, and so far perfectly comprehensible. Am I in the right? Spirit. Perfectly so ; but whence then is derived the necessity and universality thou hast ascribed to these propositions, to that of causality for instance?

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Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 47
2 months 3 weeks ago

We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilization: the rational character of its irrationality. Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, ... the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man's mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced.

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p. 9
4 months 2 days ago

Essentially, this war...is a great race-conflict, a conflict of Teuton and Slav, in which certain other nations, England, France and Belgium, have been led into cooperation with the Slav. ... The conflict of Germany and Russia has been produced not by this or that diplomatic incident, but by primitive passions expressing themselves in the temper of the two races.

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War: The Offspring of Fear (1914), quoted in Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921 (1996), p. 373
2 months 2 weeks ago

The reason that people take selfies is not narcissism. Rather, it is inner emptiness. There is no meaning to stabilize the ego. Faced with its inner emptiness, the ego constantly produces itself.

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2 weeks 2 days ago

Armies have endured all manner of want, have lived on roots, and have resisted hunger by means of food too revolting to mention. All this they have suffered to gain a kingdom, and-what is more marvellous-to gain a kingdom that will be another's. Will any man hesitate to endure poverty, in order that he may free his mind from madness?

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4 months 2 days ago

Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.

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The Problem of China (1922), Ch. XII: The Chinese Character
2 months 3 weeks ago

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.

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4 months 1 day ago

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstacies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.

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Page 159
4 months 1 week ago

The first law that ever God gave to man was a law of pure obedience; it was a commandment naked and simple, wherein man had nothing to inquire after, nor to dispute; forasmuch as to obey is the proper office of a rational soul, acknowledging a heavenly superior and benefactor.

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Ch. 12, tr. Cotton, 1685
4 months 3 weeks ago

By the ruler's cultivation of his own character, the duties of universal obligation are set forth. By honoring men of virtue and talents, he is preserved from errors of judgment.

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4 months 2 days ago

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others. It is much more nearly certain that we are assembled here tonight than it is that this or that political party is in the right. Certainly there are degrees of certainty, and one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter skepticism, and complete skepticism would, of course, be totally barren and completely useless.

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"Skepticism"

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