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Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 week 4 days ago
The policy of American government is...

The policy of American government is to leave its citizens free, neither restraining them nor aiding them in their pursuits.

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Letter to M. L'Hommande, (1787), as quoted in The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia (1900), edited by John P. Foley, p. 500
Philosophical Maxims
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick
1 month 2 weeks ago
Our principles fix what our life...

Our principles fix what our life stands for, our aims create the light our life is bathed in, and our rationality, both individual and coordinate, defines and symbolizes the distance we have come from mere animality. It is by these means that our lives come to more than what they instrumentally yield. And by meaning more, our lives yield more.

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The Nature of Rationality (1993), Ch. V : Instrumental Rationality and Its Limits; Rationality's Imagination, p. 181
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 week 4 days ago
The Constitution of the United States...

The Constitution of the United States asserts that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty.

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Letter to Justice William Johnson
Philosophical Maxims
Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith
3 weeks 4 days ago
Macaulay is like a book in...

Macaulay is like a book in breeches...He has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.

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Vol. I, ch. 11, p. 415
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 week 4 days ago
...the more a subject is understood,...

...the more a subject is understood, the more briefly it may be explained.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 months 1 week ago
Natural selection is an extremely simple...

Natural selection is an extremely simple process, in the sense that very little machinery needs to be set up in order for it to work. Of course the effects and consequences of natural selection are complex in the extreme. But in order to set natural selection going on a real planet, all that is required is the existence of inherited information.

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Chapter 2, "Silken Fetters" (p. 68)
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
1 day ago
I lie on the beach...

I lie on the beach like a crocodile and let myself be roasted by the sun. I never see a newspaper and don't give a damn for what is called the world.

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Philosophical Maxims
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva
1 month 3 weeks ago
If you look at the graph...

If you look at the graph of the growth of G.M.O.s, the growth of application of glyphosate and autism, it's literally a one-to-one correspondence. And you could make that graph for kidney failure, you could make that graph for diabetes, you could make that graph even for Alzheimer's.

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On the correlation of autism, kidney failure, diabetes and Alzheimer's with GMOs and glyphosate, as quoted in "Seeds of Doubt" by Michael Specter, The New Yorker
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 months 1 week ago
I think I can hardly overrate...

I think I can hardly overrate the malignity of the principles of Protestant ascendancy, as they affect Ireland; or of Indianism, as they affect these countries, and as they affect Asia; or of Jacobinism, as they affect all Europe, and the state of human society itself. The last is the greatest evil.

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Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (26 May 1795), quoted in R. B. McDowell (ed.)
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
4 months 2 weeks ago
I would advise no one to...

I would advise no one to send his child where the Holy Scriptures are not supreme. Every institution that does not unceasingly pursue the study of God's word becomes corrupt. Because of this we can see what kind of people they become in the universities and what they are like now. Nobody is to blame for this except the pope, the bishops, and the prelates, who are all charged with training young people. The universities only ought to turn out men who are experts in the Holy Scriptures, men who can become bishops and priests, and stand in the front line against heretics, the devil, and all the world. But where do you find that? I greatly fear that the universities, unless they teach the Holy Scriptures diligently and impress them on the young students, are wide gates to hell.

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To the Christian Nobility of the German States (1520), translated by Charles M. Jacobs, reported in rev. James Atkinson, The Christian in Society, I (Luther's Works, ed. James Atkinson, vol. 44), p. 207
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
4 months 1 week ago
False and doubtful positions, relied upon...

False and doubtful positions, relied upon as unquestionable maxims, keep those who build on them in the dark from truth. Such are usually the prejudices imbibed from education, party, reverence, fashion, interest, et cetera.

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Book IV, Ch. 7
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 4 weeks ago
Your own philosophy condemns you and...

Your own philosophy condemns you and supports us.

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Salbatore Mitxelena (1958): Unamuno eta Abendats, Baiona: Darracq
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 2 days ago
Wise command, wise obedience: the capability...

Wise command, wise obedience: the capability of these two is the net measure of culture, and human virtue, in every man; all good lies in the possession of these two capabilities; all evil, wretchedness and ill-success in the want of these.

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Philosophical Maxims
Peter Singer
Peter Singer
4 months 1 day ago
If evolution is a struggle for...

If evolution is a struggle for survival, why hasn't it ruthlessly eliminated altruists, who seem to increase another's prospects of survival at the cost of their own?

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Chapter 1, The Origins Of Altruism, p. 5
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
3 months 1 week ago
The Life according to Reason consists...

The Life according to Reason consists herein, -that the Individual forget himself in the Race, place his own life in the life of the Race, and dedicate it thereto;-the Life opposed to Reason, on the contrary, consists in this, that the Individual think of nothing but himself, love nothing but himself and in relation to himself, and set his whole existence in his own personal well-being alone: -and since we may briefly call that which is according to Reason good, and that which is opposed to Reason evil, so there is but One Virtue, to forget one's own personality;-and but One Vice,-to make self the object of our thoughts.

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p. 33
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 1 week ago
You never know how much you...

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose that you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it? ... Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 week 1 day ago
You may break your heart, but...

You may break your heart, but men will still go on as before.

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VIII, 4
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
3 months 1 week ago
It is imperative that we should...

It is imperative that we should not pare down the meaning of a dream to fit some narrow doctrine. ... No language exists that cannot be misused. It is hard to realize how badly we are fooled by the abuse of ideas, it even seems as if the unconscious had a way of strangling the physician in the coils of his own theory. p 11; this was originally listed here in a somewhat misleading form combining it with another statement on the interpretations of dreams on p. 14: No language exists that cannot be misused ... Every Interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 months 3 weeks ago
Man is always partial and is...

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

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F 78
Philosophical Maxims
Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith
3 weeks 5 days ago
When I hear any man talk...

When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces upon me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool.

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Peter Plymley's Letters (1808), Letter IV
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 1 week ago
You can put this another way...

You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred-like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.

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Book IV, Chapter 2, "The Three-personal God"
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
3 months 2 weeks ago
The Americans combine the notions of...

The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.

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Chapter XVII.
Philosophical Maxims
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
2 months 4 days ago
The culture of a civilization is...

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

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"What is Culture?" (p. 2)
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
3 weeks 5 days ago
Our minds must have relaxation: rested,...

Our minds must have relaxation: rested, they will rise up better and keener. Just as we must not force fertile fields (for uninterrupted production will quickly exhaust them), so continual labor will break the power of our minds. They will recover their strength, however, after they have had a little freedom and relaxation.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Fodor
1 week 1 day ago
Philosophers who have wanted to banish...

Philosophers who have wanted to banish the ghost from the machine have usually sought to do so by showing that truths about behavior can sometimes, and in some sense, logically implicate truths about mental states. In so doing, they have rather strongly suggested that the exorcism can be carried through only if such a logical connection can be made out. ... Once it has been made clear that the choice between dualism and behaviorism is not exhaustive, a major motivation for the defense of behaviorism is removed: we are not required to be behaviorists simply in order to avoid being dualists.

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Fodor (1986) "Why Paramecia Don't Have Mental Representations," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10: 3-23. cited in: Bradley Rives "Jerry A. Fodor (1935 - )" Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Oct. 25, 2010
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 week 4 days ago
You can never....
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Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 week 1 day ago
A cucumber is bitter. Throw it...

A cucumber is bitter. Throw it away. There are briars in the road. Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, "And why were such things made in the world?"

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VIII. 50, trans. George Long
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
5 months 1 week ago
Because of the way that myth...
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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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
1 day ago
Man tries to make for...

Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 4 weeks ago
Not only are we unable to...

Not only are we unable to conceive of the full and living God as masculine simply, but we are unable to conceive of Him as individual simply, as the projection of a solitary I, an unsocial I, an I that is in reality an abstract I. My living I is an I that is really a We; my living personal I lives only in other, of other, and by other I's; I am sprung from a multitude of ancestors. I carry them within me in extract, and at the same time I carry within me, potentially, a multitude of descendants, and God, the projection of my I to the infinite - or rather I, the projection of God to the finite - must also be a multitude. Hence, in order to save the personality of God - that is to say, in order to save the living God - faith's need - the need of the feeling and the imagination - of conceiving Him and feeling Him as possessed of a certain internal multiplicity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 1 week ago
When one admits that nothing is...

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others. It is much more nearly certain that we are assembled here tonight than it is that this or that political party is in the right. Certainly there are degrees of certainty, and one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter skepticism, and complete skepticism would, of course, be totally barren and completely useless.

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"Skepticism"
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
1 month 2 days ago
"A fair day's wages for a...

"A fair day's wages for a fair day's work": it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing. It is the everlasting right of man.

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Bk. I, ch. 3.
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
4 months 2 weeks ago
By this means all knowledge degenerates...

By this means all knowledge degenerates into probability; and this probability is greater or less, according to our experience of the veracity or deceitfulness of our understanding, and according to the simplicity or intricacy of the question.

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Part 4, Section 1
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
3 months 3 days ago
And this Feare of things invisible,...

And this Feare of things invisible, is the naturall Seed of that, which every one in himself calleth Religion; and in them that worship, or feare that Power otherwise than they do, Superstition.

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The First Part, Chapter 11, p. 51
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 week 1 day ago
It is a base thing for...

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
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
3 months 3 days ago
As the great words of freedom...

As the great words of freedom and fulfillment are pronounced by campaigning leaders and politicians, on the screens and radios and stages, they turn into meaningless sounds which obtain meaning only in the context of propaganda, business, discipline, and relaxation. This assimilation of the ideal with reality testifies to the extent to which the ideal has been surpassed. It is brought down from the sublimated realm of the soul or the spirit or the inner man, and translated into operational terms and problems. Here are the progressive elements of mass culture. The perversion is indicative of the fact that advanced industrial society is confronted with the possibility of a materialization of ideals. The capabilities of this society are progressively reducing the sublimated realm in which the condition of man was represented, idealized, and indicted. Higher culture becomes part of the material culture. In this transformation, it loses the greater part of its truth.

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pp. 57-58
Philosophical Maxims
George Santayana
George Santayana
3 months 3 days ago
Never since the heroic days of...

Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master.

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"The British Character"
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
3 months 3 days ago
And seeing every man is presumed...

And seeing every man is presumed to do all things in order to his own benefit, no man is a fit Arbitrator in his own cause.

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The First Part, Chapter 15, p. 78
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 months 1 week ago
It is an advantage to all...

It is an advantage to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals that their maxims have a plausible air; and, on a cursory view, appear equal to first principles. They are light and portable. They are as current as copper coin; and about as valuable. They serve equally the first capacities and the lowest; and they are, at least, as useful to the worst men as to the best. Of this stamp is the cant of not man, but measures; a sort of charm by which many people get loose from every honourable engagement.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
3 months 2 days ago
Even the eye that is artificially...

Even the eye that is artificially trained to see color as color, apart from things that colors qualify, cannot shut out the resonances and transfers of value.

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p. 126
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
3 months 1 week ago
The worst is not ennui nor...

The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!

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Philosophical Maxims
Mozi
Mozi
2 weeks 5 days ago
Now, as to universal love and...

Now, as to universal love and mutual aid, they are beneficial and easy beyond a doubt. It seems to me that the only trouble is that there is no superior who encourages it. If there is a superior who encourages it, promoting it with rewards and commendations, threatening its reverse with punishments, I feel people will tend toward universal love and mutual aid like fire tending upward and water downwards - it will be unpreventable in the world.

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Book 4; Universal Love III
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
3 months 1 week ago
Every man is fully satisfied that...

Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question.

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Vol. V, par. 211
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
5 months 1 week ago
For some identify happiness with virtue,...

For some identify happiness with virtue, some with practical wisdom, others with a kind of philosophic wisdom, others with these, or one of these, accompanied by pleasure or not without pleasure; while others include also external prosperity. Now ... it is not probable that these should be entirely mistaken, but rather that they should be right in at least some one respect or even in most respects.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 months 1 week ago
For the first half of geological...

For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
5 months 1 week ago
Martyrs must choose between being forgotten,...

Martyrs must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood, never!

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Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
3 months 1 week ago
It is the destiny of our...

It is the destiny of our race to become united into one great body, thoroughly connected in all its parts, and possessed of similar culture. Nature, and even the passions and vices of Man, have from the beginning tended towards this end. A great part of the way towards it is already passed, and we may surely calculate that it will in time be reached.

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Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 88
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
3 months 3 weeks ago
He is not rich, that enjoyeth...

He is not rich, that enjoyeth not his own goods.

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Philosophical Maxims
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
1 week 4 days ago
One of the roots of the...

One of the roots of the problem is the focus of environmentalists. The conservation movement, for one hundred years, has, at least in this country, focused on wilderness preservation-places of spectacular rocks and waterfalls-at the expense of what I would call the "economic landscapes" of farming, forestry, and mining.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
4 months 1 week ago
The real nature of the present...

The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.

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Philosophical Maxims
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