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3 months 1 day ago

The second failing of liberalism comes directly out of the fact that it attempts to lower the horizons of politics. Liberal societies do not want to tell you how to live. They do not want to define "the good life" because that is the source of conflict, but as a result liberal societies tend not to satisfy these very deep human cravings for community, because... there's something wrong with the basic liberal premise that we all start... as self-interested individuals. We're not self-interested individuals.

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15:22
6 months 5 days ago

The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.

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"Martin Heidegger at Eighty," in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays (1978) by Michael Murray, p. 294
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is manifest that there is no danger at all in the proportion or quantity of knowledge, how large soever, lest it should make it swell or out-compass itself; no, but it is merely the quality of knowledge, which, be it in quantity more or less, if it be taken without the true corrective thereof, hath in it some nature of venom or malignity, and some effects of that venom, which is ventosity or swelling. This corrective spice, the mixture whereof maketh knowledge so sovereign, is charity, which the Apostle immediately addeth to the former clause; for so he saith, "Knowledge bloweth up, but charity buildeth up".

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Book I
4 months 6 days ago

Giving alms is only a virtuous deed when you give money that you yourself worked to get.

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p. 83
4 months 1 week ago

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful. If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDEDFOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC. Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn't be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out. That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today's war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.

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As quoted in "Vonnegut's Blues For America" Sunday Herald
5 months 1 week ago

The one infinite is perfect, in simplicity, of itself, absolutely, nor can aught be greater or better, This is the one Whole, God, universal Nature, occupying all space, of whom naught but infinity can give the perfect image or semblance.

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II 12 as translated by Dorothea Waley Singer
6 months 1 week ago

If this labourer were in possession of his own means of production, and was satisfied to live as a labourer, he need not work beyond beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day.

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Vol. I, Ch. 11, pg. 336.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Like nonhuman animals in human factory farms, free-living nonhumans who are starving - or being disembowelled, asphyxiated or eaten alive - cannot console themselves by chanting the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. The moral case for helping other sentient beings, regardless or race or species, does not rest on the distress their plight does (or doesn't) cause spectators.

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Reply to Meet the people who want to turn predators into herbivores, TreeHugger, 2 Apr. 2015
2 months 3 weeks ago

Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity: men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.

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Pt. I, Bk. VII, ch. 4.
5 months 1 week ago

Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.

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7 months 1 week ago

In the New Testament sense, to be a Christian is, in an upward sense, as different from being a man as, in a downward sense, to be a man is different from being a beast. A Christian in the sense of the New Testament, although he stands suffering in the midst of life's reality, has yet become completely a stranger to this life; in the words of the Scripture and also of the Collects (which still are read-O bloody satire!-by the sort of priests we now have, and in the ears of the sort of Christians that now live) he is a stranger and a pilgrim-just think, for example of the late Bishop Mynster intoning, We are strangers and pilgrims in this world! A Christian in the New Testament sense is literally a stranger and a pilgrim, he feels himself a stranger, and everyone involuntarily feels that this man is a stranger to him.

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4 months 4 days ago

Don't turn back when you are just at the goal.

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Maxim 580
4 months 2 days ago

Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?

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The Suicide Club, The Adventure of the Hansom Cabs.
6 months 1 week ago

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one - particularly if he plays golf, which he usually does.

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Introduction to The New Generation, 1930
6 months 1 week ago

All natural philosophers, who wished to proceed mathematically in their work, have hence invariably (although unknown to themselves) made use of metaphysical principles, and must make use of such, it matters not how energetically they may otherwise repudiate any claim of metaphysics on their science.

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Preface, Tr. Bax, 1883
2 months 4 days ago

The Constitution of 1795, like its predecessors, was made for man. But there is no such thing as man in the world. In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me.

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5 months 2 days ago

I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action - mother of all vices - I am the cause of no one's suffering.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle, has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution. If I were to sum up my whole argument in one sentence I should say: The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. These two tendencies are incompatible and mutually destructive. The State idea killed the Russian Revolution and it must have the same result in all other revolutions, unless the libertarian idea prevail.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

And when the physician said, "Sir, you are an old man," "That happens," replied Pausanias, "because you never were my doctor."

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Of Pausanias the Son of Phistoanax
2 months 3 weeks ago

All vices sink into our whole being, if we do not crush them before they gain a footing; and in like manner these sad, pitiable, and discordant feelings end by feeding upon their own bitterness, until the unhappy mind takes a sort of morbid delight in grief... In like manner, wounds heal easily when the blood is fresh upon them: they can then be cleared out and brought to the surface, and admit of being probed by the finger: when disease has turned them into malignant ulcers, their cure is more difficult.

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6 months 5 days ago

Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society.

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p. 6
6 months 6 days ago

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.

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The Snow-Storm
4 months 4 days ago

Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.

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p. 43
6 months 2 weeks ago

So in all human affairs one notices, if one examines them closely, that it is impossible to remove one inconvenience without another emerging.

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Book 1, Ch. 6 (as translated by LJ Walker and B Crick)
5 months 1 week ago

Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are to blame for them.

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6 months 1 week ago

In every province, the chief occupations, in order of importance, are lovemaking, malicious gossip, and talking nonsense.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

By a clock we understand anything characterized by a phenomenon passing periodically through identical phases so that we must assume, by the principle of sufficient reason, that all that happens in a given period is identical with all that happens in an arbitrary period.

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5 months 1 week ago

Of the eternal incorporeal substance nothing is changed, is formed or deformed, but there always remains only that thing which cannot be a subject of dissolution, since it is not possible that it be a subject of composition, and therefore, either of itself or by accident, it cannot be said to die.

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As translated by Arthur Imerti
7 months 3 days ago

Of course, I had to own that he was right; I didn't feel much regret for what I'd done. Still, to my mind, he overdid it, and I'd have liked to have a chance of explaining to him, in a quite friendly, almost affectionate way, that I have never been able to really regret anything in all my life. I've always been far too much absorbed in the present moment, or the immediate future, to think back.

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5 months 2 days ago

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.

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6 months 5 days ago

If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.

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Act 1
6 months 5 days ago

That is precisely what we should have expected, since Genet wants to live simultaneously creation, destruction, the impossibility of destroying and the impossibility of creating, since he wants both to show his rejection of the divine creation and to manifest, in the absolute, human impotence as man's reproval of God and as the testimony of his grandeur.

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p. 424
5 months 2 days ago

It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Strength and beauty are the blessings of youth; temperance, however, is the flower of old age.

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Fragment quoted in H. Diels and W. Kranz (eds.) Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Vol. II (1952), no. 294
4 months 4 weeks ago

Movement in direct experience is alteration in the qualities of objects, and space as experienced is an aspect of this qualitative change. Up and down, back and front, to and fro, this side and that- or right and left- here and there, feel differently. The reason they do is that they are not static points in something itself static, but objects in movement, qualitative changes of value. For "back" is short for backwards and front for forwards. So with velocity. Mathematically there are no such things as fast and slow. They mark simply greater and less on a number scale. As experienced they are qualitatively as unlike as noise and silence, heat and cold, black and white. To be forced to wait a long time for an important event to happen is a length very different from that measured by the movements of the hands of a clock. It is something qualitative.

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4 months 6 days ago

In the upper, rich, more educated classes of European society doubt arose as to the truth of that understanding of life which was expressed by Church Christianity. When, after the Crusades and the maximum development of papal power and its abuses, people of the rich classes became acquainted with the wisdom of the classics and saw, on the one hand, the reasonable lucidity of the teachings of the ancient sages, and on the other hand, the incompatibility of the Church doctrine with the teaching of Christ, they found it impossible to continue to believe the Church teaching.

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6 months 5 days ago

Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.

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Estelle, discovering that there are no mirrors in Hell, Act 1, sc. 5
5 months 6 days ago

The fundamental maxim of those who stand at the head of this Age, and therefore the principle of the Age, is this,-to accept nothing as really existing or obligatory, but that which they can understand and clearly comprehend. With regard to this fundamental principle, as we have now declared and adopted it without farther definition or limitation, this third Age is precisely similar to that which is to follow it, the fourth, or age of Reason as Science,-and by virtue of this similarity prepares the way for it. Before the tribunal of Science, too, nothing is accepted but the Conceivable. Only in the application of the principle there is this difference between the two Ages,-that the third, which we shall shortly name that of Empty Freedom, makes its fixed and previously acquired conceptions the measure of existence; while the fourth-that of Science-on the contrary, makes existence the measure, not of its acquired, but of its desiderated beliefs.

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p. 19
4 months 4 days ago

By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures.

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(p. 25)
6 months 2 weeks ago

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold...The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes.

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Ch. 12, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
6 months 6 days ago

Tell him to live by yes and no - yes to everything good, no to everything bad.

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As quoted in The Thought and Character of William James (1935) by Ralph Barton Perry, Vol. II, ch. 91
5 months 3 weeks ago

Lysander said, "Where the lion's skin will not reach, it must be pieced with the fox's."

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60 Lysander
5 months 6 days ago

The supervision of the state extends to the lock upon the door, and there begins mine own. The lock is the boundary line between the power of the government and my own private power. It is the intention of locks to make possible self-protection. In my own house my person is sacred and inviolable even to the government. In civil cases government has no right to attack me in my house, but must wait till I am upon public ground.

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P. 324
5 months 1 week ago

Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security.

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