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2 weeks 4 days ago

From Plato: the man who has an elevated mind and takes a view of all time and of all substance, dost thou suppose it possible for him to think that human life is anything great? It is not possible, he said. Such a man then will think that death also is no evil.

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VII, 35
2 months 1 week ago

From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiator's show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight-whereby the strongest, the swiftest and the cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given.

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(February 1888) "The Struggle for Existence: A Programme". The Nineteenth Century 23: 161-180. (quote from p. 163)
4 months 4 weeks ago

If it were art to overcome heresy with fire, the executioners would be the most learned doctors on earth.

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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
1 month 6 days ago

To preserve the life of citizens, is the greatest virtue in the father of his country.

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The quote is from a Roman tragedy Octavia; Act 2, Line 444, where Seneca advises Nero against carrying out his tyrannical plans. Seneca's attribution to the play is generally discredited by modern scholarship.
5 months 2 weeks 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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3 months 1 week ago

The philosophy of the soul of my people appears to me as an expression of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of Don Quixote, as the expression of conflict between what the world is as scientific reason shows it to be and what we wish that it might be, as our religious faith affirms it to be. And in this philosophy is to be found the explanation of what is usually said about us - namely, that we are fundamentally irreducible to Kultur - or in other words, that we refuse to submit to it. No, Don Quixote does not resign himself either to the world, or to science or logic, or to art or esthetics, or to morality or ethics.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

I cannot get from the nature of the proposition to the individual logical operations!!! That is, I cannot bring out how far the proposition is the picture of the situation. I am almost inclined to give up all my efforts.

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Journal entries (12 March 1915 and 15 March 1915) p. 41
5 months 3 weeks ago
Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities? It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a "truth" of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions.
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5 months 6 days ago

Every habit and faculty is confirmed and strengthened by the corresponding actions, that of walking by walking, that of running by running.

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Book II, ch. 18, 1
2 months 1 week ago

That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.

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p. 160
5 months 4 days ago

These two states which it is necessary to know together in order to see the whole truth, being known separately, lead necessarily to one of these two vices, pride or indolence, in which all men are invariably led before grace, since if they do not remain in their disorders through laxity, they forsake them through vanity, so true is that which you have just repeated to me from St. Augustine, and which I find to a great extent; for in fact homage is rendered to them in many ways.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war. Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed.

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Totality and Infinity
4 months 4 weeks ago

I approached the task of destroying images by first tearing them out of the heart through God's Word and making them worthless and despised. This indeed took place before Dr. Karlstadt ever dreamed of destroying images. For when they are no longer in the heart, they can do no harm when seen with the eyes. But Dr. Karlstadt, who pays no attention to matters of the heart, has reversed the order by removing them from sight and leaving them in the heart. For he does not preach faith, nor can he preach it; unfortunately, only now do I see that. Which of these two forms of destroying images is best, I will let each man judge for himself.

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pp. 84-85
5 months 2 weeks ago

In the world of today can there be peace anywhere until there is peace everywhere?

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The capitalist cannot store labour-power in warehouses after he has bought it, as he may do with the raw material.

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Vol. II, Ch. XV, p. 285.
3 months 3 days ago

The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are concerned, is notorious. From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one's own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard - every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals which they serve.

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1 month 2 days ago

There are two kinds of openness, the openness of indifference-promoted with the twin purposes of humbling our intellectual pride and letting us be whatever we want to be, just as long as we don't want to be knowers-and the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude, for which history and the various cultures provide a brilliant array of examples for examination.

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p. 41.

The system of banking we have both equally and ever reprobated. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our Constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction, which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption, and is sweeping away in its progress the fortunes and morals of our citizens. Funding I consider as limited, rightfully, to a redemption of the debt within the lives of a majority of the generation contracting it; every generation coming equally, by the laws of the Creator of the world, to the free possession of the earth he made for their subsistence, unincumbered by their predecessors, who, like them, were but tenants for life.

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Letter to John Taylor (28 May 1816) ME 15:18: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson "Memorial Edition" (20 Vols., 1903-04) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 15, p. 18
4 months 2 weeks ago

I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

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Letter to Arthur Greeves (February 1932) - in They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963) (1979), p. 439
5 months 1 week ago

The Superior Man is all-embracing and not partial. The inferior man is partial and not all-embracing.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

In civil law the existing property relationships are declared to be the result of the general will. The jus utendi et abutendi itself asserts on the one hand the fact that private property has become entirely independent of the community, and on the other the illusion that private property itself is based solely on the private will, the arbitrary disposal.

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ibid, pp. 188
4 months 2 weeks ago

The problem... Democracy is founded by a politeia, a constitution, where the demos, the people, exercise power, and... everyone is equal in front of the law. Such a constitution... is condemned to give equal place to all forms of parrhesia, even the worst. Because parrhesia is given even to the worst citizens, the overwhelming influence of bad, immoral, or ignorant speakers may lead... into tyranny, or... otherwise endanger the city. Hence parrhesia may be dangerous for democracy itself.

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5 months 4 days ago

Do not imagine that it is less an accident by which you find yourself master of the wealth which you possess, than that by which this man found himself king.

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1 week 4 days ago

I have come to believe that the motion of the Earth cannot be detected by any optical experiment.

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How I Created the Theory of Relativity, speech at Kyoto University, Japan, December 14, 1922, as cited in Physics Today, August, 1982.
1 month ago

An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.

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As quoted by Edward Teller, in Dr. Edward Teller's Magnificent Obsession by Robert Coughlan, in LIFE magazine (6 September 1954), p. 62
3 weeks ago

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

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Part of an endorsement statement for The Dying of the Trees (1997) by Charles E. Little
2 months 1 week ago

Identical in the physical processes by which he originates-identical in the early stages of his formation-identical in the mode of his nutrition before and after birth, with the animals which lie immediately below him in the scale-Man, if his adult and perfect structure be compared with theirs, exhibits, as might be expected, a marvellous likeness of organization. He resembles them as they resemble one another-he differs from them as they differ from one another.-And, though these differences and resemblances cannot be weighed and measured, their value may be readily estimated; the scale or standard of judgment, touching that value, being afforded and expressed by the system of classification of animals now current among zoologists.

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Ch.2, p. 83
3 months 3 weeks ago

No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do. Variant: What is not yet done is only what we have not yet attempted to do.

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Chapter XVIII.

To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them.

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As quoted in Inwardness and Existence (1989) by Walter A. Davis, p. 18
1 month 2 weeks ago

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

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"New methods and new aims in teaching", in New Scientist, 22(392) (21 May 1964), pp.483-4
2 months 1 week ago

In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am opposed. I feel with them, that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

But, in my state of mind, this appearance of superiority to illusion added to the effect which Bentham's doctrines produced on me, by heightening the impression of mental power, and the vista of improvement which he did open was sufficiently large and brilliant to light up my life, as well as to give a definite shape to my aspirations.

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(p. 67)
3 months 4 days ago

And the central assertion of his philosophy is that this inner realm is the 'spiritual world' and that once man has learned to enter this realm, he realizes that it is not a mere imaginative reflection of the external world, but a world that possesses its own independent reality.

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p. 161
4 months 1 week ago

Disease of the home and of the life comes about in the same way as that of the body.

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Freeman (1948), p. 170 Variant: Disease occurs in a household, or in a life, just as it does in a body.
3 months 2 weeks ago

But everyone who hears these sayings of Mine, and does not do them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell. And great was its fall.

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Matthew 7:24-27 (NKJV) (Also Luke 6:47-49)
3 weeks ago

I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.

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"Health is Membership"
3 months 2 weeks ago

Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so. How often have we not seen the truth condemned! It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history.

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p. 33
2 months 2 weeks ago

Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible.

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(p. 33)
3 months 1 week ago

Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.

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Cited in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations by Subject, ed. Susan Ratcliffe (2010), p. 223
4 months 2 weeks ago

This legible lesson, this ritual recording, must be repeated as often as possible; the punishments must be a school rather than a festival; an ever-open book rather than a ceremony. The duration that makes the punishment effective for the guilty is also useful for the spectators. They must be able to consult at each moment the permanent lexicon of crime and punishment. A secret punishment is a punishment half wasted. Children should be allowed to come to the places where the penalty is being carried out; there they will attend their classes in civics. And grown men will periodically relearn the laws. Let us conceive of places of punishment as a Garden of the Laws that families would visit on Sundays.

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Chapter Three, The Gentle Way in Punishment
4 months 3 weeks ago

Science, ever since the time of the Arabs, has had two functions: (1) to enable us to know things, and (2) to enable us to do things.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

So many of my thoughts and feelings are shared by the English that England has turned into a second native land of the mind for me.

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Journeys to England and Ireland, 1835.
3 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"
4 months 4 weeks ago

Tell your master that if there were as many devils at Worms as tiles on its roofs, I would enter.

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Psalm. Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (translated by Frederic H. Hedge), Reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
2 months 3 weeks ago

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

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Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1855) by Sir David Brewster (Volume II. Ch. 27).
3 months 1 week ago

Bourgeois norms are experienced as the evident laws of a natural order-the further the bourgeois class propagates its representations, the more naturalized they become.

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p. 140

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