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3 months 1 week ago

Man is the higher Sense of our Planet; the star which connects it with the upper world; the eye which it turns towards Heaven.

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3 months 1 week ago

To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

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1 month 1 week ago

The possibility of democracy on a global scale is emerging today for the very first time.

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(xi)
2 months 1 week ago

We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?

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Ch. 1. Why Are People?
4 months 1 week ago

Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one."

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3 months 3 days ago

The physical change in the thickness of walls since the Middle Ages could be shown in a diagram. In the fourteenth century each house was a fortress. Man spent the major portion of his day in them, in secret and well-defended solitude. That solitude, working on the soul hour after hour, forged it, like a transcendent blacksmith, into a compact and forceful character. Under its treatment, man consolidated his individual destiny and sallied forth with impunity, never yielding to the contamination from the public. It is only in isolation that we gain, almost automatically, a certain discrimination in ideas, desires, longings, that we learn which are ours, and which are anonymous, floating in the air, falling on us like dust in the street.

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p. 168
2 months 1 week ago

Literacy affects the physiology as well as the psychic life of the African.

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(p. 38)
2 months 1 week ago

By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The christian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun.

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An Essay on the Origin of Free-Masonry (1803-1805); found in manuscript form after Paine's death and thought to have been written for an intended part III of The Age of Reason. It was partially published in 1810 and published in its entirety in 1818.
1 month 1 week ago

It is the simple hypotheses of which one must be most wary; because these are the ones that have the most chances of passing unnoticed.

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Thermodynamique: Leçons professées pendant le premier semestre 1888-1889 (1892), Preface
1 month 4 days ago

It is a most important social act; nay, at bottom, the one important social act. Given the men a People choose, the People itself, in its exact worth and worthlessness, is given. A heroic people chooses heroes, and is happy; a valet or flunkey people chooses sham-heroes, what are called quacks, thinking them heroes, and is not happy.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organised, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children!

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Philo to Cleanthes, Part XI
4 months 2 weeks ago

That of beaver skins, of beaver wool, and of gum Senega, has been subjected to higher duties; Great Britain, by the conquest of Canada and Senegal, having got almost the monopoly of those commodities.

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Chapter II, Part II, Article IV, p. 954-955.
3 months 5 days ago

When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind...They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country.

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3 months 5 days ago

When capitalism is negated, social processes no longer stand under the rule of blind natural laws.

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P. 318
1 week 6 days ago

Instead of funding issues of paper on the hypothecation of specific redeeming taxes (the only method of anticipating, in a time of war, the resources of times of peace, tested by the experience of nations), we are trusting to tricks of jugglers on the cards, to the illusions of banking schemes for the resources of the war, and for the cure of colic to inflations of more wind.

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Letter to José Correia da Serra (1814) ME 14:224
4 months 1 week ago

Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce.

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Vol. II, Ch. XX, p. 474 (See also...David Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Ch. VII, p. 81).
4 months 2 weeks ago

Thus it may be said that not only the soul, the mirror of an indestructible universe, is indestructible, but also the animal itself, though its mechanism may often perish in part and take off or put on an organic slough.

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La monadologie (77). Sometimes paraphrased as: The soul is the mirror of an indestructible universe.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.

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4 months 3 days ago

The core of ethics runs deep in our species and is common to human beings everywhere. It survives the most appalling hardships and the most ruthless attempts to deprive human beings of their humanity. Nevertheless, some people resist the idea that his core has a biological basis which we have inherited from our pre-human ancestors.

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Chapter 2, The Biological Basis Of Ethics, p. 27
3 months 1 week ago

The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.

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Letter to Thomas Mercer
4 months 3 days ago

Every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective physical theory will abandon that point of view.

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p. 167.
3 weeks 3 days ago

The transformation of human consciousness through meditation is frustrated, as long as we think of it in terms as something that I, my self can bring about. because it leads to endless games of spiritual oneupmanship, and Guru competitions.

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3 months 3 days ago

When scientists take part in activity they transform themselves from scientists into acting beings, that is, they become elements, data, facts; as soon as they reflect on their activity, however, they are re-transformed into scientists. The trained specialist qua scientist looks upon himself as a chain of judgments and inferences; qua member of society, he regard himself as a mere object. The same holds for everyone. The individual is divided into innumerable functions, the interconnection of which are unknown. In society a man is pater familias under one aspect, business man under another, thinker under a third; to be more precise, he is not a human being at all, but all these aspects and many more in an inevitable succession.

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p. 155.
4 months 1 week ago

When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is, that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office.

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p. 491

Our time is Gothic in its spirit. Unlike the Renaissance, it is not dominated by a few outstanding personalities. The twentieth century has established the democracy of the intellect. In the republic of art and science, there are many men who take an equally important part in the intellectual movements of our age. It is the epoch rather than the individual that is important. There is no one dominant personality like Galileo or Newton. Even in the nineteenth century, there were still a few giants who outtopped all others. Today the general level is much higher than ever before in the history of the world, but there are few men whose stature immediately sets them apart from all others.

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1 month 4 days ago

Henry of Essex's religion was the Inner Light or Moral Conscience of his own soul; such as is vouchsafed still to all souls of men;-which Inner Light shone here 'through such intellectual and other media' as there were; producing 'Phantasms,' Kircherean Visual-Spectra, according to circumstances! It is so with all men. The clearer my Inner Light may shine, through the less turbid media; the fewer Phantasms it may produce,-the gladder surely shall I be, and not the sorrier! Hast thou reflected, O serious reader, Advanced- Liberal or other, that the one end, essence, use of all religion past, present and to come, was this only: To keep that same Moral Conscience or Inner Light of ours alive and shining.

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1 month 1 week ago

If, then, a phenomenon admits of a complete mechanical explanation, it will admit of an infinity of others, that will render an account equally well of all the particulars revealed by experiment.

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Ch. XII: Optics and Electricity, as translated by George Bruce Halsted
4 months 3 weeks ago

Whence we see spiders, flies, or ants entombed and preserved forever in amber, a more than royal tomb.

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Historia Vitæ et Mortis; Sylva Sylvarum, Cent. i. Exper. 100, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed.
4 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
3 months 3 days ago

It is as if thinking itself had been reduced to the level of industrial processes, subjected to a close schedule-in short, made part and parcel of production.

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p. 21.
2 months 3 weeks ago

The motto should not be: Forgive one another; rather, Understand one another.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity. Now even that flickered out.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

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H 1

Without being known too well, it [India] has existed for millennia in the imagination of the Europeans as a wonderland. Its fame, which it has always had with regard to its treasures, both its natural ones, and in particular, its wisdom, has lured men there.

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Friedrich Hegel .source: Contesting the Master Narrative, Jeffrey Cox and Shelton Stromquist Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013).
5 months 1 week ago

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

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3 months 1 week ago

When we speak of the commerce with our [American] colonies, fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.

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3 months 5 days ago

Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

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4:17 (KJV)
1 week 5 days ago

It is better to form new words as technical terms, than to employ old ones in which the last three Aphorisms cannot be complied with.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

In the root of the word "faith" itself... there is implicit the idea of confidence, of surrender to the will of another, to a person. Confidence is placed only in persons. We trust in Providence, which we perceive as something personal and conscious, not in Fate, which is something impersonal. And thus it is in the person who tells us the truth, in the person that gives us hope, that we believe, not directly or immediately in truth itself or in hope itself.

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1 week 2 days ago

Marxism is a revolutionary worldview that must always struggle for new revelations. Marxism must abhor nothing so much as the possibility that it becomes congealed in its current form. It is at its best when butting heads in self-criticism, and in historical thunder and lightning, it retains its strength.

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As quoted in Quote Junkie : Political Edition (2008) by Hagopian Institute
4 months 1 week ago

Conformity to nature has no connection whatever with right and wrong. The idea can never be fitly introduced into ethical discussions at all, except, occasionally and partially, into the question of degrees of culpability. To illustrate this point, let us consider the phrase by which the greatest intensity of condemnatory feeling is conveyed in connection with the idea of nature - the word "unnatural." That a thing is unnatural, in any precise meaning which can be attached to the word, is no argument for its being blamable; since the most criminal actions are to a being like man not more unnatural than most of the virtues.

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page 62; Broadview Press, page 102
4 months 1 week ago

When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.

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Preface
2 months 1 week ago

Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been...destroyed by sudden environmental change.

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Letter to Clare Westcott, November 26 1975. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 514
2 months 3 weeks ago

Now, obviously, the human race is on the point of an extremely interesting evolutionary development. The first step towards escape from this vicious circle is to recognize that the apparent "ordinariness" of the world is a delusion. If we could become deeply and permanently convinced that the world "out there" is endlessly exciting, we would never again allow ourselves to become trapped in the swamp of "taken-for-grantedness". And we would become practically unkillable. Shaw says of his "Ancients" in Back to Methuselah "Even in the moment of death, their life does not fail them". "Life failure" is that feeling that there is nothing new under the sun, and that we all have to accept defeat in the end. If we could learn the mental trick of causing the dynamo to accelerate, this illusion would never again be able to exert its power over us.

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p. 14
3 months 5 days ago

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

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A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
1 month 1 week ago

From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free.

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