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5 months 3 days ago

Man is a tool-using animal...Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

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Bk. I, ch. 5.
4 months 2 days ago

Whereas materialistic historians and philosophers neglect psychic realities, Freud is inclined to overstress their importance. I am not a psychologist, but it seems to me fairly evident that physiological factors, especially our endocrines, control our destiny ... I am not able to venture a judgment on so important a phase of modern thought. However, it seems to me that psychoanalysis is not always salutary. It may not always be helpful to delve into the subconscious. The machinery of our legs is controlled by a hundred different muscles. Do you think it would help us to walk if we analyzed our legs and knew exactly which one of the little muscles must be employed in locomotion and the order in which they work? ... I am not prepared to accept all his [Freud's] conclusions, but I consider his work an immensely valuable contribution to the science of human behavior. I think he is even greater as a writer than as a psychologist. Freud's brilliant style is unsurpassed by anyone since Schopenhauer.

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6 months 1 week ago

To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved sufferings.

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Bk. XIV, ch. 15
7 months 1 week ago

What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it heaven.

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8 months 1 week ago

What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

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8 months 1 week ago

I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable. We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman's billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment! We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. So we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery. I know that the mass of my countrymen think that the only righteous use that can be made of Sharp's rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them, when we are insulted by other nations, or to hunt Indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them, or the like. I think that for once the Sharp's rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use them.

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7 months 1 week ago

To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.

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Part 1, Chapter 9
4 months 2 days ago

One reason why mathematics enjoys special esteem, above all other sciences, is that its laws are absolutely certain and indisputable, while those of other sciences are to some extent debatable and in constant danger of being overthrown by newly discovered facts.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, "Repent," he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

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Thesis 1
6 months 5 days ago

Nationality is not the only kind of social membership, nor is it an exclusive tie. However, it is the only form of membership that has so far shown itself able to sustain a democratic process and a liberal rule of law.

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9 months ago

O immortal gods! Men do not realize how great a revenue parsimony can be!

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Paradoxa Stoicorum; Paradox VI, 49
4 months 1 week ago

In a modern war, fought with modern weapons and on the modern scale, neither side can limit to "the enemy" the damage that it does. These wars damage the world. We know enough by now to know that you cannot damage a part of the world without damaging all of it. Modern war has not only made it impossible to kill "combatants" without killing "noncombatants," it has made it impossible to damage your enemy without damaging yourself.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Nonviolence is not an absolute principle, but an open-ended struggle with violence and its countervailing forces.

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p. 56
9 months 1 week ago

There are limits beyond which your folly will not carry you. I am glad of that. In fact, I am relieved.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.

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A 727, B 755
6 months 3 weeks ago

The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders.

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Chapter Three, The Romantic Outsider
5 months 1 week ago

If it does not upset, it is not philosophy.

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8 months 1 week ago

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

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"On Three Ways of Writing for Children" (1952) - in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1967), p. 25
8 months 3 days ago

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.

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Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).
9 months 1 week ago

The best way to describe anyone is to give an example of the kind of thing he would do.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

The idea of politics as a conservation in which the collision of opinions is moderated and accommodated, in which what is sought is not truth but peace, has been almost entirely lost, and supplanted by a legalist paradigm in which all political claims and conflicts are modelled in the jargon of rights.

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'Oakeshott as a Liberal' (p.80)
7 months 1 week ago

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

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7 months 1 week ago

The subject must distinguish itself through opposition from the rational being, which it has assumed outside of itself. The subject has posited itself as one, which contains in itself the last ground of something that is in it, (for this is the condition of Egohood, or of Rationality generally;) but it has also posited a being outside of itself, as the last ground of this something in it. It is to have the power of distinguishing itself from this other being; and this is, under our presupposition, possible only, if the subject can distinguish in that given something how far the ground of this something lies in itself and how far it lies outside of itself.

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P. 63
6 months 3 weeks ago

To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Faith is born and preserved in us by preaching why Christ came, what he brought and gave to us, and the benefits we obtain when we receive him. This happens when Christian liberty - which he gives to us - is rightly taught and we are told in what way as Christians we are all kings and priests and therefore lords of all.

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p. 70
7 months 5 days ago

Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me.

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18:22 (KJV)
4 months 2 weeks ago

Christianity is at the very root of the evil that has corrupted the West. This is the truth, and it admits no doubt.

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7 months 1 week ago

It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?

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7 months 5 days ago

All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given. For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.

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19:11-12 (KJV)
8 months 2 weeks ago

Mother Mary, like us, was born in sin of sinful parents, but the Holy Spirit covered her, sanctified and purified her so that this child was born of flesh and blood, but not with sinful flesh and blood. The Holy Spirit permitted the Virgin Mary to remain a true, natural human being of flesh and blood, just as we. However, he warded off sin from her flesh and blood so that she became the mother of a pure child, not poisoned by sin as we are. For in that moment when she conceived, she was a holy mother filled with the Holy Spirit and her fruit is a holy pure fruit, at once God and truly man, in one person.

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The Precious and Sacred Writings of Martin Luther (1905) edited by John Nicholas Lenker; republished as Sermons of Martin Luther (1996), p. 291
7 months 1 week ago

Nor is there any embarrassment in the fact that we're ridiculous, isn't it true? For it's actually so, we are ridiculous, light-minded, with bad habits, we're bored, we don't know how to look, how to understand, we're all like that, all, you, and I, and they! Now, you're not offended when I tell you to your face that you're ridiculous? And if so, aren't you material? You know, in my opinion it's sometimes even good to be ridiculous, if not better: we can the sooner forgive each other, the sooner humble ourselves; we can't understand everything at once, we can't start right out with perfection! To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well. This I tell you, you, who have already been able to understand. .. and not understand ... so much. I'm not afraid for you now.

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Part 4, Chapter ?
6 months 1 week ago

The good is the everlasting, the pinnacle of our life. ... life is striving towards the good, toward God. The good is the most basic idea ... an idea not definable by reason ... yet is the postulate from which all else follows. But the beautiful ... is just that which is pleasing. The idea of beauty is not an alignment to the good, but is its opposite, because for most part, the good aids in our victory over our predilections, while beauty is the motive of our predilections. The more we succumb to beauty, the further we are displaced from the good. ...the usual response is that there exists a moral and spiritual beauty ... we mean simply the good. Spiritual beauty or the good, generally not only does not coincide with the typical meaning of beauty, it is its opposite.

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5 months 1 week ago

Ignorant as regards the unity of man with himself, the world is still more ignorant in respect to the two other unities - unity of man with God and the universe.

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7 months 4 days ago

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

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The Message to the Planet (1989) p. 43.
8 months 3 weeks ago

But tell me this: did you never love any person... were you never commanded by the person beloved to do something which you did not wish to do? Have you never flattered your little slave? Have you never kissed her feet? And yet if any man compelled you to kiss Caesar's feet, you would think it an insult and excessive tyranny. What else then is slavery?

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Book IV, ch. 1, 17.
7 months 5 days ago

I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture. The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.

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10:9-11
7 months 2 weeks ago

Pursue Virtue virtuously.

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These words also appear in Christian Morals, Part I, Section I
7 months 1 week ago

What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.

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7 months 1 week ago

I think of so many people who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.

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7 months 1 week ago

Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

A witty saying proves nothing.

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Le dîner du comte de Boulainvilliers (1767): Deuxième Entretien
8 months 1 week ago

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.

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Part Three, Panopticism
7 months 3 days ago

The idea that an aim can be reasonable for its own sake-on the basis of virtues that insight reveals it to have in itself-without reference to some kind of subjective gain or advantage, is utterly alien to subjective reason, even where it rises above the consideration of immediate utilitarian values and devotes itself to reflection about the social order as a whole.

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p. 4.

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