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Carl Jung
Carl Jung
5 months 2 weeks ago
What can a man say about...

What can a man say about woman, his own opposite? I mean of course something sensible, that is outside the sexual program, free of resentment, illusion, and theory. Where is the man to be found capable of such superiority? Woman always stands just where the man's shadow falls, so that he is only too liable to confuse the two. Then, when he tries to repair this misunderstanding, he overvalues her and believes her the most desirable thing in the world.

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P. 236
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
2 months 1 week ago
Much reading after a certain...

Much reading after a certain age diverts the mind from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theaters is apt to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
5 months 2 weeks ago
Boredom is connected naturally with time,...

Boredom is connected naturally with time, with the horror of time, with the experience and the consciousness of time. Those who are not aware of time do not become bored. Basically life is only possible if one is not aware of time. If one should happen to want to experience consciously one of those moments that pass, one would be lost; life would become unbearable.

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Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
7 months 2 days ago
If it is my interest to...

If it is my interest to have a farm, it is my interest to take it away from my neighbour; if it is my interest to have a cloak, it is my interest also to steal it from a bath. This is the source of wars, seditions, tyrannies, plots.

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Book I, ch. 22, 14.
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
3 months 1 week ago
So today... red and blue voters...

So today... red and blue voters rely on a completely different set of facts. ...Polls ...suggest that a substantial... majority of Republican voters believe that the Democrats... stole the election, and that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president... When you don't have a common factual basis, you... reinforce the kinds of filter bubbles that people have started to move into.

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Philosophical Maxims
Sir Thomas Browne
Sir Thomas Browne
5 months 3 weeks ago
I thanke God for my happy...

I thanke God for my happy Dreams|dreames, as I doe for my good rest, for there is a satisfaction in them unto reasonable desires, and such as can be content with a fit of happinesse; and surely it is not a melancholy conceite to thinke we are all asleepe in this world, and that the conceits of this life are as meare dreames to those of the next, as the Phantasmes of the night, to the conceit of the day. There is an equall delusion in both, and the one doth but seeme to bee the embleme or picture of the other;

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Section 12
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
5 months 1 week ago
Position expresses the poised readiness of...

Position expresses the poised readiness of the live creature to meet the impact of surrounding forces, to meet so as to endure and persist, to extend or expand through undergoing the very forces that, apart from its response, are indifferent and hostile. Through going out into the environment, position unfolds into volume; through the pressure of environment, mass is retracted into energy of position, and space remains, when matter is contracted, as an opportunity for further action.

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p. 221
Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
3 months 3 weeks ago
A global transition to a cruelty-free...

A global transition to a cruelty-free vegan diet won't just help non-human animals. The transition will also help malnourished humans who could benefit from the grain currently fed to factory-farmed animals. For factory-farming is not just cruel; it's energy-inefficient. Let's take just one example. Over the past few decades, millions of Ethiopians have died of "food shortages" while Ethiopia grew grain to sell to the West to feed cattle. Western meat-eating habits prop up the price of grain so that poor people in the developing world can't afford to buy it. In consequence, they starve by the millions.In my work, I explore futuristic, hi-tech solutions to the problem of suffering. But anybody who seriously wants to reduce human and non-human suffering alike should adopt a cruelty-free vegan lifestyle today.

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"A World Without Suffering?", Instituto Humanitas Unisinos, Jan. 2011
Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
7 months ago
Rules for Definitions. I. Not to...

Rules for Definitions. I. Not to undertake to define any of the things so well known of themselves that the clearer terms cannot be had to explain them. II. Not to leave any terms that are at all obscure or ambiguous without definition. III. Not to employ in the definition of terms any words but such as are perfectly known or already explained.

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Philosophical Maxims
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
4 months 2 weeks ago
The telling of jokes is an...

The telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.

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Interviewed by J. Rentilly, "The Best Jokes Are Dangerous", McSweeny's
Philosophical Maxims
Proclus
Proclus
6 months 1 day ago
But after these, Pythagoras changed that...

But after these, Pythagoras changed that philosophy, which is conversant about geometry itself, into the form of a liberal doctrine, considering its principles in a more exalted manner; and investigating its theorems immaterially and intellectually; who likewise invented a treatise of such things as cannot be explained in geometry, and discovered the constitution of the mundane figures.

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Chap. IV.
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
5 months 2 days ago
Fertilisation of the soul is the...

Fertilisation of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.

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Ch. 13: "Requisites for Social Progress", p. 283
Philosophical Maxims
Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg
2 months 1 week ago
The socialist system of society should...

The socialist system of society should only be, and can only be, an historical product, born out of the school of its own experiences, born in the course of its realization, as a result of the developments of living history, which - just like organic nature of which, in the last analysis, it forms a part - has the fine habit of always producing along with any real social need the means to its satisfaction, along with the task simultaneously the solution. However, if such is the case, then it is clear that socialism by its very nature cannot be decreed or introduced by ukase. It has as its prerequisite a number of measures of force - against property, etc. The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive, cannot. New Territory. A thousand problems. Only experience is capable of correcting and opening new ways.

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Chapter Six, "The Problem of Dictatorship"
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
3 months 1 week ago
I say, it is the everlasting...

I say, it is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise; to be guided in the right path by those who know it better than they. This is the first "right of man;" compared with which all other rights are as nothing.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
5 months 2 days ago
The pursuit of mathematics is a...

The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.

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Ch. 2: "Mathematics as an Element in the History of Thought", p. 30
Philosophical Maxims
William Whewell
William Whewell
2 months 2 weeks ago
Secondary Qualities are not 'extended' but...

Secondary Qualities are not 'extended' but 'intensive'; their effects are not augmented by addition of parts, but by increased operation of the medium. Hence they are not measured directly, but by 'scales'; not by 'units', but by 'degrees'.

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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
6 months 2 weeks ago
Wherever we turn we find that...

Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes.

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Ch. 9, p. 138 [2012 reprint]
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
2 months 2 weeks ago
Words that everyone once used are...

Words that everyone once used are now obsolete, and so are the men whose names were once on everyone's lips: Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus, and to a lesser degree Scipio and Cato, and yes, even Augustus, Hadrian, and Antoninus are less spoken of now than they were in their own days. For all things fade away, become the stuff of legend, and are soon buried in oblivion. Mind you, this is true only for those who blazed once like bright stars in the firmament, but for the rest, as soon as a few clods of earth cover their corpses, they are 'out of sight, out of mind.' In the end, what would you gain from everlasting remembrance? Absolutely nothing. So what is left worth living for? This alone: justice in thought, goodness in action, speech that cannot deceive, and a disposition glad of whatever comes, welcoming it as necessary, as familiar, as flowing from the same source and fountain as yourself.

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IV. 33, trans. Scot and David Hicks
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
5 months ago
Compared with the wholesale violence of...

Compared with the wholesale violence of capital and government, political acts of violence are but a drop in the ocean. That so few resist is the strongest proof how terrible must be the conflict between their souls and unbearable social iniquities.

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Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
6 months 2 weeks ago
Pacifists ought to enter more deeply...

Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents. ... So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation. And as a rule they do fail. The duties, penalties, and sanctions pictured in the utopias they paint are all too weak and tame to touch the military-minded.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Rawls
John Rawls
6 months 2 weeks ago
The first statement of the two...

The first statement of the two principles reads as follows. First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a)reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.

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Chapter II, Section 11, pg. 60
Philosophical Maxims
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Fodor
2 months 2 weeks ago
From the point of view of...

From the point of view of semantics, errors must be accidents: if in the extension of "horse" there are no cows, then it cannot be required for the meaning of "horse" that cows be called horses. On the other hand, if "horse" did not mean that which it means, and if it were an error for horses, it would never be possible for a cow to be called "horse." Putting the two things together, it can be seen that the possibility of falsely saying "this is a horse" presupposes the existence of a semantic basis for saying it truly, but not vice versa. If we put this in terms of the crude causal theory, the fact that cows cause one to say "horse" depends on the fact that horses cause one to say "horse"; but the fact that horses cause one to say "horse" does not depend on the fact that cows cause one to say "horse"...

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Fodor (1990). A Theory of Content and Other Essays. The MIT Press.
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
5 months 1 week ago
They that be whole need not...

They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

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9:12-13 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
6 months 2 weeks ago
As a rule, begin my lectures...

As a rule, begin my lectures on Scientific Method by telling my students that scientific method does not exist. ...having been ...the one and only professor of this non-existent subject within the British Commonwealth.

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Philosophical Maxims
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
5 months 2 weeks ago
The dynamic principle of fantasy is...

The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth.

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Ch. 1, p. 82
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
6 months 2 weeks ago
The finest workers in stone are...

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

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Philosophical Maxims
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
4 months 1 week ago
I confess I have no great...

I confess I have no great notion of the use of books, except to amuse a railway journey; although, I believe, there are some very exact treatises on astronomy, the use of the globes, agriculture, and the art of making paper flowers. Upon the less apparent provinces of life I fear you will find nothing truthful.

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The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the Young Man in Holy Orders.
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
6 months 2 weeks ago
Freedom of opinion can only exist...

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure...

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A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42 (1996), p. 443
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
7 months 2 weeks ago
But voice is a certain sound...

But voice is a certain sound of that which is animated; for nothing inanimate emits a voice; but they are said to emit a voice from similitude, as a pipe, and a lyre, and such other inanimate things, have extension, modulation, and dialect; for thus it appears, because voice, also, has these.

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Philosophical Maxims
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
5 months 2 weeks ago
We exhort the compromisers to open...

We exhort the compromisers to open their hearts to truth, to free themselves of their wretched and blind circumspection, of their intellectual arrogance, and of the servile fear which dries up their souls and paralyzes their movements. Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!

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"The Reaction in Germany" (1842) Often paraphrased as, "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge"
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
3 months 1 week ago
But deepest of all illusory Appearances,...

But deepest of all illusory Appearances, for hiding Wonder, as for many other ends, are your two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances, SPACE and TIME. These, as spun and woven for us from before Birth itself, to clothe our celestial ME for dwelling here, and yet to blind it, - lie all-embracing, as the universal canvas, or warp and woof, whereby all minor Illusions, in this Phantasm Existence, weave and paint themselves. In vain, while here on Earth, shall you endeavor to strip them off; you can, at best, but rend them asunder for moments, and look through.

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Bk. III, ch. 8.
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
5 months 2 days ago
In the first place for over...

In the first place for over two centuries religion has been on the defensive, and on a weak defensive. The result of the repetition of this undignified retreat, during many generations, has at last almost entirely destroyed the intellectual authority of religious thinkers. Consider this contrast: when Darwin or Einstein proclaim theories which modify our ideas, it is a triumph for science. We do not go about saying that there is another defeat for science, because its old ideas have been abandoned. We know that another step of scientific insight has been gained.Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", p. 263
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
5 months 2 weeks ago
Justice was in all countries originally...

Justice was in all countries originally administered by the priesthood; nor indeed could laws in their first feeble state have either authority or sanction, so as to compel men to relinquish their natural independence, had they not appeared to come down to them enforced by beings of more than human power. The first openings of civility have been everywhere made by religion. Amongst the Romans, the custody and interpretation of the laws continued solely in the college of the pontiffs for above a century.

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An Essay towards an Abridgment of English History (1757-c. 1763), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI (1856), p. 196
Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
6 months 3 weeks ago
Of how much more passion than...

Of how much more passion than reason has Jupiter composed us? putting in, as one would say, "scarce half an ounce to a pound."

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
5 months 1 week ago
All they that take the sword...

All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.

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Matthew 26:52 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
4 months 1 week ago
Tis only from...
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Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
6 months 2 weeks ago
Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a...

Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts.

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Chapter 5 (p. 43)
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Luther
Martin Luther
6 months 3 weeks ago
Faith ever says, "If Thou wilt,"...

Faith ever says, "If Thou wilt," not "If Thou canst."

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p. 241
Philosophical Maxims
Cornel West
Cornel West
6 months 1 week ago
My aim is not to provide...

My aim is not to provide excuses for black behavior or to absolve blacks of personal responsibility. But when the new black conservatives accent black behavior and responsibility in such a way that the cultural realities of black people are ignored, they are playing a deceptive and dangerous intellectual game with the lives and fortunes of disadvantaged people. We indeed must criticize and condemn immoral acts of black people, but we must do so cognizant of the circumstances into which people are born and under which they live. By overlooking these circumstances, the new black conservatives fall into the trap of blaming black poor people for their predicament. It is imperative to steer a course between the Scylla of environmental determinism and the Charybdis of a blaming-the-victims perspective.

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(p56)
Philosophical Maxims
Max Scheler
Max Scheler
5 months 1 week ago
When we are told, in the...

When we are told, in the same tone, that these people will be rewarded in "heaven" for their distress, and that "heaven" is the exact reverse of the earthly order ("the first shall be last"), we distinctly feel how the ressentiment-laden man transfers to God the vengeance he himself cannot wreak on the great. In this way, he can satisfy his revenge at least in imagination, with the aid of an other-worldly mechanism of rewards and punishments.

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L. Coser, trans. (1961), p. 97
Philosophical Maxims
Lucretius
Lucretius
7 months 2 days ago
Superstition is now…

Superstition is now in her turn cast down and trampled underfoot, whilst we by the victory are exalted high as heaven.

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Book I, lines 78-79 (tr. W. H. D. Rouse)
Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
6 months 2 weeks ago
The beginning of religion, more precisely...

The beginning of religion, more precisely its content, is the concept of religion itself, that God is the absolute truth, the truth of all things, and subjectively that religion alone is the absolutely true knowledge.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
6 months 3 weeks ago
There must then be something that...

There must then be something that is better, and that must be God. When you see a stately and stupendous edifice, though you do not know who is the owner of it, you would yet conclude it was not built for rats. And this divine structure, that we behold of the celestial palace, have we not reason to believe that it is the residence of some possessor, who is much greater than we?

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Ch. 12, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Carew Hazlitt, 1877
Philosophical Maxims
Ptahhotep
Ptahhotep
6 months 1 week ago
Be a craftsman in speech that...

Be a craftsman in speech that thou mayest be strong, for the strength of one is the tongue, and speech is mightier than all fighting.

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Translated by J. H. Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933) p. 131
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
2 months 2 weeks ago
As the nature of the universal...

As the nature of the universal has given to every rational being all the powers that it has, so we have received from it this power also. For as the universal nature converts and fixes in its predestined place everything which stands in the way and opposes it, and makes such things a part of itself, so also the rational animal is able to make every hindrance its own material, and to use it for such purpose as it may have designed.

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VIII, 35
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
6 months 2 weeks ago
There are all kinds of sources...

There are all kinds of sources of our knowledge; but none has authority ... The fundamental mistake made by the philosophical theory of the ultimate sources of our knowledge is that it does not distinguish clearly enough between questions of origin and questions of validity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
6 months 1 week ago
In the ceremonies of the public...

In the ceremonies of the public execution, the main character was the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance.

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Chapter One, pp. 56
Philosophical Maxims
Julius Evola
Julius Evola
2 months 3 weeks ago
The presence of a proletarian aspect...

The presence of a proletarian aspect in Nazism is undeniable, as in the figure of Hitler himself, who had none of the traits of a 'gentleman,' of an aristocratic type di razza. This proletarian aspect and even vulgarity of National Socialism was often noticed, especially in Austria after its annexation to the Reich and after the phase of a rash 'national' infatuation of Austrians for 'Greater Germany.'

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p. 43
Philosophical Maxims
Niels Bohr
Niels Bohr
2 months 3 weeks ago
Some subjects are so serious that...

Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.

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As quoted in The Genius of Science: A Portrait Gallery (2000) by Abraham Pais, p. 24
Philosophical Maxims
Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri
3 months 1 week ago
All wars today tend to be...

All wars today tend to be netwars.

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Philosophical Maxims
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