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1 month 1 week ago

Eight hours daily labour is enough for any human being, and under proper arrangements sufficient to afford an ample supply of food, raiment and shelter, or the necessaries and comforts of life, and for the remainder of his time, every person is entitled to education, recreation and sleep.

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"Foundation Axioms" of Society for Promoting National Regeneration
2 months 1 week ago

Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.

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Ch. VI
2 months 2 days ago

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Many receive advice, few profit by it.

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Maxim 149
1 month 3 weeks ago

Violence as a tool is already operating in the world before anyone takes it up: that fact alone neither justifies nor discounts the use of the tool. What seems most important, however, is that the tool is already part of a practice, presupposing a world conducive to its use; that the use of the tool builds or rebuilds a specific kind of world, activating a sedimented legacy of use. When any of us commit acts of violence, we are, in and through those acts, building a more violent world.

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p. 19
4 days ago

What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?

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Vol. II, letter to Miss Lucie Austin (22 July 1835), p. 364
3 months 3 weeks ago

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.

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p. 31
3 months 2 weeks ago

What is commonly called friendship even is only a little more honor among rogues.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 95
2 months 2 days ago

To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose.

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As quoted in Chance Rules : An Informal Guide to Probability, Risk, and Statistics (1999) by Brian Everitt, p. 137
2 months 2 weeks ago

There is, however, a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.

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Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769), volume i, p. 273
2 months 3 days ago

Now the basic impulse behind existentialism is optimistic, very much like the impulse behind all science. Existentialism is romanticism, and romanticism is the feeling that man is not the mere he has always taken himself for. Romanticism began as a tremendous surge of optimism about the stature of man. Its aim - like that of science - was to raise man above the muddled feelings and impulses of his everyday humanity, and to make him a god-like observer of human existence.

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p. 96
2 months 2 weeks ago

Scientists believe there is a hierarchy of facts and that among them may be made a judicious choice. They are right, since otherwise there would be no science... One need only open the eyes to see that the conquests of industry which have enriched so many practical men would never have seen the light, if these practical men alone had existed and if they had not been preceded by unselfish devotees who died poor, who never thought of utility, and yet had a guide far other than caprice.As Mach says, these devotees have spared their successors the trouble of thinking.

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Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science (1907) Author's Essay Prefatory to the Translation: "The Choice of Facts," p.4, Tr. George Bruce Halsted
2 months 2 weeks ago

I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.

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2 months 1 week ago

The spectacle of what religions have been in the past, of what certain religions still are to-day, is indeed humiliating for human intelligence. What a farrago of error and folly!'

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Chapter II : Static Religion
2 months 1 week ago

In old days the plastic arts, music, and poesy were so germane to man in his totality that his Transcendence plainly manifest in them. ... What is to-day obvious to all is a decay in the essence of art. ... the opposition to man's true nature as man.

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2 weeks 1 day ago

The election... on November 3 ... illustrates a lot of these clashing forces. ..That election was the most important political fight ...in my lifetime. It's important not just for the United States but... for the rest of the world, given the role that the United States has historically played in maintaining that broader liberal international order.

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20:56
4 months 2 weeks ago

The roots of education ... are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

He who discommendeth others obliquely commendeth himself.

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Part I, Section XXXIV

When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.

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F 155
3 months 2 weeks ago

A great deal of capital, which appears to-day in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children.

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Vol. I, Ch. 31, pg. 829.
3 months 2 weeks ago

How significant is the enormous heightening, under mescalin, of the perception of color! ... Man's highly developed color sense is a biological luxury-inestimably precious to him as an intellectual and spiritual being, but unnecessary to his survival as an animal. ... Mescalin raises all colors to a higher power and makes the percipient aware of innumerable fine shades of difference, to which, at ordinary times, he is completely blind. It would seem that, for Mind at Large, the so-called secondary characters of things are primary.

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describing his experiment with mescaline, pp. 26-27
4 months 1 week ago

An ignorant doctor is the aide-de-camp of death.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Why? Surely they can find other men. Russell's reply when asked "if it wasn't unkind of him to love and leave so many women";

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as quoted in My Father - Bertrand Russell (1975) by Katharine Tait, p. 106
1 month 5 days ago

The student of development finds, not only that the chick commences its existence as an egg, primarily identical, in all essential respects, with that of the Dog, but that the yelk of this egg undergoes division-that the primitive groove arises, and that the contiguous parts of the germ are fashioned, by precisely similar methods into a young chick, which, at one stage of its existence, is so like the nascent Dog, that ordinary inspection would hardly distinguish the two.

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The history of the development of any other vertebrate animal, Lizard, Snake, Frog, or Fish, tells the same story. Ch.2, p. 79

A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the world's torrent.

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Torquato Tasso, Act I, sc. ii
3 months 2 weeks ago

One Folk, One Realm, One Leader. Union with the unity of an insect swarm. Knowledgeless understanding of nonsense and diabolism. And then the newsreel camera had cut back to the serried ranks, the swastikas, the brass bands, the yelling hypnotist on the rostrum. And here once again, in the glare of his inner light, was the brown insectlike column, marching endlessly to the tunes of this rococo horror-music. Onward Nazi soldiers, onward Christian soldiers, onward Marxists and Muslims, onward every chosen People, every Crusader and Holy War-maker. Onward into misery, into all wickedness, into death!

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2 months 1 week ago

It is sad not to be loved, but it is much sadder not to be able to love.

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To a Young Writer
3 weeks 6 days ago

Rather than trying to escape violence, human beings more often become habituated to it. History abounds with long conflicts - the Thirty Years' War in early seventeenth-century Europe, the Time of Troubles in Russia, twentieth-century guerrilla conflicts - in which continuous slaughter has been accepted as normal. Famously adaptable, the human animal quickly learns to live with violence and soon comes to find satisfaction in it.

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In the Puppet Theatre: Roof Gardens, Feathers and Human Sacrifice (p. 80)
3 months 2 weeks ago

Stupidity or reason? Oh, there was no choice now. It was imbecility every time.

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The Gioconda smile, in Mortal Coils, 1921
3 months 2 weeks ago

All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle.

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1855
4 months 2 weeks ago

If one thing goes without saying, almost anything can.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

On doit exiger de moi que je cherche la vérité, mais non que je la trouve. One may demand of me that I should seek truth, but not that I should find it.

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No. 29
2 months 2 days ago

At present we live to impede each other's satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this? We go somewhere where we are not wanted and where we don't want to go. What else is conventional life? Passivity when we want to be active. So many hours spent every day in passively doing what conventional life tells us, when we would so gladly be at work. And is it a wonder that all individual life is extinguished?

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3 months 3 weeks ago

He that thinks diversion may not lie in hard and painful labour, forgets the early rising, hard riding, heat, cold and hunger of huntsmen, which is yet known to be the constant recreation of men of the greatest condition.

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Sec. 206
1 month 3 weeks ago

Pascal is called the founder of modern probability theory. He earns this title not only for the familiar correspondence with Fermat on games of chance, but also for his conception of decision theory, and because he was an instrument in the demolition of probabilism, a doctrine which would have precluded rational probability theory.

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Chapter 3, Opinion, p. 23.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.

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"The Flood", 1764
4 months 1 week ago

The Master said, "He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it."

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2 months 3 weeks ago

There's a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime feelings and our purest tenderness.

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Letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville
2 weeks 2 days ago

A person who is transformed by the instructions of a teacher, devotes himself to study, and abides by ritual and rightness may become a noble person, while one who follows his nature and emotions, is content to give free play to his passions, and abandons ritual and rightness is a lesser person.

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Sources of Chinese Tradition (1999), vol. 1, p. 180
3 months 3 weeks ago

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than it was because he was he, and I was I. Variants: If a man urge me to tell wherefore I loved him, I feel it cannot be expressed but by answering: Because it was he, because it was myself. If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.

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Ch. 28
1 month 1 week ago

We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it - the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.

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Great Jewish Short Stories, introduction to the Dell paperback edition
3 months 3 weeks ago

Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like faculty in another. I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them.

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Section I, Chap. III.
3 months 2 weeks ago

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

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2 months 1 week ago

Thought must be judged by something that is not thought, by its effect on production or its impact on social conduct, as art today is being ultimately gauged in every detail by something that is not art, be it box-office or propaganda value.

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describing the pragmatist view, p. 51.
2 months 3 weeks ago

But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of Bravery, in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.

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Chapter V
2 months 2 weeks ago

The ideal of Morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of highest Strength, of most powerful life; which also has been named (very falsely as it was there meant) the ideal of poetic greatness. It is the maximum of the savage; and has, in these times, gained, precisely among the greatest weaklings, very many proselytes. By this ideal, man becomes a Beast-Spirit, a Mixture; whose brutal wit has, for weaklings, a brutal power of attraction.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgement for not agreeing with me in that, from which perhaps within a few days I should dissent myself.

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Section 6
3 months 3 weeks ago

Even opinion is of force enough to make itself to be espoused at the expense of life.

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Book I, Ch. 40. Of Good and Evil, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
2 months 1 week ago

A man, in so far as he is an individual, may be very sharply detached from others, a sort of spiritual crustacean, and yet be very poor in differentiating content. And further, it is true on the other hand that the more personality a man has and the greater his interior riches and the more he is a society within himself, the less brusquely he is divided from his fellows.

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4 months 1 week ago

War is the father and king of all, and has produced some as gods and some as men, and has made some slaves and some free.

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