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2 months 3 weeks ago

The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests of the desire to know-it involves suppression of hopes and fears, loves and hates, and the whole subjective emotional life, until we become subdued to the material, able to see it frankly, without preconceptions, without bias, without any wish except to see it as it is, and without any belief that what it is must be determined by some relation, positive or negative, to what we should like it to be, or to what we can easily imagine it to be.

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To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.

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K 42
3 months 2 weeks ago

A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

At the present time a serious, strong state can have but one sound foundation - military and bureaucratic centralization. Between a monarchy and the most democratic republic there is only one essential difference: in the former, the world of officialdom oppresses and robs the people for the greater profit of the privileged and propertied classes, as well as to line its own pockets, in the name of the monarch; in the latter, it oppresses and robs the people in exactly the same way, for the benefit of the same classes and the same pockets, but in the name of the people's will. In a republic a fictitious people, the "legal nation" supposedly represented by the state, smothers the real, live people. But it will scarcely be any easier on the people if the cudgel with which they are beaten is called the people's cudgel.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

If you don't want to explode with rage, leave your memory alone, abstain from burrowing there.

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3 months 1 week ago

Anger is a weed; hate is the tree.

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58 Alternate versions: Anger is a stem, hate is a trunk. Anger is the mote, hate is the beam.
2 months 3 weeks ago

I do not wish to force my thoughts upon you, but I feel forced myself. Little as I know of Captain Brown, I would fain do my part to correct the tone and the statements of the newspapers, and of my countrymen generally, respecting his character and actions. It costs us nothing to be just. We can at least express our sympathy with, and admiration of, him and his companions, and that is what I now propose to do.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.

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Ch. 8: Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness
1 month 2 weeks ago

The Creation was the first act of sabotage.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Neither of us cares a straw for popularity. A proof of this is for example, that, because of aversion to any personality cult, I have never permitted the numerous expressions of appreciation from various countries with which I was pestered during the existence of the International to reach the realm of publicity, and have never answered them, except occasionally by a rebuke. When Engels and I first joined the secret Communist Society we made it a condition that everything tending to encourage superstitious belief in authority was to be removed from the statutes.

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Remarks against personality cults from a letter to W. Blos (10 November 1877).
3 months 2 weeks ago

Hypocrisy is a universal phenomenon. It ends with death, but not before.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others. Coming from a logician, this surprise surprised me.

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Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), Part III, chapter II, "Solipsism", p. 196
2 months 3 weeks ago

A nation never falls but by suicide.

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1861
1 month 1 week ago

The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul - like pincers to catch hold of God.

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p. 92
2 months 3 weeks ago

Such taxes [upon the necessaries of life], when they have grown up to a certain height, are a curse equal to the barrenness of the earth and the inclemency of the heavens; and yet it is in the richest and most industrious countries that they have been most generally imposed. No other countries could support so great a disorder.

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Chapter II, paragraph 36, p. 500.
2 months 3 weeks ago

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

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Ch. 4
1 month 1 week ago

The greater part of Eastern teachers of the Church, from Clement of Alexandria to Maximus the Confessor, were supporters of Apokatastasis, of universal salvation and resurrection. And this is characteristic of (contemporary) Russian religious thought. Orthodox thought has never been suppressed by the idea of Divine justice and it never forgot the idea of Divine love. Chiefly - it did not define man from the point of view of Divine justice but from the idea of transfiguration and Deification of man and cosmos.

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"The Truth of Orthodoxy" as translated in Vestnik of the Russian West European Patriarchal Exarchate

Time, and reflection, and discussion, have produced their natural effect on minds eminently intelligent and candid. No intermediate shades of opinion are now left. There is no twilight. The light has been divided from the darkness. Two parties are ranged in battle array against each other. There is the standard of monopoly. Here is the standard of free trade; and by the standard of free trade I pledge myself to stand firmly.

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Speech in Edinburgh (2 December 1845), quoted in Speeches of the Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay, M.P. (1854), p. 423
2 months 2 weeks ago

The guillotine takes life almost without touching the body, just as prison deprives of liberty or a fine reduces wealth. It is intended to apply the law not so to a real body capable of feeling pain as to a juridical subject, the possessor, among other rights, of the right to exist it had to have the abstraction of the law itself.

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pp. 13, Chapter One The Body of the Condemned
2 months 3 weeks ago

The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. Of that larger script part is already visible, part is still unsolved. In other words, some of the miracles do locally what God has already done universally: others do locally what He has not yet done, but will do. In that sense, and from our human point of view, some are reminders and others prophecies.

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"Miracles" (1942), p. 29
2 weeks 3 days ago

All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?

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316
1 month 2 weeks ago

As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.

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The First Part, Chapter 11, p. 47
1 month 2 weeks ago

All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.

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Vol. VI, par. 191
2 months 3 weeks ago

There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself. The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the ryots, tortured, dishonoured and stripped naked by the British, but with the sepoys, clad, fed and petted, fatted and pampered by them.

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In an article written for the New York Daily Tribune, September 16, 1857
2 months 3 weeks ago

Days of absence,

sad and dreary, 

Clothed in sorrow's dark array,

Days of absence, I am weary: She I love is far away.

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Day of Absence, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
3 weeks 3 days ago

Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is a generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.

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"The Precession of Simulacra," p. 1
2 months 3 weeks ago

If the Communists conquered the world, it would be very unpleasant for a while, but not forever. But if the human race is wiped out, that is the end.

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Television interview on March 24, 1958, as quoted in The United States in World Affairs (1959), p. 12
1 month 3 weeks ago

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

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"Selected Ideas (1799-1800)", Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #62
3 months ago

A penny saved is of more value than a penny paid out.

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What Luther Says, Section on "Life, Human," No. 2438. Rules for a Thrifty Life. 2, p. 784
1 month 5 days ago

Jung fiercely resented the implication that he was a hypocritical, self-seeking Judas, a 'rat'. Yet there was just enough truth in it to strike home. He was undoubtedly a man who liked his own way, no matter what the cost to others.

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p. 72
2 months 3 days ago

Do not ask who started it.

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Finish it A Dictionary of Thoughts (1908) by Tryon Edwards, p. 234
1 month 2 weeks ago

What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.

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Letter to Jean-Richard Bloch
2 weeks 5 days ago

Audacity augments courage; hesitation, fear.

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Maxim 63 Variant translation: "Valour grows by daring, fear by holding back."
3 months 3 weeks ago

Now, in the solemn silence before God with the lilies and the birds, where accordingly there is nobody at all present, where accordingly there is no other intercourse for thee but with God-there indeed the rule holds good: either hold to Him/or despise Him. There is no excuse, for no one else is present, in any case no one is present in such a wise that thou canst hold to him without despising God; for precisely there in the silence it is clear how close God is to thee.

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1 month 6 days ago

Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.

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p. 203.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Everything that is possible demands to exist.

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1686
2 months 3 weeks ago

Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

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Social Aims; sometimes condensed to "What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say."
2 months 1 week ago

What odds does it make to the man who lives within Nature's bounds, whether he ploughs a hundred acres or a thousand?

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Book I, satire i, line 48
2 weeks 5 days ago

Patience is a remedy for every sorrow.

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Maxim 170
2 months 3 weeks ago

In vain I sought relief from my favourite books; those memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded, that my love of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out. I sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. If I had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the condition.

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(pp. 134-135)
3 months 1 week ago

To rank the effort above the prize may be called love.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

For the first time in the revolutionary movement of 1848, for the first time since 1793, a nation surrounded by superior counter-revolutionary forces dares to counter the cowardly counter-revolutionary fury by revolutionary passion, the terreur blanche by the terreur rouge. For the first time after a long period we meet with a truly revolutionary figure, a man who in the name of his people dares to accept the challenge of a desperate struggle, who for his nation is Danton and Carnot in one person - Lajos Kossuth.

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The Magyar Struggle in Neue Rheinische Zeitung (13 January 1849).
1 month 4 days ago

Perhaps, if prematurely we dismiss ourselves from this world, all may even have to be suffered through again - the premature birth may not contribute to the production of another being, which must be begun again from the beginning.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Consider MacArthur and his Republican supporters. So limited is his intelligence and his imagination that he is never puzzled for one moment. All we have to do is to go back to the days of the Opium War. After we have killed a sufficient number of millions of Chinese, the survivors among them will perceive our moral superiority and hail MacArthur as a saviour. But let us not be one-sided. Stalin, I should say, is equally simple- minded and equally out of date. He, too, believes that if his armies could occupy Britain and reduce us all to the economic level of Soviet peasants and the political level of convicts, we should hail him as a great deliverer and bless the day when we were freed from the shackles of democracy. One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

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Part I: Man and Nature, Ch. 1: Current Perplexities, pp. 4-5
3 months 4 days ago

You are in the same manner surrounded with a small circle of persons... full of desire. They demand of you the benefits of desire... You are therefore properly the king of desire. ...equal in this to the greatest kings of the earth... It is desire that constitutes their power; that is, the possession of things that men covet.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.

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Lecture II, What Pragmatism Means
3 months 1 week ago

The way of the superior man may be found, in its simple elements, in the intercourse of common men and women; but in its utmost reaches, it shines brightly through Heaven and Earth.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

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