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3 months 2 weeks ago

How can anyone see the only way the world can be saved and not be forced to weep?

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7 months 2 weeks ago

I wished, by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her to become one.

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A Plea for Psychology as a Natural Science, 1892
5 months 2 weeks ago

For me any of the little gestures I make are all tentative probes. That's why I feel free to make them sound as outrageous or extreme as possible. Until you make it extreme, the probe is not very efficient.

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Marshall McLuhan: the man and his message, edited by George Sanderson and Frank MacDonald, Fulcrum, 1989, p. 32
3 months 2 weeks ago

Hence the Pythagoreans in their theology called it sometimes "universe," sometimes "heaven," sometimes "all," sometimes "Fate" and "eternity," "power" and "trust" and "Necessity," "Atlas" and "unwearying," and simply "God" and "Phanes" and "sun."They called it "universe," because all things are arranged by it both in general and in particular, and because it is the most perfect boundary of number, in the sense that "decad" is, as it were, "receptacle," just as heaven is the receptacle of all things, they called it "heaven" and, among the Muses, "Ourania."

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On the Decad
3 months 2 weeks ago

I say, the earth belongs to each of these generations during its course, fully and in its own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts and incumbrances of the first, the third of the second, and so on. For if the first could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation. Then, no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.

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Letter to James Madison (6 September 1789) ME 7:455, Papers 15:393
6 months 2 weeks ago

The man that does not know himself not to be at the mercy of other men, that does not feel that he is invulnerable to all the vicissitudes of fortune, is incapable of a constant and inflexible virtue.

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Book V, "Of Education"
3 months 2 weeks ago

Stir up thy mind, and recall thy wits again from thy natural dreams, and visions, and when thou art perfectly awoken, and canst perceive that they were but dreams that troubled thee, as one newly awakened out of another kind of sleep look upon these worldly things with the same mind as thou didst upon those, that thou sawest in thy sleep.

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VI, 29
6 months 1 week ago

Persons who feel themselves to be exiles in this world-and what noble mind, from Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?-are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.

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pp. 39-40
1 month 3 days ago

Conservatives are strange people. Some guy went off on me about my interracial marriage. They are the danger they keep insisting we are. Weird people.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.

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p. 27
8 months 2 weeks ago

I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The devil...the prowde spirit...cannot endure to be mocked.

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Thomas More, quoted at the beginning of The Screwtape Letters
6 months 3 weeks ago

Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people, is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

More controversially, technology can accelerate the transition from harming to helping free-living sentient beings: mankind's fitfully expanding "circle of compassion". The civilising process needn't be species-specific but instead extend to free-living dwellers in tomorrow's wildlife parks. Every cubic metre of the biosphere will soon be computationally accessible to surveillance, micro-management and control. Fertility regulation via immunocontraception can replace Darwinian ecosystems governed by starvation and predation. Any species of obligate carnivore we choose to preserve can be genetically and behaviourally tweaked into harmlessness. Asphyxiation, disembowelling, and agonies of being eaten alive can pass into the dustbin of history.

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High-tech Jainism, The World Transformed, Jul. 2014
5 months 2 weeks ago

The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance.

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(p. 263)

One must be something in order to do something.

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Conversations with Eckermann
7 months 3 weeks ago

Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies, and we no more create numbers than he created the Indians.

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Principles of Mathematics (1903), p. 451
7 months 3 weeks ago

I am looking forward very much to getting back to Cambridge, and being able to say what I think and not to mean what I say: two things which at home are impossible. Cambridge is one of the few places where one can talk unlimited nonsense and generalities without anyone pulling one up or confronting one with them when one says just the opposite the next day.

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Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1893); published in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume 1: The Private Years (1884-1914), edited by Nicholas Griffin
7 months 3 weeks ago

There is no virtue they should be excited to, nor fault they should be kept from, which I do not think they may be convinced of; but it must be by such reasons as their age and understandings are capable of, and those propos'd always in very few and plain words.

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Sec. 81
6 months 2 weeks ago

Man is a Sun; his Senses are the Planets.

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6 months 1 week ago

Facts, facts, facts,' cries the scientist if he wants to emphasize the necessity of a firm foundation for science. What is a fact? A fact is a thought that is true. But the scientist will surely not recognize something which depends on men's varying states of mind to be the firm foundation of science.

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Gottlob Frege (1956). "The thought: A logical inquiry" in: Peter Ludlow (1997) Readings in the Philosophy of Language. p. 27
7 months 1 week 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
7 months 2 weeks ago

I disbelieve in specialization and... experts. ...[P]aying too much respect to the specialist ...[is] destroying the commonwealth of learning, the rationalist tradition, and science ...

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7 months 1 day ago

He is worst of all, that is malicious against his friends.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

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Adagia (first published 1500, with numerous expanded editions through 1536), III, IV, 96
7 months 3 weeks ago

But though empires, like all the other works of men, have all hitherto proved mortal, yet every empire aims at immortality.

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Chapter II, Part II, p. 896.
6 months 2 weeks ago

To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Balance isn't good for everything. A balance that agrees to destroy SOME life is not a good balance...

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Every village has its simpleton, and if one does not exist they invent one to pass the time.

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Ch. 8
5 months 3 weeks ago

The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is already reproduced, the hyper-real.

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Simulations (1983), New York: Semiotext, p. 146
4 months 1 week ago

Mahomet can work no miracles; he often answers impatiently: I can work no miracles. I? "I am a Public Preacher;" appointed to preach this doctrine to all creatures. Yet the world, as we can see, had really from of old been all one great miracle to him. Look over the world, says he; is it not wonderful, the work of Allah; wholly "a sign to you," if your eyes were open!

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by Nature be attained. No citizen will have an advantage over any other citizen save as is given by his industry, skill, and intelligence; and each will obtain what he fairly earns. Then, but not till then, will labor get its full reward, and capital its natural return.

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Book VIII, Ch. 3
7 months 4 days ago

Every body is in place; but nothing essentially incorporeal, or any thing of this kind, has any locality.

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4 months 5 days ago

That man, I declare, is happy whom nothing makes less strong than he is; he keeps to the heights, leaning upon none but himself; for one who sustains himself by any prop may fall.

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8 months 5 days ago

Let each look to his own heart: let him not keep hatred against his brother for any hard word; on account of earthly contention let him not become earth.

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First Homily, Paragraph 11, as translated by H. Browne, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 7 (1888)
5 months 6 days ago

The question of questions for mankind-the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other-is the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of things.

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Ch.2, p. 71
7 months 3 weeks ago

What is commonly called friendship even is only a little more honor among rogues.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 95
8 months 3 weeks ago
Because of the way that myth takes it for granted that miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically inspired people the ancient Greeks, for instance more closely resembles a dream than it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker.
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7 months 2 weeks ago

But, suppose, besides, that the making of the new machinery affords employment to a greater number of mechanics, can that be called compensation to the carpet makers, thrown on the streets?

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Vol. I, Ch. 15, Section 6, pg. 479.
5 months 4 weeks ago

Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.

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E 11
6 months 2 weeks ago

I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions - only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

When the profits of trade happen to be greater than ordinary, over-trading becomes a general error both among great and small dealers.

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Chapter I, p. 469.
11 months 2 weeks ago

Think differently, but know when it's your duty to think the same...

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no-one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end.

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Part Two : Metaphysical Principles of Virtue
4 months 1 week ago

In the past you rivalled the Achaians and the Macedonians, peoples of your own race, and Philip, their commander, for the hegemony and glory, but now that the freedom of the Hellenes is at stake at a war against an alien people (Romans), ...And does it worth to ally with the barbarians, to take the field with them against the Epeirotans, the Achaians, the Akarnanians, the Boiotians, the Thessalians, in fact with almost all the Hellenes with the exception of the Aitolians who are a wicked nation... ...So Lakedaimonians it is good to remember your ancestors,... be afraid of the Romans... and do ally yourselves with the Achaians and Macedonians. But if some the most powerful citizens are opposed to this policy at least stay neutral and do not side with the unjust.

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Histories, IX, 37:7-39:7 (Loeb)
4 months 5 days ago

A golden bit does not make a better horse.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

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Original text:Partout où vous verrez un autel, là se trouve la civilisation. "Second Dialogue," p. 44

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