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6 months 6 days ago

Yes, to seek power that's vain and never grantedand for it to suffer hardship and endless pain:this is to heave and strain to push uphilla boulder, that still from the very top rolls backand bounds and bounces down to the bare, broad field.

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Book III, lines 998-1002 (tr. Frank O. Copley)
4 months 5 days ago

I have wanted them to have this simple definition to read again and again so they know: Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.

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Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2014), p.XII
2 months 1 week ago

Somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today seem endemic among, say, psychologists or sociologists. Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognize the role in scientific research of what I have since called "paradigms." These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners.

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p. xiii
2 months 3 days ago

If we look deeply into such ways of life as Buddhism and Taoism, Vedanta and Yoga, we do not find either philosophy or religion as these are understood in the West. We find something more nearly resembling psychotherapy. ... The main resemblance between these Eastern ways of life and Western psychotherapy is in the concern of both with bringing about changes of consciousness, changes in our ways of feeling our own existence and our relation to human society and the natural world. The psychotherapist has, for the most part, been interested in changing the consciousness of peculiarly disturbed individuals. The disciplines of Buddhism and Taoism are, however, concerned with changing the consciousness of normal, socially adjusted people.

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pp. 3-4
5 months 3 weeks ago

Granted that any practice causes more pain to animals than it gives pleasure to man; is that practice moral or immoral? And if, exactly in proportion as human beings raise their heads out of the slough of selfishness, they do not with one voice answer 'immoral,' let the morality of the principle of utility be for ever condemned.

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Dr. Whewell on Moral Philosophy (1852), in Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical, vol. 2, London: John W. Parker and son, 1859, p. 485
6 months 1 day ago

In this life it is necessary that we be on our guard. To begin with we must be constantly aware of the fact that life here below is best described as being a type of continual warfare. This is a fact that Job, that undefeated soldier of vast experience, tells us so plainly. Yet in this matter the great majority of mankind is often deceived, for the world, like some deceitful magician, captivates their minds with seductive blandishments, and as a result most individuals behave as if there had been a cessation of hostilities.

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p.61
5 months 3 weeks ago

My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before - a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Some people steal from others, or defraud them, or enslave them, seizing their product and preventing them from living as they choose, or forcibly exclude others from competing in exchanges. None of these are permissible modes of transition from one situation to another.

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Ch. 7 : Distributive Justice, Section I, The Entitlement Theory, p. 152
5 months 2 weeks ago

You won't - I really believe - get too much out of reading it. Because you won't understand it; the content will seem strange to you. In reality, it isn't strange to you, for the point is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however, I'll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one.

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On his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker (1919), published in Wittgenstein : Sources and Perspectives (1979) by C. Grant Luckhard
2 months 1 week ago

In the whole world, that day, there was not a more entirely unimportant-looking pair of people than this Miner and his Wife. And yet what were all Emperors, Popes and Potentates, in comparison? There was born here, once more, a Mighty Man; whose light was to flame as the beacon over long centuries and epochs of the world; the whole world and its history was waiting for this man. It is strange, it is great.

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6 months 1 day ago

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

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Book II, vii, 5
4 months 2 weeks ago

Liberalism has merely cleared a field in which every soul and every corporate interest may fight with every other for domination. Whoever is victorious in this struggle will make an end of liberalism; and the new order, which will deem itself saved, will have to defend itself in the following age against a new crop of rebels.

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"The Irony of Liberalism"
5 months 3 weeks ago

The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious-it makes little or no difference.

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Chapter 7 (p. 63)
5 months 2 weeks ago

The world is sacred because it gives an inkling of a meaning that escapes us.

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p. 280
3 months 2 weeks ago

The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.

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p. 98
2 months 1 week ago

Every love to which there clings but the smallest speck of obligation is an unselfish love, and, so far as this speck reaches, a possessedness. He who believes that he owes the object of his love anything loves romantically or religiously.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 260
2 months 2 weeks ago

Some economists also use the terms Fordism and pos-Fordism to mark the shift from an economy characterized by the stable-long-term employment typical of factory workers to one marked by flexible, mobile, and precarious labor relations: flexible because workers have to adapt to different tasks, mobile because workers have to move frequently between jobs, and precarious because no contracts guarantee stable, long-term employment. Whereas economic modernization, which developed Fordist labor relations, centered on the conomies of scale and larga systems of production and exchange, economic postmodernization, with its post-Fordist labor relations, develops smaller-scale, flexible systems.

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112
5 months 2 weeks ago

Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.

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p. 785
4 months 1 week ago

"There is no God," cry the masses more and more vociferously; and with the loss of God man loses his sense of values - is, as it were, massacred because he feels himself of no account.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness...This is a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Shame on the soul, to falter on the road of life while the body still perseveres.

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VI. 29, trans. Maxwell Staniforth
3 months 1 week ago

All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are moreover so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them.

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2 months 1 week ago

Undue cultivation of the inward or Dynamical province leads to idle, visionary, impracticable courses, and, especially in rude eras, to Superstition and Fanaticism, with their long train of baleful and well-known evils. Undue cultivation of the outward, again, though less immediately prejudicial, and even for the time productive of many palpable benefits, must, in the long-run, by destroying Moral Force, which is the parent of all other Force, prove not less certainly, and perhaps still more hopelessly, pernicious. This, we take it, is the grand characteristic of our age. By our skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass, that in the management of external things we excel all other ages; while in whatever respects the pure moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are perhaps inferior to most civilised ages.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

There is a sort of enthusiasm in all projectors, absolutely necessary for their affairs, which makes them proof against the most fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults; and what is severer than all, the presumptuous judgments of the ignorant upon their designs.

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Volume I, p. 7
4 months 2 weeks ago

Every state, like every theology, assumes man to be fundamentally bad and wicked.

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As quoted in Michael Bakunin (1937), E.H. Carr, p. 453
3 months 2 weeks ago

The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.

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Arts in society, Volume 3, 1964, p. 242
6 months 6 days ago

For freedom is not acquired by satisfying yourself with what you desire, but by destroying your desire.

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Book IV, ch. 1, 175.
4 months 1 week ago

I can assure you that no kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ.

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No. 29. (Rica writing to Ibben)
5 months 3 weeks ago

I do not, therefore, need any penetrating acuteness to see what I have to do in order that my volition be morally good. Inexperienced in the course of the world, incapable of being prepared for whatever might come to pass in it, I ask myself only: can you also will that your maxim become a universal law?

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

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Cited in Rules for methodizing the Apocalypse, Rule 9, from a manuscript published in The Religion of Isaac Newton (1974) by Frank E. Manuel, p. 120
1 week 3 days ago

"He was a man who looked at what ought to be done, not to the reputation which is got by a man's acts."
- Marcus Aurelius

See biography for Marcus Aurelius:
https://civilsimian.com/MarcusAurelius

Read Marcus Aurelius's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/249/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

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6 months 2 weeks ago

No matter how various the subject matter I write on, I was a science-fiction writer first and it is as a science-fiction writer that I want to be identified.

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4 months 6 days ago

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

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p. 285.
1 month 2 weeks ago

It is a base thing for the countenance to be obedient and to regulate and compose itself as the mind commands, and for the mind not to be regulated and composed by itself.

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VII, 37
6 months 1 week ago

Virtuous, worthy, wise and capable people are chosen as leaders.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own-not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine.

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II. 1, trans. Gregory Hays
4 months 3 weeks ago

There are few with whom I can communicate so freely as with Pope. But Pope cannot bear every truth. He has a timidity which hinders the full exertion of his faculties, almost as effectually as bigotry cramps those of the general herd of mankind. But whoever is a genuine follower of truth keeps his eye steady upon his guide, indifferent whither he is led, provided that she is the leader. And, my Lord, if it may be properly considered, it were infinitely better to remain possessed by the whole legion of vulgar mistakes, than to reject some, and, at the same time, to retain a fondness for others altogether as absurd and irrational. The first has at least a consistency, that makes a man, however erroneously, uniform at least; but the latter way of proceeding is such an inconsistent chimera and jumble of philosophy and vulgar prejudice, that hardly anything more ridiculous can be conceived.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Truth, Goodness, Beauty - those celestial thrins, Continually are born; e'en now the Universe, With thousand throats, and eke with greener smiles, Its joy confesses at their recent birth.

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June 14, 1838
4 months 3 weeks ago

Men must be governed by those laws which they love. Where thirty millions are to be governed by a few thousand men, the government must be established by consent, and must be congenial to the feelings and to the habits of the people. That which creates tyranny is the imposition of a form of government contrary to the will of the governed: and even a free and equal plan of government, would be considered as despotic by those who desired to have their old laws and their ancient system.

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Speech in the House of Commons on India (27 June 1781), quoted in The Parliamentary Register: Or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons, Volume III (1782), pp. 666-667
4 months 2 weeks ago

No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honour, it has no word to keep. ... Hitler is himself the nation. That incidentally is why Hitler always has to talk so loud, even in private conversation - because he is speaking with 78 million voices.

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During an interview with H. R. Knickerbocker (1939), quoted in A Life of Jung (2002) by Ronald Hayman, p. 360
4 months 2 weeks ago

No explanation is required for Holy Writing. Whoso speaks truly is full of eternal life, and wonderfully related to genuine mysteries does his Writing appear to us, for it is a Concord from the Symphony of the Universe.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

No multitude is able to acquire any art whatsoever. Then if there is a kingly art, neither the collective body of the wealthy nor the whole people could ever acquire this science of statesmanship.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied on with confidence and certainty.

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Addresses to the German Nation (1807), Second Address : "The General Nature of the New Education". Chicago and London, The Open Court Publishing Company, 1922, p. 20.
6 months 1 week ago

A man living without conflicts, as if he never lives at all.

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5 months 1 week ago

He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.

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Book I, epistle ii, lines 41-42
5 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all merely human meditations and endeavors. Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Friendship, I have said, is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself..."

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5 months 3 weeks ago

At present they philosophers seem to be in a very lamentable condition, and such as the poets have given us but a faint notion of in their descriptions of the punishment of Sisyphus and Tantalus. For what can be imagin'd more tormenting, than to seek with eagerness, what for ever flies us; and seek for it in a place, where 'tis impossible it can ever exist?

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Part 4, Section 3
5 months 3 weeks ago

The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition. The experimental habit of mind is a difficult one for most people to maintain; indeed, the science of one generation has already become the tradition of the next...

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The Scientific Outlook, 1931

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