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4 months 6 days ago

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

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"Slavery in Massachusetts", 1854
2 months 3 days ago

Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.

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Letter to Clare Westcott, November 26 1975. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 514
4 months 6 days ago

It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.

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May 3, 1845
2 months 3 weeks ago

I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind, or cannot understand the darker pages of Hegel, it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act.

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4 months 1 week ago

If you punish him for what he sees you practise yourself, he... will be apt to interpret it the peevishness and arbitrary imperiousness of a father, who, without any ground for it, would deny his son the liberty and pleasure he takes himself.

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Sec. 71
1 month 2 weeks ago

I do not believe that civilizations have to die...Civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

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In "Prophet of Hope & Fear" [Review of A Study of History, Vols. 7-10] TIME (18 October 1954) p. 108
3 weeks 6 days ago

We shall either learn to know a Hero, a true Governor and Captain, somewhat better, when we see him; or else go on to be forever governed by the Unheroic;-had we ballot-boxes clattering at every street-corner, there were no remedy in these.

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4 months ago

In the old system, the body of the condemned man became the king's property, on which the sovereign left his mark and brought down the effects of his power. Now he will be rather the property of society, the object of a collective and useful appropriation.

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

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.

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pp. 48-49
2 months 3 weeks ago

The true antithesis of nature is not art but arbitrary conceit, fantasy, and stereotyped convention.

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p. 158
5 months 1 week ago
No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any. By enlisting passion on his side he wants to stifle his reason and its doubts: thus he will acquire a good conscience and with it success among his fellow men.
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2 months 2 weeks ago

The freedom of the 'everyday mind' consists rather in not kneeling down in awe. Its mental attitude is better expressed as sitting unmoveable like an object.

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3 months 2 days ago

Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism.

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5 months 2 days ago

Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man.

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4 months 1 week ago

The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom.

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Second Treatise of Government, Ch. VI, sec. 57
3 months 6 days ago

Our patience will achieve more than our force.

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5 months 3 days ago

The newsmen were writing down sentences busily as Hoskins spoke to them. They did not understand and they were sure their readers would not, but it sounded scientific and that was what counted.

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4 months 6 days ago

Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion; as if the short spring days were an eternity.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 175

Depart then satisfied, for he also who releases thee is satisfied.

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XII, 36
4 months 3 weeks ago

The Asharites have expressed a very peculiar opinion, both with regard to reason and religion; about this problem they have explained it in a way in which religion has not, but have adopted quite an opposite method.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

He wins every hand who mingles profit with pleasure, by delighting and instructing the reader at the same time.

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Line 343
3 months 2 days ago

Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transforming being at home to being in the world. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space. They render time habitable.

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3 weeks 6 days ago

Human virtue, if we went down to the roots of it, is not so rare. The materials of human virtue are everywhere abundant as the light of the sun: raw materials,-O woe, and loss, and scandal thrice and threefold, that they so seldom are elaborated, and built into a result! that they lie yet unelaborated, and stagnant in the souls of wide-spread dreary millions, fermenting, festering; and issue at last as energetic vice instead of strong practical virtue!

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3 weeks 6 days ago

History a distillation of Rumour.

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Pt. I, Bk. VII, ch. 5.
2 weeks 6 days ago

The fact is that in order to do any thing in this world worth doing, we must not stand shivering on the bank thinking of the cold and the danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can.

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Lecture IX : On the Conduct of the Understanding
1 month 1 day ago

Let us pardon him his hope of a vain apocalypse, and of a second coming in great triumph upon the clouds of heaven. Perhaps these were the errors of others rather than his own; and if it be true that he himself shared the general illusion, what matters it, since his dream rendered him strong against death, and sustained him in a struggle to which he might otherwise have been unequal?

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Ch. 17.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Since the war began, miles of paper and oceans of ink have been used to prove the barbarity, the cruelty, the oppression of Prussian militarism. Conservatives and radicals alike are giving their support to the Allies for no other reason than to help crush that militarism, in the presence of which, they say, there can be no peace or progress in Europe. But though America grows fat on the manufacture of munitions and war loans to the Allies to help crush Prussians the same cry is now being raised in America which, if carried into national action, would build up an American militarism far more terrible than German or Prussian militarism could ever be, and that because nowhere in the world has capitalism become so brazen in its greed and nowhere is the state so ready to kneel at the feet of capital.

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Why does God afflict the best of men with ill-health, or sorrow, or other troubles? Because in the army the most hazardous services are assigned to the bravest soldiers: a general sends his choicest troops to attack the enemy in a midnight ambuscade, to reconnoitre his line of march, or to drive the hostile garrisons from their strong places. No one of these men says as he begins his march, " The general has dealt hardly with me," but "He has judged well of me."

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De Providentia (On Providence), 4.8, translated by Aubrey Stewart
4 months 5 days ago

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong.

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Part II: Malaya,
4 months 5 days ago

I don't think that there are any sinister persons deliberately trying to rob people of their freedom but I do think, first of all, that there are a number of impersonal forces which are pushing in the direction of less and less freedom. And I also thing there are a number of technological devices which anybody who wishes to use, can use, to accelerate this process of going away from freedom, of imposing control.

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5 months 2 days ago

One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it.

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5 months 2 days ago

The important thing isn't the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

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22:29-32 (KJV)
2 months 3 weeks ago

But the truth is that my work - I was going to say my mission - is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

To use Virtue is perfect blessedness.

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4 months 4 days ago

Clearly when the liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another.

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Chapter IV, Section 32, p. 203
2 months 4 weeks ago

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

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"Friendships"
1 month 4 weeks ago

It is the interest of the individual and of all society, that he should be made, at the earliest period, to understand his own construction, the proper use of its parts, and how to keep them at all times in a state of health; and especially that he should be taught to observe the varied effects of different kinds of food, and different quantities, upon his own constitution. He should be taught the general and individual laws of health, thus early, that he may know how to prevent the approach of disease. And the knowledge of the particular diet best suited to his constitution, is one of the most essential laws of health.

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3rd Part
5 days ago

Nobody can valuate without devaluating, revaluating, and serving one's interests. Whoever sets a value, takes position against a disvalue by that very action. The boundless tolerance and the neutrality of the standpoints and viewpoints turn themselves very quickly into their opposite, into enmity, as soon as the enforcement is carried out in earnest. The valuation pressure of the value is irresistible, and the conflict of the valuator, devaluator, revaluator, and implementor, inevitable.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Apart from the fact there is no normal standard of health, nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful by nature. And further, man, by the very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.

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You are not free. Myriad invisible hands hold your hands and direct them. When you rise in anger, a great-grandfather froths at your mouth; when you make love, an ancestral caveman growls with lust; when you sleep, tombs open in your memory till your skull brims with ghosts.

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An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.

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Damage
4 months 6 days ago

Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defences only of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really free.

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p. 493
5 months 2 days ago

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

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4 months 1 week ago

Man is free at the instant he wants to be.

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Source Brutus, act II, scene I, 1730

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