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6 months 2 weeks ago

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

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8:32
8 months 3 weeks ago

Parmenides: If anyone, with his mind fixed on all these objections and others like them, denies the existence of ideas of things, and does not assume an idea under which each individual thing is classed, he will be quite at a loss, since he denies that the idea of each thing is always the same, and in this way he will utterly destroy the power of carrying on discussion... Then what will become of philosophy? To what can you turn, if these things are unknown?

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7 months 3 weeks ago

All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 14, § 164
8 months 4 days ago

There is no need for you to develop an armed insurrection. Christ himself has already begun an insurrection with his mouth.

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pp. 67-68
6 months 1 week ago

But it has been necessary, for the benefit of the social order, to convert religion into a kind of police system, and hence hell. Oriental or Greek Christianity is predominantly eschatological, Protestantism predominantly ethical, and Catholicism is a compromise between the two, although with the eschatological element predominating.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

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Ch. IV: The Aristocratic Ideal
6 months 3 weeks ago

It is astounding that man, the instigator, inventor and vehicle of all these developments, the originator of all judgements and decisions and the planner of the future, must make himself such a quantité negligeable.

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p 45
7 months 2 weeks ago

But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Time, and Industry, produce everyday new knowledge.

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The Second Part, Chapter 30, p. 176
7 months 3 weeks ago

As for the commercial business, I can no longer make head or tail of it. At one moment crisis seems imminent and the City prostrated, the next everything is set fair. I know that none of this will have any impact on the catastrophe.

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Letter to Friedrich Engels (4 February 1852), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 39. Letters 1852-55 (2010), p. 32
6 months 3 weeks ago

In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Communism was not the crazy fantasy of a few fanatics, nor the result of human stupidity and baseness; it was a real, very real part of the history of the twentieth century, and we cannot understand this history of ours without understanding communism. We cannot get rid of this specter by saying it was just "human stupidity," or "human corruptibility." The specter is stronger than the spells we cast on it. It might come back to life.

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Introduction to My Correct Views on Everything
6 months 2 weeks ago

Be it well understood, I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not. Freedom is not an activity pursued by an entity that, apart from and previous to such pursuit, is already possessed of a fixed being. To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity, not to have subscribed to a determined being, to be able to be other than what one was, to be unable to install oneself once and for all in any given being. The only attribute of the fixed, stable being in the free being is this constitutive instability.

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"Man has no nature"
7 months 4 weeks ago

Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure-Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure. Such pleasures seek if private be thy end: If it be public, wide let them extend.Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view: If pains must come, let them extend to few.

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Ch. 4: Value of a Lot of Pleasure or Pain, How to be Measured
4 months 2 weeks ago

The limits of this strategy were evident as the century drew to a close.

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The Marxist left had to confront the fact that actual Communist societies in the Soviet Union and China had turned into grotesque and oppressive dictatorships. p. 112
8 months 3 weeks ago

This fact, that the opposite of sin is by no means virtue, has been overlooked. The latter is partly a pagan view, which is content with a merely human standard, and which for that very reason does not know what sin is, that all sin is before God. No, the opposite of sin is faith.

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2 weeks 5 days ago

There's no safe way to promote philosophies that include "God". No matter how you approach it they capture destructive dual use, and a lot of us are smarter than that now.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country.

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Book III, ode ii, line 13
6 months 1 week ago

Reason, that which we call reason, reflex and reflective knowledge, the distinguishing mark of man, is a social product.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Unconscious assumptions or opinions are the worst enemy of woman; they can even grow into a positively demonic passion that exasperates and disgusts men, and does the woman herself the greatest injury by gradually smothering the charm and meaning of her femininity and driving it into the background. Such a development naturally ends in profound psychological disunion, in short, in a neurosis.

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P.245
5 months 3 weeks ago

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

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Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1878).
6 months 1 week ago

One cannot ignore half of life for the purposes of science, and then claim that the results of science give a full and adequate picture of the meaning of life. All discussions of 'life' which begin with a description of man's place on a speck of matter in space, in an endless evolutionary scale, are bound to be half-measures, because they leave out most of the experiences which are important to use as human beings.

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p. 309
5 months 3 weeks ago

The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.

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quoted in "The Prospects of Recording" by Glenn Gould, The Glenn Gould reader, 1984, p. 345
4 months 1 week ago

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind.

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Line 2 Alternate translation: If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable. (translator unknown).
7 months 3 weeks ago

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

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p. 87
7 months 3 weeks ago

Something that is merely negative creates nothing.

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Notebook VI, The Chapter on Capital, p. 532.
7 months 3 weeks ago

The hidden significance of these fables which is sometimes thought to have been detected, the ethics running parallel to the poetry and history, are not so remarkable as the readiness with which they may be made to express a variety of truths. As if they were the skeletons of still older and more universal truths than any whose flesh and blood they are for the time made to wear. It is like striving to make the sun, or the wind, or the sea symbols to signify exclusively the particular thoughts of our day. But what signifies it? In the mythus a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn. In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun's rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Not from fear but from a sense of duty refrain from your sins.

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5 months 1 week ago

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

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A favourite comment, inscribed on his memorial at Ealing, quoted in Nature Vol. XLVI (30 October 1902), p. 658
8 months ago

The commodities of Europe were almost all new to America, and many of those of America were new to Europe. A new set of exchanges, therefore, began..and which should naturally have proved as advantageous to the new, as it certainly did to the old continent. The savage injustice of the Europeans rendered an event, which ought to have been beneficial to all, ruinous and destructive to several of those unfortunate countries.

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Chapter I, p. 481.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

A questioner asks: If human nature is evil, then where do ritual and rightness come from? I reply: ritual and rightness are always created by the conscious activity of the sages.

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

Suppose that I wish to deserve the title of "robber of remorse" and that I place in myself all the townspeople's repentence?

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Orestes to Electra, Act 2
7 months 3 weeks ago

Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.

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Beauty
7 months 3 weeks ago

We thus have a kind of see-saw: first, pure persuasion leading to the conversion of a minority; then force exerted to secure that the rest of the community shall be exposed to the right propaganda; and finally a genuine belief on the part of the great majority, which makes the use of force again unnecessary.

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Ch. 9: Power over opinion
5 months 2 weeks ago

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

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p. 5
8 months 1 week ago

We know, that of all living beings man is the best formed, and, as the gods belong to this number, they must have a human form. ... I do not mean to say that the gods have body and blood in them; but I say that they seem as if they had bodies with blood in them. . . , Epicurus, for whom hidden things were as tangible as if he had touched them with his finger, teaches us that gods are not generally visible, but that they are intelligible; that they are not bodies having a certain solidity . . . but that we can recognize them by their passing images; that as there are atoms enough in the infinite space to produce such images, these are produced before us . . . and make us realize what are these happy, immortal beings.

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Book I, Section 18
7 months 3 weeks ago

The mere word 'design' by itself has no consequences and explains nothing. It is the barrenest of principles. The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer - and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.

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Lecture III, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered
5 months 2 weeks ago

The university, in a society ruled by public opinion, was to have been an island of intellectual freedom where all views were investigated without restriction. ... But by consenting to play an active or "positive," a participatory role in society, the university has become inundated and saturated with the backflow of society's "problems." Preoccupied with questions of Health, Sex, Race, War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes. ... Any proposed reforms of liberal education which might bring the university into conflict with the whole of the U.S.A. are unthinkable. Increasingly, the people "inside" are identical in their appetites and motives with the people "outside" the university.

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p. 18
3 months 2 weeks ago

The longing for guidance, for love and succor, provides the stimulus for the growth of a social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence, who protects, decides, rewards and punishes. This is the God who, according to man's widening horizon, loves and provides for the life of the race, or of mankind, or who even loves life itself. He is the comforter in unhappiness and in unsatisfied longing, the protector of the souls of the dead. This is the social or moral idea of God.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Life is our dictionary.

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par. 29
4 months 1 week ago

Apart from any other basis which might justify a superiority, education, as a power, raised him who possessed it over the weak, who lacked it, and the educated man counted in his circle, however large or small it was, as the mighty, the powerful, the imposing one: for he was an authority.

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p. 12
3 months 3 weeks ago

The truth is, that the greatest enemies of the doctrine of Jesus are those, calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them to the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter ... But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.

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Letter to John Adams (11 April 1823) (Scan at The Library of Congress)
5 months 3 weeks ago

Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up.

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The Intellectual and Moral Courage of Atheism
6 months 3 weeks ago

In reality, the law always contains less than the fact itself, because it does not reproduce the fact as a whole but only in that aspect of it which is important for us, the rest being intentionally or from necessity omitted.

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"The Economical Nature of Physical Inquiry," in Popular Scientific Lectures (1898), p. 192

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