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4 months 2 weeks ago

If the love of money is the root of all evil, the need of money is most certainly the root of all despair.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Lord Jesus Christ, the birds had nests, the foxes had dens, and you had no place where you could lay your head. You were homeless in the world-yet you yourself were a hiding place, the only place where the sinner could flee. And so even this very day you are a hiding place. When the sinner flees to you, hides himself with you, is hidden in you, he is eternally kept safe, since love hides a multitude of sins.

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1 week 5 days ago

Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books!

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Life of Frederick the Great, Bk. XVI, ch. 1.
3 weeks 6 days ago

The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in parallel with our increasing knowledge. The twentieth century shows the contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to wage war and strengthen tyranny. Science made possible the technologies that powered the industrial revolution. In the twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge - not even in the long run.

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"Joseph Conrad, Our Contemporary," from Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions
3 months 3 weeks ago

Lying... is so ill a quality, and the mother of so many ill ones that spawn from it, and take shelter under it, that a child should be brought up in the greatest abhorrence of it imaginable. It should be always spoke of before him with the utmost detestation, as a quality so wholly inconsistent with the name and character of a gentleman, that no body of any credit can bear the imputation of a lie; a mark that is judg'd in utmost disgrace, which debases a man to the lowest degree of a shameful meanness, and ranks him with the most contemptible part of mankind and the abhorred rascality; and is not to be endured in any one who would converse with people of condition, or have any esteem or reputation in the world.

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Sec. 131
1 month 2 weeks ago

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

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(p. 26)
3 months 3 weeks ago

Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an essential time-order; a written word is a series of pieces of matter, having an essential space-order.

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An Outline of Philosophy Ch.4 Language, 1927
2 months 2 weeks ago

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The tendency to regard continuity, in the sense in which I shall define it, as an idea of prime importance in philosophy conveniently may be be termed synechism. The present paper is intended chiefly to show what synechism is, and what it leads to.

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2 months 1 week ago

Egoism you say? There is nothing more universal than the individual, for what is the property of each is the property of all. Each man is worth more than the whole of humanity, nor will it do to sacrifice each to all save in so far as all sacrifice themselves to each. That which we call egoism is the principle of psychic gravity, the necessary postulate. "Love thy neighbor as thyself," we are told, the presupposition being that each man loves himself; and it is not said "Love thyself." And nevertheless, we do not know how to love ourselves.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.

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Grey Eminence, 1940
1 week 5 days ago

Of America it would ill beseem any Englishman, and me perhaps as little as another, to speak unkindly, to speak unpatriotically, if any of us even felt so. Sure enough, America is a great, and in many respects a blessed and hopeful phenomenon. Sure enough, these hardy millions of Anglosaxon men prove themselves worthy of their genealogy... But as to a Model Republic, or a model anything, the wise among themselves know too well that there is nothing to be said... Their Constitution, such as it may be, was made here, not there... Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions.

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Latter Day Pamphlets, No. 1., p. 23, 24.
3 months 3 weeks ago

A pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do never does all he can.

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(p. 32)

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

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Alternate translation: I shall never be ashamed to go to a bad author for a good quotation. Chapter 11, Section 8
1 week 5 days ago

With stupidity and sound digestion man may front much.

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Bk. II, ch. 4.
2 months 1 week ago

Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy.

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The Good Apprentice (1985), p. 247.
1 month 4 days ago

We share this planet, our home, with millions of species. Justice and sustainability both demand that we do not use more resources than we need. Restraint in resource use and living within nature's limits are preconditions for social justice. The commons are where justice and sustainability converge, where ecology and equity meet. The survival of pastures and forests as community property, or of a common good like a stable ecosystem, is only possible with social organizations with checks and controls on the use of resources built into their principles. The breakdown of a community, with the associated erosion of concepts of joint ownership and responsibility, can trigger the degradation of common resources.

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(p.50)
3 months 2 weeks ago

Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?

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p. 14e
3 months 1 week ago

You must learn all things, both the unshaken heart of persuasive truth, and the opinions of mortals in which there is no true warranty.

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Frag B 1.28-30, quoted by Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians, vii. 3
3 months 3 weeks ago

Born for success he seemed, With grace to win, with heart to hold, With shining gifts that took all eyes.

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In Memoriam E. B. E.
2 months 4 days ago

If life can no longer be narrated, wisdom deteriorates, and its place is taken by problem-solving.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

In all affairs - love, religion, politics, or business - it's a healthy idea, now and then, to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

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As quoted in The Reader's Digest, Vol. 37 (1940), p. 90; no specific source given.
3 months 2 weeks ago

Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Grey Life.

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2 weeks 3 days ago

Today we have arrived at a point when the three principles [of modern resistance: 1. measure of efficacy, 2. the form of political and military organization correspond to the current forms of economic and social production, 3. democracy and freedom] coincide. The distributed network structure provides the model for an absolutely democratic organization that corresponds to the dominant forms of economic and social production and is also the most powerful weapon against the ruling power structure.

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88
2 months 1 week ago

Progress usually comes from the barbarian, and there is nothing more stagnant than the philosophy of the philosophers and the theology of the theologians.

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2 months 1 week ago

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

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A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
3 months 3 weeks ago

Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap'd shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances.

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Part 4, Section 7
2 months 1 week ago

In France there are three kinds of professions: the church, the sword, and the long robe. Each hath a sovereign contempt for the other two. For example, a man who ought to be despised only for being a fool is often so because he is a lawyer.

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No. 44 (Usbek writing to Rhedi)
1 month 2 weeks ago

The images of mankind have become the most basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied.

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(p. 346)
1 month 2 weeks ago

Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen.

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Ch. 8
1 month 4 weeks ago

From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have the right ideas.

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Chapter 15, Inductive Logic, p. 139.
2 months 1 week ago

A man discovers what he is actually worth in this world when he faces society as a man, without money, name, or powerful connections, stripped of all but his native potentialities. He soon finds that nothing has less weight than his human qualities. They are prized so low that the market does not even list them. Strict science, which acknowledges man only as a biological concept, reflects man's lot in the actual world; in himself, man is nothing more than a member of a species. In the eyes of the world, the quality of humanity confers no title to existence, nay, not even a right of sojourn. Such title must be certified by special social circumstances stipulated in documents to be presented on demand.

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p. 137.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed.

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Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7)
2 months 5 days ago

When television screens had only rare images of black folks, black people were more critically vigilant about these representations. Even when blackness was represented 'positiviely,' as it was in early black television shows like Julia, which focused on the life of a black nurse, the beauty standard was a reflection of white supremacist aesthetics.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

As the strata of the earth preserve in succession the living creatures of past epochs, so the shelves of libraries preserve in succession the errors of the past and their expositions, which like the former were very lively and made a great commotion in their own age but now stand petrified and stiff in a place where only the literary palaeontologist regards them.

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Vol. 2 "On Books and Writing" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
2 weeks 1 day ago

Among all the great men who have philosophized about this remarkable effect, I am more astonished at Kepler than at any other. Despite his open and acute mind, and though he has at his fingertips the motions attributed to the earth, he nevertheless lent his ear and his assent to the moon's dominion over the waters, to occult properties, and to such puerilities.

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In regard to Kepler's belief of the moon affecting the tides of the Earth, p. 328
2 months 4 days ago

You've got the temperament of a scholar, and you live on your own and write books. You don't have anything to do with civilization. You've been in London a few days and you can't wait to get back home. But how about the people who can't write books -- people there's no outlet for in this civilization? What about your new men who don't know what to do?

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p. 200
3 months 2 weeks ago

Ion is... a parrhesiastes, i.e., the sort... so valuable to democracy or monarchy since he is courageous enough to explain either to the demos or to the king just what the short-comings of their life really are.

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2 months 3 days ago

The history of other cultures is non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.

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Chap 4, Sect 2
1 month 2 weeks ago

I shall doubtless outlive some troublesome desires; but I am in no hurry about that; nor, when the time comes, shall I plume myself on the immunity just in the same way, I do not greatly pride myself on having outlived my belief in the fairy tales of Socialism. Old people have faults of their own; they tend to become cowardly, niggardly, and suspicious. Whether from the growth of experience or the decline of animal heat, I see that age leads to these and certain other faults; and it follows, of course, that while in one sense I hope I am journeying towards the truth, in another I am indubitably posting towards these forms and sources of error.

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Crabbed Age and Youth.
3 months 3 weeks ago

If, when a man writes a poem or commits a murder, the bodily movements involved in his act result solely from physical causes, it would seem absurd to put up a statue to him in the one case and to hang him in the other.

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"The Doctrine of Free Will"
3 months 1 week ago

'Tis well to restrain the wicked, and in any case not to join him in his wrong-doing.

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3 months 1 week ago

Cicero said loud-bawling orators were driven by their weakness to noise, as lame men to take horse.

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Cicero
3 months 4 weeks ago

We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, which is the cause that what we believe we do not believe, and cannot disengage ourselves from what we condemn.

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Ch. 16. Of Glory, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
2 months 3 days ago

So long as one can use scented candy to abate the foul breath of hypocrisy, Puritanism is triumphant.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Science has adapted itself entirely to the wealthy classes and accordingly has set itself to heal those who can afford everything, and it prescribes the same methods for those who have nothing to spare.

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