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8 months 2 weeks ago

This Europe, which in its ruinous blindness is forever on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on one side and America on the other. From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same: the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man...

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7 months 1 week ago

A whole dimension of human activity and passivity has been de-eroticized. The environment from which the individual could obtain pleasure-which he could cathect as gratifying almost as an extended zone of the body-has been rigidly reduced. Consequently, the "universe" of libidinous cathexis is likewise reduced. The effect is a localization and contraction of libido, the reduction of erotic to sexual experience and satisfaction.

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p. 73
4 months 2 weeks ago

When the empirical investigator glories in his refusal to go beyond the specialized observation dictated by the traditions of his discipline, be they ever so inclusive, he is making a virtue out of a defense mechanism which insures him against questioning his presuppositions.

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7 months 1 week ago

Loren von Stein thus turned the dialectic into an ensemble of objective laws calling for social reform as the adequate solution of all contradictions and neutralized the critical elements of the dialectic.

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P. 388
5 months 2 weeks ago

A further threat to liberalism has to do with the mode of cognition that we call modern natural science. The early liberals were very closely aligned with the founders of modern natural science, people like Bacon and Descartes and Newton, who believed that there was an objective world beyond our subjective consciousnesses, that we could perceive this world through the experimental method, and then come to manipulate it. Natural science gave us technology... that made the world much more habitable, by conquering disease, by inventing things that vastly increased human productivity. So... it's closely related to the wealth, and... the safety and comfort of a modern economically developed world.

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18:49
7 months 1 day ago

Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.

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Ch. 4
7 months 5 days ago

It must be recognized that man in his limited and relative earthly life is capable of bringing about the beautiful and the valuable only when he believes in another life, unlimited, absolute, eternal. That is a law of his being. A contact with this mortal life exclusive of any other ends in the wearing-away of effective energy and a self-satisfaction that makes one useless and superficial. Only the spiritual man, striking his roots deep in infinite and eternal life, can be a true creator. But Humanism denied the spiritual man, handed over the eternal to the temporal, and took its stand by the natural man within the limited confines of the earth.

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p. 34
7 months 2 days ago

The key to understanding Crowley is the same as the key to understanding the Marquis de Sade. Both wasted an immense amount of energy screaming defiance at the authority they resented so much, and lacked the insight to see that they were shaking their fists at an abstraction.

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p. 29
7 months 6 days ago

Just as eunuchs will never know aesthetics as applied to the selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is reasoned or defined.

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6 months 2 days ago

Those least responsible for climate change are worst affected by it.

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Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis
8 months 3 weeks ago

A faithful and good servant is a real godsend; but truly 'tis a rare bird in the land.

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156
5 months 2 weeks ago

In the 1980s and 90s there was an extension of the autonomy of individual property owners in... a movement towards neoliberalism represented by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and... by the Chicago school of economics that denigrated... the role of the state in the economy, that said the private markets would be able to solve most social distribution problems and the like. This was true in many ways. The world did become much richer in this period, but it also became much more unequal... Without adequate regulation and... effort to protect people against the excesses of market capitalism, you had people... left behind, even as their societies as a whole, grew. ...This ...became one of the triggers for the kind of populism we've seen arise in many rich countries.

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14:13
7 months 1 week ago

Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.

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18:16-17 (KJV) Variant translation: Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.
9 months 1 week ago

If I hear the Way [of truth] in the morning, I am content even to die in that evening.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

There is a sort of gratification in doing good which makes us rejoice in ourselves.

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Book III, Ch. 2
4 months 4 weeks ago

As for the beauty of the gods, not even Hermes tried to describe it in his tale; he said that it transcended description, and must be comprehended by the eye of the mind; for in words it was hard to portray and impossible to convey to mortal ears. Never indeed will there be or appear an orator so gifted that he could describe such surpassing beauty as shines forth on the countenance of the gods.

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9 months 3 days ago

To the rational being only the irrational is unendurable, but the rational is endurable.

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Variant translation: To a reasonable creature, that alone is insupportable which is unreasonable; but everything reasonable may be supported. Book I, ch. 2,1.
7 months 2 weeks ago

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

An appeal to his alarm is never a good plan to rid oneself of a spirited young man.

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The Pavilion on the Links, ch. III.
8 months 2 weeks ago

The utilitarian doctrine is, that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being only desirable as means to that end.

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Ch. 4
6 months 2 weeks ago

He who helps the guilty, shares the crime.

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Maxim 139
8 months 2 weeks ago

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

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Loser Wins (Les Séquestrés d'Altona: A Play in Five Acts)
1 month 1 week ago

What Leo said....

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4 months 2 weeks ago

I believe... that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.

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Letter to John Adams
4 months 2 weeks ago

...undefiled by pleasures, invulnerable to any pain, untouched by arrogance, unaffected by meanness, an athlete in the greatest of all contests-the struggle not to be overwhelmed by anything that happens.

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(Hays translation) III, 4
8 months 3 weeks ago

Young man! Deny yourself satisfaction (of amusement, of debauchery, of love, etc.), not with the Stoical intention of complete abstinence, but with the refined Epicurean intention of having in view an ever-growing pleasure. This stinginess with the cash of your vital urge makes you definitely richer through the postponement of pleasure, even if you should, for the most part, renounce the indulgence of it until the end of your life. The awareness of having pleasure under your control is, like everything idealistic, more fruitful and more abundant than everything that satisfies the sense through indulgence because it is thereby simultaneously consumed and consequently lost from the aggregate of totality.

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Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 54.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time. The twining strands of fate wove both of them together: your own existence and the things that happen to you.

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V. 8, trans. Gregory Hays
8 months 2 weeks ago

An atheist, like a Christian, holds that we can know whether or not there is a God. The Christian holds that we can know there is a God; the atheist, that we can know there is not. The Agnostic suspends judgment, saying that there are not sufficient grounds either for affirmation or for denial. At the same time, an Agnostic may hold that the existence of God, though not impossible, is very improbable; he may even hold it so improbable that it is not worth considering in practice. In that case, he is not far removed from atheism. His attitude may be that which a careful philosopher would have towards the gods of ancient Greece. If I were asked to prove that Zeus and Poseidon and Hera and the rest of the Olympians do not exist, I should be at a loss to find conclusive arguments. An Agnostic may think the Christian God as improbable as the Olympians; in that case, he is, for practical purposes, at one with the atheists.

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What is an Agnostic?, 1953
7 months 2 weeks ago

In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interest of the immense majority in subjection to them. This is the sense in which we are really Anarchists.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

I do not admire myself as a person. My successes do not override my shortcomings.

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Journal of Humanistic Psychology (Spring 1991) Vol. 31 No. 2, p. 112
9 months 2 weeks ago

The infinite is in capacity. That, however, which is infinite in capacity is not to be assumed as that which is infinite in energy. ...It has its being in capacity, and in division and diminution. ...It is always possible to assume something beyond it. It does not, however, on this account surpass every definite magnitude; as in division it surpasses every definite magnitude, and will be less.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

If...it be a thing external that causes thy grief, know, that it is not that properly that doth cause it, but thine own conceit and opinion concerning the thing: which thou mayest rid thyself of, when thou wilt.

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VIII, 45
6 months 2 weeks ago

In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for practical existence.

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A Lodging for the Night.
8 months 2 weeks ago

It is time to be old, To take in sail: - The god of bounds, Who sets to seas a shore, Came to me in his fatal rounds, And said: 'No more!

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Terminus
7 months 3 weeks ago

Gratitude is a burden, and every burden is made to be shaken off.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The acts of France were acts of hostility to this country; her whole system, every speech, every decree, every act, bespoke an intention preclusive of accommodation. No man, he would venture to say, had a more lively sense of the importance of the question before the House, or of the evils of war, than himself. A war with France, under such circumstances as now governed her conduct, must be terrible, but peace much more so. A nation that had abandoned all its valuable distinctions, arts, sciences, religion, law order, every thing but the sword, was most formidable and dreadful to all nations composed of citizens who only used soldiers as a defence; as such, France should be resisted with spirit and temper, without fear or scruple.

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Speech in the House of Commons upon the outbreak of war with France (12 February 1793)
7 months 2 weeks ago

I did not hate the author of my misfortunes - truth and justice acquit me of that; I rather pitied the hard destiny to which he seemed condemned. But I thought with unspeakable loathing of those errors, in consequence of which every man is fated to be, more or less, the tyrant or the slave. I was astonished at the folly of my species, that they did not rise up as one man, and shake off chains so ignominious, and misery so insupportable. So far as related to myself, I resolved - and this resolution has never been entirety forgotten by me - to hold myself disengaged from this odious scene, and never fill the part either of the oppressor or the sufferer.

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Among the Romans in Christian times Mithras-worship as very widely spread, and so late as the Middle Ages we meet with a secret Mithras-worship ostensibly connected with the order of the Knights-Templars. Mithras thrusting the knife into the neck of the ox is a figurative representation belonging essentially to the cult of Mithras, of which examples have been frequently found in Europe. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Lectures on the philosophy of religion, together with a work on the proofs of the existence of God.

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Vol 2 Translated from the 2d German ed. 1895 Ebenezer Brown Speirs 1854-1900, and J Burdon Sanderson p. 81-82
8 months 2 weeks ago

The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,-a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

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par. 5
5 months ago

Do you suppose that God takes himself seriously? I know a Zen master, Joshu Sasaki, who has let it be known that the best form of meditation is to stand up with your hands on your hips and roar with laughter for ten minutes every morning. I have heard of a sophisticated shaman-type fellow who used to cure ringworm on cows just by pointing at the scars and laughing. Truly religious people always make jokes about their religion; their faith is so strong that they can afford it. Much of the secret of life consists in knowing how to laugh, and also how to breathe.

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p. 6
5 months 2 weeks ago

Liberal values like tolerance and individual freedom are prized most intensely when they are denied: People who live in brutal dictatorships want the simple freedom to speak, associate, and worship as they choose. But over time life in a liberal society comes to be taken for granted and its sense of shared community seems thin.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Absurd, irreducible; nothing - not even a profound and secret delirium of nature - could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it. Reflections on a chestnut tree root.

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8 months 1 week ago

He was seized and dragged off to King Philip, and being asked who he was, replied, "A spy upon your insatiable greed."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 43. Cf. Plutarch, Moralia, 70CD.
7 months 2 weeks ago

Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don't know, and we don't really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."

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