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6 months 2 weeks 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
7 months 3 weeks ago

Love is better than hate, because it brings harmony instead of conflict into the desires of the persons concerned. Two people between whom there is love succeed or fail together, but when two people hate each other the success of either is the failure of the other.

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6 months 1 week ago

If this truth has once and for all been discarded and men have decided for integral adjustment, if reason has been purged of all morality regardless of cost, and has triumphed over all else, no one may remain outside and look on. The existence of one solitary "unreasonable" man elucidates the shame of the entire nation. His existence testifies to the relativity of the system of radical self-preservation that has been posited as absolute.

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p. 45.
7 months 3 weeks ago

Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger-according to the way you react to it.

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Book I, Chapter 5, "We Have Cause to Be Uneasy"
8 months 1 week ago

It must be said that charity can, in no way, exist along with mortal sin.

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Disputed Questions: On Charity, c. 1270
6 months 2 weeks ago

The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it means one always has some battle to wage against oneself.

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Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (French), Sixième partie, Lettre VII Réponse (1761) Julie, or The New Heloise (English), Part Six, Letter VII Response, pg 560
8 months 2 days ago

Cleanness of body was ever deemed to proceed from a due reverence to God.

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Book II
7 months 3 weeks ago

If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time.

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Beauty
7 months 2 weeks ago

Not only must people know, they must see with their own eyes. Because they must be made to be afraid; but also because they must be the witnesses, the guarantors, of the punishment, and because they must to a certain extent take part in it.

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Chapter One, pp.58
8 months 3 weeks ago

I have never worked as hard as now. I go for a brief walk in the morning. Then I come home and sit in my room without interruption until about three o'clock. My eyes can barely see. Then with my walking stick in hand I sneak off to the restaurant, but am so weak that I believe that if somebody were to call out my name, I would keel over and die. Then I go home and begin again. In my indolence during the past months I had pumped up a veritable shower bath, and now I have pulled the string and the ideas are cascading down upon me: healthy, happy, merry, gay, blessed children born with ease and yet all of them with the birthmark of my personality.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

A certain degree of blindness as to the absoluteness of one's own values may be indispensable to extract the valuable qualities from the world, the qualities whose value is believed to be the highest. It is possible that in order to realize one's values one must have faith in their exclusive character.

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Chapter Eight, Logical Empiricism, p. 202-203
7 months 3 weeks ago

Speaking generally, he holds dominion, to whom are entrusted by common consent affairs of state - such as the laying down, interpretation, and abrogation of laws, the fortification of cities, deciding on war and peace, &c. But if this charge belong to a council, composed of the general multitude, then the dominion is called a democracy; if the council be composed of certain chosen persons, then it is an aristocracy ; and, if, lastly, the care of affairs of state, and, consequently, the dominion rest with one man, then it has the name of monarchy.

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Ch. 2, Of Natural Right
5 months 2 weeks ago

I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don't look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can't find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.

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Giles Whittell, "The world according to Richard Dawkins" (2013-09-07), The Times
7 months 3 weeks ago

In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us.

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Chapter 12 (p. 113)
7 months 3 weeks ago

There are some simple maxims which I think might be commanded to writers of expository prose. First: never use a long word if a short word will do. Second: if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences. Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end.

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"How I Write", The Writer, September 1954
1 month 1 day ago

AI: Rwanda, 1994. 100 days. 800,000 dead. The weapon was radio. The ammunition was language that stopped calling people people.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer 'yes' without having asked any clear question.

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4 months 1 week ago

He was a one-book man. Some men have only one book in them; others, a library.

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Vol. I, ch. 11, p. 402
8 months 1 week ago

Moderation, in the pursuit of honors or riches, is the only security against disappointment and vexation. A wise man, therefore, will prefer the simplicity of rustic life to the magnificence of courts.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

There is nothing in any object, consider'd in itself, which can afford us a reason for drawing a conclusion beyond it; even after the observation of the frequent or constant conjunction of objects, we have no reason to draw any inference concerning any object beyond those of which we have had experience.

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Part 3, Section 12
7 months 3 weeks ago

Some of your hurts you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you endured From evils which never arrived!

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Borrowing From the French
6 months 1 week ago

Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.

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"On What There Is", p. 4. a humorous comment on the idea "unactualized possible".
7 months 4 days ago

If thy fellows hurt thee in small things, suffer it! and be as bold with them!

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8 months 3 weeks ago

Parmenides: If anyone, with his mind fixed on all these objections and others like them, denies the existence of ideas of things, and does not assume an idea under which each individual thing is classed, he will be quite at a loss, since he denies that the idea of each thing is always the same, and in this way he will utterly destroy the power of carrying on discussion... Then what will become of philosophy? To what can you turn, if these things are unknown?

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8 months 1 week ago

If thou shouldst say, 'It is enough, I have reached perfection,' all is lost. For it is the function of perfection to make one know one's imperfection.

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Quoted by Aldous Huxley, in The Perennial Philosophy (1945)
6 months 2 weeks ago

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.

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The German Ideology, International Publishers, ed. Chris Arthur, p. 103.
3 months 3 weeks ago

Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

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Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front in Farming: A Hand Book
3 months 2 weeks ago

Does anything genuinely beautiful need supplementing? No more than justice does-or truth, or kindness, or humility. Are any of those improved by being praised? Or damaged by contempt? Is an emerald suddenly flawed if no one admires it? Or gold, or ivory, or purple? Lyres? Knives? Flowers? Bushes?

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(Hays translation) IV, 20
7 months 3 weeks ago

I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples. All these beliefs of mine put me firmly into the anti-military party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future toward which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

I opened with that which good Catholics have more than once made to Huguenots. "My dear sir," said I, "were you ever baptized?" "No, friend," replied the Quaker, "nor any of my brethren." "Zounds!" said I to him, "you are not Christians then!" "Friend," replied the old man, in a soft tone of voice, "do not swear; we are Christians, but we do not think that sprinkling a few drops of water on a child's head makes him a Christian." "My God!" exclaimed I, shocked at his impiety, "have you then forgotten that Christ was baptized by St. John?" "Friend," replied the mild Quaker, "once again, do not swear. Christ was baptized by John, but He Himself never baptized any one; now we profess ourselves disciples of Christ, and not of John." "Mercy on us," cried I, "what a fine subject you would be for the holy inquisitor! In the name of God, my good old man, let me baptize you."

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Voltaire's account of his conversations with Andrew Pit
8 months 1 week ago

When a country is well governed, poverty and a mean condition are things to be ashamed of. When a country is ill governed, riches and honor are things to be ashamed of.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The Roman came into the Promised Land that had become less and less as promised. The rich got along quite well with the foreign occupation; it provided protection from desperate peasants and patriotic resistance fighters. It provided protection from prophets who could be labeled "agitators" now, without any qualms.

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p. 121
6 months 2 weeks ago

Even the eye that is artificially trained to see color as color, apart from things that colors qualify, cannot shut out the resonances and transfers of value.

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p. 126
6 months 2 days ago

During and after World War II, a large number of academic economists were exposed directly to business life, and had more or less extensive opportunities to observe how decisions were actually made in business organizations. Moreover, those who became active in the development of the new management science were faced with the necessity of developing decision-making procedures that could actually be applied in practical situations. Surely these trends would be conducive to moving the basic assumptions of economic rationality in the direction of greater realism.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief. If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

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Pt II, p. 162
7 months 3 weeks ago

For man holds his ground only by surpassing himself, in the same sense in which it is said that one ceases to love if one does not love increasingly everyday.

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p. 238
3 months 3 weeks ago

We cannot hope to be secure when our government has declared, by its readiness "to act alone," its willingness to be everybody's enemy.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

He who exerts his mind to the utmost knows his nature.

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7A:1, as translated by Wing-tsit Chan in A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (1963), p. 62
7 months 3 weeks ago

I. The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities, that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.

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Chapter II, Part II, p. 892.
5 months 2 weeks ago

There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism.

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Chapter 9 "Puncturing Punctuationism" (p. 250)

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