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8 months 2 days ago

All things were together, infinite both in number and in smallness; for the small too was infinite.

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Frag. B 1, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.
7 months 1 week ago

That the uneducated and the ill-educated should think the hypothesis that all races of beings, man inclusive, may in process of time have been evolved from the simplest monad, a ludicrous one, is not to be wondered at. But for the physiologist, who knows that every individual being is so evolved-who knows, further, that in their earliest condition the germs of all plants and animals whatever are so similar, "that there is no appreciable distinction amongst them, which would enable it to be determined whether a particular molecule is the germ of a Conferva or of an Oak, of a Zoophyte or of a Man";-for him to make a difficulty of the matter is inexcusable.

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Spencer here references William Benjamin Carpenter, Principles of Comparative Physiology see p. 473
7 months 3 weeks ago

By Silence, the discretion of a man is known: and a fool, keeping Silence, seemeth to be wise.

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7 months 1 week ago

The Scientific discourse extracts truths from the errors which surround and oppose it on all sides and in every form; and, by demolition of these opposing views as error, and as impossible to true thought, shows the truth as that which alone remains after their withdrawal, and therefore as the only possible truth:--and in this separation of opposites, and elucidation of the truth from the confused chaos in which truth and error lie mingled together, consists the peculiar and characteristic nature of the Scientific discourse. This method creates and produces truth, before our eyes, out of a world full of error.

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P. 26-27
8 months 2 weeks ago

Money is always to be found when men are to be sent to the frontiers to be destroyed: when the object is to preserve them, it is no longer so.

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"Charity", 1770
6 months 1 week ago

The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.

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Ch. 5, translated by David Patterson, 1983
6 months 4 weeks ago

In the products of the culture industry human beings get into trouble only so that they can be rescued unharmed, usually by representatives of a benevolent collective; and then, in illusory harmony, they are reconciled with the general interest whose demands they had initially experienced as irreconcilable with their own.

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Section 14
6 months 1 week ago

A wise man rules his passions, a fool obeys them.

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Maxim 49
8 months 1 week ago

The reader is nowhere raised into and sustained in a bigger, purer or rarer region of thought than in the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita's sanity and sublimity have impressed the minds of even soldiers and merchants.

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A Tribute to Hinduism, 2008
8 months 2 weeks ago

To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should never be established in it.

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Chapter II, p. 505.
6 months 1 week ago

Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.

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7 months 1 week ago

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.

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8 months 1 week ago

The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.

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Act 6, sc. 2
7 months 4 days ago

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

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A Severed Head (1961); 1976, p. 181.
9 months ago

And what can be more divine than the exhalations of the earth, which affect the human soul so as to enable her to predict the future ? And could the hand of time evaporate such a virtue? Do you suppose you are talking of some kind of wine or salted meat ?

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Book I, Chapter III
7 months 1 week ago

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Now I say this to keep the conscience free from mischievous laws and fictitious sins, and not because I would defend images. Nor would I condemn those who have destroyed them, especially those who destroy divine and idolatrous images. But images for memorial and witness, such as crucifixes and images of saints, are to be tolerated.

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p. 91
8 months 3 weeks ago

Who then to frail mortality shall trust But limns the water, or but writes in dust.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The ideal of human kinship that would brook no injustice or social wrong agave the only meaning and purpose to my life. This ideal I found in anarchism. Not, to be sure, in the distorted image of anarchism presented in the Press and by pseudo-social economists or hounded and persecuted by the powers that be. I found anarchism the moving spirit of beauty-of social harmony-of a free and untrammeled growth of the individual. This became my inspiration and my highest goal.

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4 months 1 week ago

An 'Artificial System' is one in which the 'smaller' groups (the Genera) are 'natural'; and in which the 'wider' divisions (Classes, Orders) are constructed by the 'peremptory' application of selected Characters

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9 months 1 week ago

Who is to blame but her and the third factor, from whence no one knows, which moved me with its stimulus and transformed me? After all, what I have done is praised in others.-Or is becoming a poet my compensation? I reject all compensation, I demand my rights-that is, my honor. I did not ask to become one, I will not buy it at this price. – Or if I am guilty, then I certainly should be able to repent of my guilt and make it good again. Tell me how. On top of that, must I perhaps repent that the world plays with me as a child plays with a beetle?-Or is it perhaps best to forget the whole thing? Forget-indeed, I shall have ceased to be if I forget it. Or what kind of life would it be if along with my beloved I have lost honor and pride and lost them in such a way that no one knows how it happened, for which reason I can never retrieve them again? Shall I allow myself to be shoved out in this manner? Why, then, was I shoved in?

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7 months 4 days ago

Surrender of individuality by the many to someone who is taken to be a superindividual explains the retrograde movement of society. Dictatorships and totalitarian states, and belief in the inevitability of this or that result coming to pass are, strange as it may sound, ways of denying the reality of time and the creativeness of the individual.

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8 months 1 week ago

There is room in the world, no doubt, and even in old countries, for a great increase of population, supposing the arts of life to go on improving, and capital to increase. But even if innocuous, I confess I see very little reason for desiring it. The density of population necessary to enable mankind to obtain, in the greatest degree, all the advantages both of co-operation and of social intercourse, has, in all the most populous countries, been attained. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it..

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Book IV, Chapter VI, §3, p. 516
7 months 1 week ago

Throughout all organic nature there is at work a modifying influence of the kind... as the cause, these specific differences: an influence which, though slow in its action, does, in time, if the circumstances demand it, produce marked changes-an influence, which to all appearance, would produce in the millions of years, and under the great varieties of condition which geological records imply, any amount of change.

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4 months 1 week ago

The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy.

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4 months 2 days ago

I believe in intuition and inspiration. ... At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason. When the eclipse of 1919 confirmed my intuition, I was not in the least surprised. In fact I would have been astonished had it turned out otherwise. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Roughly speaking, rationality is concerned with the selection of preferred behavior alternatives in terms of some system of values, whereby the consequences of behavior can be evaluated.

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p. 84.
8 months 2 weeks ago

Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, research is the means of all learning, and ignorance is the end.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Very often the things that cost nothing cost us the most heavily; I can show you many objects the quest and acquisition of which have wrested freedom from our hands.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

A screen bans reality.

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8 months 3 days ago

The evidence of our own eyes makes it more plausible to believe that the world was not created by any god at all. If, however, we insist on believing in divine creation, we are forced to admit that the god who made the world cannot be all-powerful and all good. He must be either evil or a bungler.

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The God of Suffering? Project Syndicate, 2008
6 months 3 weeks ago

What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine - they are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine - they are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior, jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.

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Letter (5 May 1855), published in Florence Nightingale : An Introduction to Her Life and Family (2001), edited by Lynn McDonald, p. 141
8 months 1 week ago

In its widest possible sense, however, a man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down.

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Ch. 10
4 months 4 weeks ago

For the state it is indispensable that nobody have an own will; if one had, the state would have to exclude (lock up, banish, etc.) this one; if all had, they would do away with the state. (...) The own will of me is the state's destroyer; it is therefore denounced by the state as 'self-will'. Own will and the state are powers in deadly hostility, between which no 'perpetual peace' is possible. As long as the state asserts itself, it represents own will, its ever-hostile opponent, as unreasonable, evil; and the latter lets itself be talked into believing this.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 174, 175
8 months 1 week ago

In its most general form, confinement was explained, or at least justified, by a will to avoid scandal. It thereby signalled an important change in the consciousness of evil. The Renaissance had let unreason in all its forms come out into the light of day, as public exposure gave evil the chance to redeem itself and to serve as an exemplum.

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Part One: 5. The Insane
6 months 4 weeks ago

Although people seem to be unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.

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7 months 1 week ago

...all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.

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8 months 1 week ago

Philosophy hasn't made any progress?-If someone scratches where it itches, do we have to see progress? Is it not genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?

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p. 98e
9 months 1 week ago

I was brought up in the Christian religion, and although I can scarcely sanction all the improper attempts to gain the emancipation of woman, all paganlike reminiscences also seem foolish to me. My brief and simple opinion is that woman is certainly as good as man-period. Any more discursive elaboration of the difference between the sexes or deliberation on which sex is superior is an idle intellectual occupation for loafers and bachelors.

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4 months 1 week ago

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

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IV, 43
8 months 2 weeks ago

We were halves throughout, and to that degree that, methinks, by outliving him I defraud him of his part.

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Ch. 27. Of Friendship, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
8 months 2 weeks ago

But there is only one thing which gathers people into seditious commotion, and that is oppression.

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A Letter Concerning Toleration
8 months 1 week ago

As for large landed property, its defenders have always, sophistically, identified the economic advantages offered by large-scale agriculture with large-scale landed property, as if it were not precisely as a result of the abolition of property that this advantage, for one thing, would receive its greatest possible extension, and, for another, only then would be of social benefit.

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Rent of Land, p. 66.
8 months 2 weeks ago

Reason, if consulted with, would advise, that their children's time should be spent in acquiring what might be useful to them when they come to be men, rather than to have their heads stuff'd with a deal of trash, a great part whereof they usually never do ('tis certain they never need to) think on again as long as they live: and so much of it as does stick by them they are only the worse for.

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Sec. 94
7 months 5 days ago

The present stage redefines the possibilities of man and nature in accordance with the new means available for their realization.

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p. 65
8 months 2 days ago

Fortunate is he who has acquired a wealth of divine understanding, but wretched the one whose interest lies in shadowy conjectures about divinities.

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fr. 132

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