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The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition: content, ideological schema, the blurring of contradictions-these are repeated, but the superficial forms are varied: always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

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Modern, in The Pleasure of the Text

In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read-ultimately you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense, it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom writes it. Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years. The poet is he who can write some pure mythology to-day without the aid of posterity.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and understands not at all.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The three great things that govern mankind are reason, passion and superstition. The first governs a few, the two last share the bulk of mankind and possess them in their turns. But superstition most powerfully produces the greatest mischief.

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Journal entry (16 May 1681), quoted in Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957; 1985), p. 200
2 weeks 4 days ago

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world-all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. Thus the soul has gradually been turned into a Nazareth from which nothing good can come.

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CW 12, par. 126 (p 99)
3 weeks 1 day ago

Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever: But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an œconomy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure that he may speak it the longer.

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2 weeks 3 days ago

Some Machians were sufficiently impressed by Einstein's interpretations of Brownian movement to accept atomism. Mach himself brushed such objections aside, and also emphatically rejected Einstein's relativity theory.

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W. W. Bartley III, "Philosophy of biology versus philosphy of physics" (2004) p. 412, Karl Popper: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, Vol. III: Philosophy of Science 2.
1 week 5 days ago

My path was not the normal one of professors of philosophy. I did not intend to become a doctor of philosophy by studying philosophy (I am in fact a doctor of medicine) nor did I by any means, intend originally to qualify for a professorship by a dissertation on philosophy. To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet. Since my schooldays, however, I was guided by philosophical questions. Philosophy seemed to me the supreme, even the sole, concern of man. Yet a certain awe kept me from making it my profession.

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4 days ago

Obviously, Anarchism, or any other social theory, making man a conscious social unit, will act as a leaven for rebellion.

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3 weeks 1 day ago

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

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Speech at a County Meeting of Buckinghamshire
1 month 3 weeks ago

There can be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference elsewhere - no difference in abstract truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen.

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Lecture II, What Pragmatism Means
1 month 3 weeks ago

When I come to my own beliefs, I find myself quite unable to discern any purpose in the universe, and still more unable to wish to discern one.

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"Is There a God?", 1952
1 month 2 weeks ago

Diversity makes critical argument fruitful. ...[P]artners in an argument must share ...the wish to know, and the readiness to learn from the other ...by severely criticizing his views... and hearing... [the] reply. ...the so-called method of science consists in this kind of criticism.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The general reference of the philosophical discussion is usually the triangle world: world-language-subject, the relation of the subject to the world of objects, mediated through language.

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4 days ago

Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled Utopian.

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"Socialism: Caught in the Political Trap", a lecture (c. 1912), published in Red Emma Speaks, Part 1 (1972) edited by Alix Kates Shulman
2 weeks 4 days ago

To conceive a thought - just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.

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5 days ago

When I first read The Wretched of the Earth I heard a new history spoken-the voice of the decolonised subject raised in resistance. That voice . . . articulated a yearning for freedom that was so intense and a quality of emotional hunger that was so fierce that it was overwhelming. Dying into the text, I abandoned and forgot myself. The lust for freedom in those pages awakened and resurrected me.

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Gender and Decolonization in the Congo (2010) ISBN 978-0-230-11040-3
4 days ago

The 'open' mind of the poet and artist can sense realities beyond the reach of our normal senses. The real problem is that our materialistic assumptions have a number of false premises built into them: it is only when we recognize this that we see there is no sharp dividing line between the everyday world and the invisible world of the clairvoyant.

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p. 294
2 months 2 weeks ago

People who want to do so can lose weight most safely and permanently if they realize that above all they must be patient. ... It is better to eat a little less at each meal than impulse would suggest and to do that constantly. Add to this a little more exercise or activity than impulse suggests and keep that up constantly too. A few less calories taken in each day and a few more used up will decrease weight, slowly, to be sure, but without undue misery. And with better long-range results too.

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2 weeks 5 days ago

We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us.

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Chapter 12 (p. 113)
1 month 3 days ago

Concern should drive us into action and not into a depression.

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The Collected Works of Karen Horney‎ (1957) by Karen Horney, p. 154: "We may feel genuinely concerned about world conditions, though such a concern should drive us into action and not into a depression."
2 months 3 weeks ago

If one prefers to have little with blessing, to have truth with concern, to suffer instead of exulting over imagined victories, then one presumably will not be disposed to praise the knowledge, as if what it bestows were at all proportionate to the trouble it causes, although one would not therefore deny that through its pain it educates a person, if he is honest enough to want to be educated rather than to be deceived, out of the multiplicity to seek the one, out of abundance to seek the one thing needful, as this is plainly and simply offered precisely according to the need for it.

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1 month 3 days ago

Love is a God, who cooperates in securing the safety of the city.

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As quoted in Deipnosophists by Athenaeus, xiii. 561c.

Animals and plants are living effects of Nature; this Nature ... is none other than God in things... Diverse living things represent diverse divinities and diverse powers, which, besides the absolute being they possess, obtain the being communicated to all things according to their capacity and measure. Whence all of God is in all things (although not totally, but in some more abundantly and in others less) ... Think thus, of the sun in the crocus, in the narcissus, in the heliotrope, in the rooster, in the lion.... To the extent that one communicates with Nature, so one ascends to Divinity through Nature.

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As translated by Arthur Imerti
2 weeks 5 days ago

It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.

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Ch. 4
1 month 2 weeks ago

Ideally a just constitution would be a just procedure arranged to insure a just outcome.

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Chapter IV, Section 31, pg. 197
1 month 2 weeks ago

Kant was also quite aware that "the urgent need" of reason is both different from and "more than mere quest and desire for knowledge." Hence, the distinguishing of the two faculties, reason and intellect, coincides with a distinction between two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing.

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p. 14
1 month 5 days ago

Things essentially incorporeal, because they are more excellent than all body and place, are every where, not with interval, but impartibly. Things essentially incorporeal are not locally present with bodies but are present with them when they please; by verging towards them so far as they are naturally adapted so to verge. They are not, however, present with them locally, but through habitude, proximity, and alliance. Things essentially incorporeal, are not present with bodies, by hypostasis and essence; for they are not mingled with bodies. But they impart a certain power which is proximate to bodies, through verging towards them. For tendency constitutes a certain secondary power proximate to bodies.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Something that is merely negative creates nothing.

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Notebook VI, The Chapter on Capital, p. 532.
1 month 2 weeks ago

What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

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4 days ago

I have tried to show how religion, the backbone of civilisation, hardens into a Church that is unacceptable to Outsiders, and the Outsiders - the men who strive to become visionaries - become the Rebels. In our case, the scientific progress that has brought us closer than ever before to conquering the problems of civilisation, has also robbed us of spiritual drive; and the Outsider is doubly a rebel: a rebel against the Established Church , a rebel against the unestablished church of materialism. Yet for all this, he is the real spiritual heir of the prophets, of Jesus and St. Peter, of St. Augustine and Peter Waldo. The purest religion of any age lies in the hands of its spiritual rebels. The twentieth century is no exception.

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p. 320
1 month 2 weeks ago

The less somebody knows and understands himself the less great he is, however great may be his talent. For this reason our scientists are not great.

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p. 51e
1 month 3 weeks ago

The man who esteems himself as he ought, and no more than he ought, seldom fails to obtain from other people all the esteem that he himself thinks due. He desires no more than is due to him, and he rests upon it with complete satisfaction.

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Section III.
1 month 2 weeks ago

The end of man (as a factual anthropological limit) is announced to thought from the vantage of the end of man (as a determined opening or the infinity of a telos). Man is that which is in relation to his end, in the fundamentally equivocal sense of the word. Since always.

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"The Ends of Man," Margins of Philosophy, tr. w/ notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1982. (original French published in Paris, 1972, as Marges de la philosophie). p. 123
2 months 2 weeks ago

Junz found revulsion growing strong within him. A planet full of people meant nothing against the dictates of economic necessity!

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3 months 2 weeks ago

To be honest, Zizek has been saying some disappointing things lately. But, that's the reality of complex philosophy. If it's a good philosophy, if the grounding is good and it's complex, it will hit some sensitive edges.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

An intuitionist conception of justice is, one might say, but half a conception.

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Chapter I, Section 8, pg. 41

Time is the father of truth, its mother is our mind.

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Quote as translated in The Encyclopedia of Religion Vol. 11 (1987), by Mircea Eliade, p. 459
1 month 3 weeks ago

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

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December 20, 1822
2 weeks ago

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.

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Matthew 7:7-8 (NKJV) (Also Luke 11:9-13)
4 days ago

No matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.

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p. 125
2 months 2 weeks ago

The inexperienced in wisdom and virtue, ever occupied with feasting and such, are carried downward, and there, as is fitting, they wander their whole life long, neither ever looking upward to the truth above them nor rising toward it, nor tasting pure and lasting pleasures. Like cattle, always looking downward with their heads bent toward the ground and the banquet tables, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. In order to increase their possessions they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of steel and kill each other, insatiable as they are.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

This is approximately the way Christendom relates to the essentially Christian, the unconditioned. After seventeen, eighteen detours and running all around someone finally has his finite existence assured, and then we receive a sermon about Seek first the kingdom of God. Is this sobriety or is this intoxication?

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1 month 3 weeks ago

When a man acts in ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse to face the fact that his annoying behaviour is a result of antecedent causes which, if you follow them long enough, will take you beyond the moment of his birth and therefore to events for which he cannot be held responsible by any stretch of imagination.

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"The Doctrine of Free Will"
1 month 1 week ago

The idealist tradition, including contemporary phenomenology, has of course admitted subjective points of view as basic and has gone to the opposite length of denying an irreducible objective reality. ... I find the idealist solution unacceptable ...: objective reality cannot be analyzed or shut out of existence any more than subjective reality can. Even if not everything is something from no point of view, some things are.The deep source of both idealism and its objectifying opposite is the same: a conviction that a single world cannot contain both irreducible points of view and irreducible objective reality - that one of them must be what there really is and the other somehow reducible or dependent on it. This is a very powerful idea. To deny it is in a sense to deny that there is a single world.

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"Subjective and Objective" (1979), p. 212.
2 weeks 3 days ago

The transition of the subject-object relation to that of the I-Thou implies a passage of consciousness to a new sphere of existence, viz, the interval, betweenness or Zwischen; and this is a passage from thought to Umfassung.

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The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 73

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