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8 months 1 week ago

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanise them.

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As quoted in Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today's political times
4 months 1 week ago

What all agree upon is probably right; what no two agree in most probably is wrong.

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Letter to John Adams (11 January 1817) This statement has been referred to as "Jefferson's Axiom"
6 months 4 weeks ago

In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.

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"Man has no nature"
4 months 1 week ago

Above all things, lose no occasion of exercising your dispositions to be grateful, to be generous, to be charitable, to be humane, to be true, just, firm, orderly, courageous, &c. Consider every act of this kind, as an exercise which will strengthen your moral faculties and increase your worth.

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7 months 4 days ago

We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.

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8 months 6 days ago

I do not overlook the fact that there are irrationalists who love mankind, and that not all forms of irrationalism engender criminality. But I hold that he who teaches that not reason but love should rule opens up the way for those who rule by hate. (Socrates, I believe, saw something of this when he suggested that mistrust or hatred of argument is related to mistrust or hatred of man).

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Vol. 2, Ch. 24 "Oracular Philosophy and the Revolt against Reason"
7 months 4 days ago

"I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside." This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Destruction perfects that which is good; for the good cannot appear on account of that which conceals it. The good is least good whilst it is thus concealed. The concealment must be removed so that the good may be able freely to appear in its own brightness. For example, the mountain, the sand, the earth, or the stone in which a metal has grown is such a concealment. Each one of the visible metals is a concealment of the other six metals.

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Hermetic and Alchemical Writings (1894), edited by Arthur Edward Waite; Coelum Philosophorum or Book of Vexations, originally 1543
8 months 3 weeks ago

The superior man examines his heart, that there may be nothing wrong there, and that he may have no cause for dissatisfaction with himself. That wherein the superior man cannot be equaled is simply this, his work which other men cannot see.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

If the hypothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have arisen from non-living matter; for by the hypothesis the condition of the globe was at one time such, that living matter could not have existed in it, life being entirely incompatible with the gaseous state.

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In the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ninth edition, (1876) Vol. III, "Biology", p. 689. Also quoted in Joseph Cook (1878), Biology, with Preludes on Current Events, Houghton, Osgood, p. 39
4 months 3 weeks ago

All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; but the dose makes it clear that a thing is not a poison.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

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Adagia (first published 1500, with numerous expanded editions through 1536), III, IV, 96
6 months 3 weeks ago

There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few.

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7 months 1 week ago

A common monetary standard will be established, with the consent of the various governments, by which industrial transactions will be greatly facilitated. Three spheres made respectively of gold, silver, and platinum, and each weighing fifty grammes, would differ sufficiently in value for the purpose. The sphere should have a small flattened base, and on the great circle parallel to it the Positivist motto would be inscribed. At the pole would be the image of the immortal Charlemagne, the founder of the Western Republic, and round the image his name would be engraved, in its Latin form, Carolus; that name, respected as it is by all nations of Europe alike, would be the common appellation of the universal monetary standard.

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p. 430
6 months 4 days ago

It's obvious that in an intelligent educated audience such as this university, I stress this university. Who saw fit to give them accreditation? 

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At Randolph-Macon Woman's College, (23 October 2006) Broadcasted by C-SPAN2
7 months 2 weeks ago

Work at these things, practice them, these are the things you ought to desire; they are what will put you on the path of divine virtue - yes, by the one who entrusted our soul with the tetraktys, source of ever-flowing nature. Pray to the gods for success and get to work.

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As quoted in Divine Harmony: The Life and Teachings of Pythagoras by John Strohmeier and Peter Westbrook.
8 months 1 week ago

If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence?

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"On the Sufferings of the World"
7 months ago

Time, and Industry, produce everyday new knowledge.

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The Second Part, Chapter 30, p. 176
8 months 3 weeks ago

You [a disciple], shall I teach you about knowledge? What you know, you know, what you don't know, you don't know. This is true knowledge.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Buddhism is the most colossal example in the history of applied metaphysics.

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in Verhoeven, Martin J. 2001. "Buddhism and Science: Probing the Boundaries Of Faith and Reason." Religion East and West (1): 77-97.
8 months 2 weeks ago

Time, which is the author of authors.

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Book I, iv, 12
8 months 1 week ago

The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition. The experimental habit of mind is a difficult one for most people to maintain; indeed, the science of one generation has already become the tradition of the next...

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The Scientific Outlook, 1931
8 months 2 weeks ago

It is not your strength and your natural power that subjects all these people to you. Do not pretend then to rule them by force or to treat them with harshness. Satisfy their reasonable desires; alleviate their necessities; let your pleasure consist in being beneficent; advance them as much as you can, and you will act like the true king of desire.

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4 months 5 days ago

There is a great analogy between grace and genius, for genius is a grace. The real man of genius is the one who acts by grace or by impulsion, without ever contemplating himself and without ever saying to himself: Yes! It is by grace that I act.

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p. 37
5 months 2 weeks ago

It's easier to be faithful to a restaurant than it is to a woman.

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Fidelity
8 months 6 days ago

I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm.

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Act 4, sc. 5
6 months 3 weeks ago

I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. If I was offered anything like the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'd find it an extremely difficult conflict because I'd be basically disinclined to accept.

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Interview with Paul Newman in Abraxas Unbound #7
6 months 4 weeks ago

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

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Quoted in The Observer September 13, 1987.
8 months 6 days ago

Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.

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Existentialism and Human Emotions
7 months 4 weeks ago

To a wise man, the whole earth is open; for the native land of a good soul is the whole earth.

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Freeman (1948), p. 166 \
7 months 1 week ago

Our patience will achieve more than our force.

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8 months 1 week ago

People are said to believe in God, or to disbelieve in Adam and Eve. But in such cases what is believed or disbelieved is that there is an entity answering a certain description. This, which can be believed or disbelieved is quite different from the actual entity (if any) which does answer the description. Thus the matter of belief is, in all cases, different in kind from the matter of sensation or presentation, and error is in no way analogous to hallucination. A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

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On the Nature of Acquaintance: Neutral Monism, 1914
7 months 1 week ago

The created World is but a small Parenthesis in Eternity.

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Part III, Section XXIX
4 months 4 days ago

In the army, capitalist development leads to the extension of obligatory military service to the reduction of the time of service and consequently to a material approach to a popular militia. But all of this takes place under the form of modern militarism in which the domination of the people by the militarist State and the class character of the State manifest themselves most clearly.

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Ch.8
7 months 5 days ago

We wish, in a word, equality - equality in fact as a corollary, or rather, as primordial condition of liberty. From each according to his faculties, to each according to his needs; that is what we wish sincerely and energetically.

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As quoted in The Old Order and the New (1890) by J. Morris Davidson
8 months 1 week ago

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality. 

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"Don't Be Too Certain!"
8 months 1 week ago

The only man for whom Hitler had "unqualified respect" was "Stalin the genius," and while in the case of Stalin and the Russian regime we do not... have the rich documentary material that is available for Germany, we nevertheless know since Khrushchev's speech before the Twentieth Party Congress that Stalin trusted only one man and that was Hitler.

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Part 3, Ch. 10
4 months 3 weeks ago

India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.

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4 months 1 week ago

I am a mariner of Odysseus with heart of fire but with mind ruthless and clear.

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Toda Raba
7 months 1 week ago

Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.

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Ch. 6, The Formula of Justice
8 months 2 days ago

All those movements which took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which had the Reformation as their main expression and result should be analyzed as a great crisis of the Western experience of subjectivity and a revolt against the kind of religious and moral power which gave form, during the Middle Ages, to this subjectivity. The need to take a direct part in spiritual life, in the work of salvation, in the truth which lies in the Book-all that was a struggle for a new subjectivity.

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p. 782
6 months 2 weeks ago

The "dreams of youth" have become a proverb. That organisations, early rich, fall far short of their promise has been repeated to satiety. But is it extraordinary that it should be so? For do we ever utilise this heroism? Look how it lives upon itself and perishes for lack of food. We do not know what to do with it. We had rather that it should not be there. Often we laugh at it. Always we find it troublesome. Look at the poverty of our life! Can we expect anything else but poor creatures to come out of it?

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8 months 2 days ago

I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist.

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Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault
5 months 2 weeks ago

I mean to lead a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily - like a hermit crab. But I do not. I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity. My husband and five children must make their way in the world. The life I have chosen as a wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications.

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8 months 1 week ago

I hung my verse in the wind Time and tide their faults will find.

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"The Test", as quoted in Emerson As A Poet (1883) by Joel Benton, p. 40
6 months 5 days ago

Even pacifist agitation or the nation-wide fever of big sports competitions acts as a spur to war fever in circumstances like ours. Any kind of excitement or emotion contributes to the possibility of dangerous explosions when the feelings of huge populations are kept inflamed even in peacetime for the sake of the advancement of commerce. Headlines mean street sales. It takes emotion to move merchandise. And wars and rumors of wars are the merchandise and also the emotion of the popular press.

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p. 7
6 months 3 weeks ago

For Jung, the 'psychic world' (i.e. the world of the mind) was an independent reality, and it was possible to travel there and make the acquaintance of its inhabitants.

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p. 164

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