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7 months 4 weeks ago

The homosexual never thinks of himself when someone is branded in his presence with the name homosexual. ...His sexual tastes will doubtless lead him to enter into relationships with this suspect category, but he would like to make use of them without being likened to them. Here, too, the ban that is cast on certain men by society has destroyed all possibility of reciprocity among them. Shame isolates.

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8 months 1 week ago

God is surrounded with people full of love who demand of him the benefits of love which are in his power: thus he is properly the king of love.

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4 months ago

In the 'Induction of Causes' the principal maxim is, that we must be careful to possess, and to apply, with perfect clearness, the Fundamental Idea on which the Induction depends. The Induction of Substance, of Force, of Polarity, go beyond mere laws of phenomena, and may be considered as the Induction cf Causes. The Cause of certain phenomena being inferred, we are led to inquire into the Cause of this Cause, which inquiry must be conducted in the same manner as the previous one; and thus we have the Induction of Ulterior Causes.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Men are eager to tread underfoot what they have once too much feared.

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Book V, line 1140 (tr. Rouse)
8 months 4 weeks ago

Private profit is often hidden under a careful coating of great patriotism.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Sensitiveness without impulse spells decadence, and impulse without sensitiveness spells brutality.

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Ch. 13: "Requisites for Social Progress", p. 280
3 months 3 weeks ago

I have only two rules which I regard as principles of conduct. The first is: Have no rules. The second is: Be independent of the opinion of others.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

To no creature besides man has been given wisdom, foresight, industry, and reflection.

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Taking some time to think about this....

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8 months 2 days ago

There are those who blame the Press, but in this I think they are mistaken. The Press is such as the public demands, and the public demands bad newspapers because it has been badly educated.

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p. 133
8 months 2 days ago

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for co-operation with oneself.

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Ch. 6: On the Scientific Method in Philosophy
7 months 4 weeks ago

I... believe in the rationalist tradition of a commonwealth of learning, and in the urgent need to preserve this tradition.

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5 months 4 days 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
7 months 4 weeks ago

To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.

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Existentialism and Human Emotions
7 months 4 weeks ago

It is freedom, it is particularity, it is solitude that we are aiming at, and not Evil for its own sake.

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p. 179
4 months 3 weeks ago

Hadst thou not Greek enough to understand thus much: The end of man is an Action, and not a Thought, though it were the noblest.

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Bk. II, ch. 5 The words Carlyle put in italics are a quotation from Book 1 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.
8 months 2 days ago

Here the institution that compels is the state, the only purpose of which is to protect individuals from one another and the whole from external enemies. Some German philosophasters of this mercenary age would like to twist it into an institution for education and edification in morality; in the background of this lurks the Jesuitical purpose of eliminating personal freedom and the individual's personal development in order to make him into a mere cog in a Chinese machine of state and religion. But this is the path by which in the past one has arrived at the inquisitions, burning of heretics, and religious wars; Frederick the Great's pledge, 'In my country, each shall be able to tend to his salvation in his own fashion', indicated that he never wanted to tread that path.

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Part III, Ch. VI, p. 184
8 months 2 weeks ago

Don't you know that a good and excellent person does nothing for the sake of appearances, but only for the sake of having acted right?

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Book III, ch. 24, 50.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Why does this magnificent applied science which saves work and makes life easier bring us so little happiness? The simple answer runs: Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it. In war it serves that we may poison and mutilate each other. In peace it has made our lives hurried and uncertain. Instead of freeing us in great measure from spiritually exhausting labor, it has made men into slaves of machinery, who for the most part complete their monotonous long day's work with disgust and must continually tremble for their poor rations. ... It is not enough that you should understand about applied science in order that your work may increase man's blessings. Concern for the man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavours; concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization of labor and the distribution of goods in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.

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Speech to students at the California Institute of Technology, in [http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50A1FFF3F5E1B7A93C5A81789D85F458385F9&scp=4&sq=&st=p "Einstein Sees Lack in Applying Science"], The New York Times (16 February 1931)
4 months 3 weeks ago

The inventive genius of great England will not forever sit patient with mere wheels and pinions, bobbins, straps and billy-rollers whirring in the head of it. The inventive genius of England is not a Beaver's, or a Spinner's or Spider's genius: it is a Man's genius, I hope, with a God over him!

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Form displays the relation itself as the state of original comportment toward beings, the festive state in which the being itself in its essence is celebrated and thus for the first time placed in the open.

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p. 119
6 months 3 days ago

It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

A hymn is the praise of God with song; a song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth in the voice.

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Commentary on the Psalms (c. 1273), Introduction
8 months 4 days ago

Eloquence, when at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection; but addressing itself entirely to the fancy or the affections, captivates the willing hearers, and subdues their understanding. Happily, this pitch it seldom attains. But what a Tully or a Demosthenes could scarcely effect over a Roman or Athenian audience, every Capuchin, every itinerant or stationary teacher can perform over the generality of mankind, and in a higher degree, by touching such gross and vulgar passions.

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Section 10 : Of Miracles Pt. 2
8 months 2 weeks ago

The end of living, or the ultimate good, which is to be sought for its own sake, according to the universal opinion of mankind, is happiness; yet men, for the most part, fail in the pursuit of this end, either because they do not form a right idea of the nature of happiness, or because they do not make use of proper means to attain it.

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8 months ago

How you produce volume after volume the way you do is more than I can conceive. ...But you haven't to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts as I do. It is like walking through the densest brush wood.

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Letter to Henry James (ca. 1890) as quoted by Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2007) p. 297.
6 months 3 weeks ago

To its very core, the mind of ressentiment man is filled with envy, the impulse to detract, malice, and secret vindictiveness. These affects have become fixed attitudes, detached from all determinate objects. Independently of his will, this man's attention will be instinctively drawn by all events which can set these affects in motion. The ressentiment attitude even plays a role in the formation of perceptions, expectations, and memories. It automatically selects those aspects of experience which can justify the factual application of this pattern of feeling.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 74
8 months 2 weeks ago

For what is a child? Ignorance. What is a child? Want of instruction. For where a child has knowledge, he is no worse than we are.

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Book II, ch. 1, 16
7 months 3 weeks ago

When some one reminded him that the people of Sinope had sentenced him to exile, he said, "And I sentenced them to stay at home."

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Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 49
5 months 3 weeks ago

Is it not the interest of the human race, that every one should be so taught and placed, that he would find his highest enjoyment to arise from the continued practice of doing all in his power to promote the well-being, and happiness, of every man, woman, and child, without regard to their class, sect, party, country or colour?

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Paper Dedicated to the Governments of Great Britain, Austria, Russia, France, Prussia and the United States of America (1841) 17th of "20 Questions to the Human Race"
4 months 1 week ago

From my youth onwards, I have felt sure that all thought which thinks itself out to an issue ends in mysticism. In the stillness of the African jungle I have been able to work out this thought and give it expression.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

1) Preserve Life
2) State of war (opportunism)
3) Relativism
4) Confusion

Civilization, goodness, justice, fairness all contained inside the first option. Under # 1 (Universal Humanism):


1) Survive.
2) Don't prevent another from surviving.
3) Help the less fortunate.

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8 months 2 days ago

I am ashamed of belonging to the species Homo Sapiens...You & I may be thankful to have lived in happier times - you more than I, because you have no children.

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Letter to Lucy Donnelly, 6/23/1946
8 months 1 week ago

A strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgment.

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Ch. 9. Of Liars, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
6 months 1 week ago

By incestuous symbiosis is meant the tendency to stay tied to the mother and to her equivalents - blood, family, tribe - to fly from the unbearable weight of responsibility, of freedom, of awareness, and to be protected and loved in a state of certainty dependence that the individual pays for with the ceasing of his own human development.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Thus far, gentlemen, I have been insisting very strenuously upon what the most vulgar common sense has every disposition to assent to and only ingenious philosophers have been able to deceive themselves about. But now I come to a category which only a more refined form of common sense is prepared willingly to allow, the category which of the three is the chief burden of Hegel's song, a category toward which the studies of the new logico-mathematicians, Georg Cantor and the like, are steadily pointing, but to which no modern writer of any stripe, unless it be some obscure student like myself, has ever done anything approaching to justice.

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Lecture II : The Universal Categories, §3. Laws: Nominalism, CP 5.59
8 months 3 days ago

I want you to read the true system of the heart, drafted by a decent man and published under another name. I do not want you to be biased against good and useful books merely because a man unworthy of reading them has the audacity to call himself the Author.

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First Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
3 months 4 weeks ago

The rights of men to the use of land are not joint rights: they are equal rights. Were there only one man on earth, he would have a right to the use of the whole earth or any part of the earth. When there is more than one man on earth, the right to the use of land that any one of them would have, were he alone, is not abrogated: it is only limited. The right of each to the use of land is still a direct, original right, which he holds of himself, and not by the gift or consent of the others; but it has become limited by the similar rights of the others, and is therefore an equal right.

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Part I : Declaration, Ch. III : "Social Statics" - The Right of Property
3 months 3 weeks ago

You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that's all even the gods can ask of you. Thou seest how few be the things, the which if a man has at his command his life flows gently on and is divine.

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II, 5
3 months 1 week ago

You can hear his skepticism here..but...yeah, there's nothing physically precluding us from a flourishing future. SOME of us have to choose it, rather than just flourishing for themselves.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.

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7 months 1 day ago

Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those they have slain.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.

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"The Education of an Englishman" in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 138 (1926), p. 192.
2 months 5 days ago

Paradox of choice, but I think we would all prefer MORE options. At least then it's on us.....

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5 months 2 weeks ago

There will be a time when those trying to turn the world into a Colosseum for their own amusement will be raw meat thrown to the wolves themselves, and the rest of us will watch, as justice is served, with a clean conscience.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

All rational action is economic. All economic activity is rational action. All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.

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Part II : The Economics of a Socialist Community, § I : The Economics of an Isolated Socialist Community, Ch. 5 : The Nature of Economic Activity, p. 97
5 months 4 weeks ago

Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.

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(p. 11)

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