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6 months 1 week ago

The chief requirement of the good life... is to live without any image of oneself.

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The Bell (1958), ch. 9; 2001, p. 119.
7 months 4 days ago

To Harmodius, descended from the ancient Harmodius, when he reviled Iphicrates [a shoemaker's son] for his mean birth, "My nobility," said he, "begins in me, but yours ends in you."

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54 Iphicrates
5 months 4 weeks ago

When, in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob, and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow, these institutions.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.

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1 month 5 days ago

Plato's philosopher kings....

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Human history began with an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience.

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Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem in On Disobedience and Other Essays
3 months 1 week ago

Adorn thyself with simplicity and with indifference towards the things which lie between virtue and vice. Love mankind. Follow God. The poet says that Law rules all. And it is enough to remember that law rules all.

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VII, 31
6 months 1 week ago

To be or not to be is not the question where transcendence is concerned. The statement of being's other, of the otherwise than being, claims to state a difference over and beyond that which separates being from nothingness - the very difference of the beyond, the difference of transcendence.

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Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974) Chapter I, Section 1.
5 months 2 days ago

If a well were sunk at our feet in the midst of the city of Norwich, the diggers would very soon find themselves at work in that white substance almost too soft to be called rock, with which we are all familiar as "chalk".

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6 months 1 week ago

Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, the proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade. All the foregoing measures are directed to this end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizing effects to precisely the degree that the proletariat, through its labor, multiplies the country's productive forces.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

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7 months 1 week ago

Don't say: "They must have something in common, or they would not be called 'games'" but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them, you won't see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that.

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To repeat: don't think, but look! § 66
5 months 3 weeks ago

These papers are all written from what is called a realist perspective. The statements of science are in my view either true or false (although it is often the case that we don't know which) and their truth or falsity does not consist in their being highly derived ways of describing regularities in human experience. Reality is not a part of the human mind; rather the human mind is a part - and a small part at that - of reality.

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"Introduction: Science as approximation to truth"
2 months 1 week ago

"Truth is the ultimate end of the whole universe."
- Thomas Aquinas

See biography for Thomas Aquinas:
https://civilsimian.com/ThomasAquinas

Read Thomas Aquinas's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/43/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

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7 months 2 weeks ago

The facts of science, as they appeared to him [Heraclitus], fed the flame in his soul, and in its light, he saw into the depths of the world.

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Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
7 months 6 days ago

Brave men were living before Agamemnon. 

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Book IV, ode ix, line 25
7 months 1 week ago

The distance between oneself and other persons and other species can fall anywhere on a continuum. Even for other persons the understanding of what it is like to be them is only partial, and when one moves to species very different from oneself, a lesser degree of partial understanding may still be available. The imagination is remarkably flexible. My point, however, is not that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat. I am not raising that epistemological problem. My point is rather that even to form a conception of what it is like to be a bat and a fortiori to know what it is like to be a bat, one must take up the bat's point of view.

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p. 172, note 8.
6 months 1 week ago

The application of scientific formulations of the principle of probability statistically determined is thus a logical corollary of the principle already stated, that the subject matter of scientific findings is relational, not individual. It is for this reason that it is safe to predict the ultimate triumph of the statistical doctrine.

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6 months 1 week ago

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.

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The Idea of Christ in the Gospels
3 months 3 weeks ago

The truth stands regardless of the character of the one who speaks it.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others.

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4 months 1 week ago

No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it is a business of Reprobation and Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest about it! Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur-search for Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth: this is the sorest sin. The root of all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul of the man never having been open to Truth; - "living in a vain show." Such a man not only utters and produces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. The rational moral principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet paralysis of life-death.

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6 months 1 week ago

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

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Reader's Digest, 1934
8 months 2 weeks ago

All mankind, right down to those you most despise, are your neighbors.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

When the profits of trade happen to be greater than ordinary, over-trading becomes a general error both among great and small dealers.

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Chapter I, p. 469.
8 months 2 weeks ago

It is no one's privilege to despise another. It is only a hard-won right after long experience.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

They should always be heard, and fairly and kindly answer'd, when they ask after any thing they would know, and desire to be informed about. Curiosity should be as carefully cherish'd in children, as other appetites suppress'd.

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Sec. 108
7 months 2 weeks ago

Being of opinion that the doctrine and history of so extraordinary a sect as the Quakers were very well deserving the curiosity of every thinking man, I resolved to make myself acquainted with them, and for that purpose made a visit to one of the most eminent of that sect in England, who, after having been in trade for thirty years, had the wisdom to prescribe limits to his fortune, and to his desires, and withdrew to a small but pleasant retirement in the country, not many miles from London. Here it was that I made him my visit. His house was small, but neatly built, and with no other ornaments but those of decency and convenience.

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1 month 1 week ago

Good...good...he's clearly outlined the warp and woof distinction...😁

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5 months 4 weeks ago

The time is come when women must do something more than the "domestic hearth," which means nursing the infants, keeping a pretty house, having a good dinner and an entertaining party.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Is a fixed income not a good thing? Does not everyone love to count on a sure thing? Especially every petty-bourgeois, narrow-minded Frenchman? the 'ever needy' man?

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(Bastiat and Carey), pp. 809-810.
6 months 4 weeks ago

No one entrusts a secret to a drunken man; but one will entrust a secret to a good man; therefore, the good man will not get drunk.

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As quoted in Epistulae morales ad Lucilium by Seneca, Epistle LXXXIII (trans. R. M. Gummere)
6 months ago

What is necessary at this stage in our evolution is not a 'return' to the psychic powers of our ancestors, but an expansion of our own potential powers, based upon the certain knowledge that such powers exist.

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p. 290
3 weeks 6 days ago

🤷‍♂️smh

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6 months 1 week ago

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

This bird sees the white man come and the Indian withdraw, but it withdraws not. Its untamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge... It remains to remind us of aboriginal nature.

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March 23, 1856; of the crow
7 months 1 week ago

For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

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§ 43, this has often been quoted as simply: The meaning of a word is its use in the language.
8 months 2 weeks ago

Job endured everything - until his friends came to comfort him, then he grew impatient.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

You're either excluding the right people or including the wrong people.

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ComfortDragon
5 months 2 weeks ago

The whole historic existence of mankind is nothing else than the gradual transition from the personal, animal conception of life to the social conception of life, and from the social conception of life to the divine conception of life.

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Chapter IV, Christianity Misunderstood by Men of Science
7 months 3 weeks ago

Only charity admitteth no excess. For so we see, aspiring to be like God in power, the angels transgressed and fell.

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Book II, xxii
4 months 3 weeks ago

The irrationality of the "appeal to Nature" is illustrated by a simple thought-experiment. Imagine, fancifully, if starvation, disease, parasitism, disembowelling, asphyxiation and being eaten alive were not endemic to the living world - or such miseries have already been abolished and replaced by an earthly paradise. Would anyone propose there is ethical case for (re)introducing them? Even proposing such a thought-experiment can sound faintly ridiculous.

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"A Welfare State For Elephants?: A Case Study of Compassionate Stewardship", Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism, Vol. 3, Iss. 2 (Nov. 2015), p. 162
3 months 4 weeks ago

The old view was that delicacy of language was part of the nature, the sacred nature, of eros and that to speak about it in any other way would be to misunderstand it. What has disappeared is the risk and the hope of human connectedness embedded in eros. Ours is a language that reduces the longing for an other to the need for individual, private satisfaction and safety.

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pp. 13-14.

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