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4 months 4 weeks ago

By narcissism is meant ceasing to have an authentic interest in the outside world but instead an intense attachment to oneself, to one's own group, clan, religion, nation, race, etc. - with consequent serious distortions of rational judgment. In general, the need for narcissistic satisfaction derives from the necessity to compensate for material and cultural poverty.

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5 months 1 week ago

Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes - desertion after desertion.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Every start upon an untrodden path is a venture which only in unusual circumstances looks sensible and likely to be successful.

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Ch. 9 : I Resolve to Become a Jungle Doctor
3 months 1 week ago

Logic teaches us that on such and such a road we are sure of not meeting an obstacle; it does not tell us which is the road that leads to the desired end. For this, it is necessary to see the end from afar, and the faculty which teaches us to see is intuition. Without it, the geometrician would be like a writer well up in grammar but destitute of ideas.

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Part II. Ch. 2 : Mathematical Definitions and Education, p. 130
2 months 2 weeks ago

On eroding, ecologically degraded, increasingly toxic landscapes, worked by failing or subsidy-dependent farmers and by the cheap labor of migrants, we have erected the tottering tower of "agribusiness," which prospers and "feeds the world" (incompletely and temporarily) by undermining its own foundations.

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3 months 1 week ago

Tsze-Kung asked Confucius, saying, "Master, are you a sage?" Confucius answered him: "A sage is what I cannot rise to. I learn without satiety, and teach without being tired." Tsze-Kung said: "You learn without satiety: that shows your wisdom. You teach without being tired: that shows your benevolence. Benevolent and wise:- Master, you are a sage."

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"Humility", no. 139
7 months 2 weeks ago

Your pride has been too much for the pride of your admirers; they were numerous and high-spirited, but they have all run away, overpowered by your superior force of character; not one of them remains. And I want you to understand the reason why you have been too much for them. You think that you have no need of them or of any other man, for you have great possessions and lack nothing, beginning with the body, and ending with the soul. Socrates speaking to Alcibiades

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3 months 1 week ago

We need a good alternative to Trumpism. There is a majority in favor of that, but... the other party is really not providing that alternative in a very clear way.

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46:46:00
7 months 5 days ago

O immortal gods! Men do not realize how great a revenue parsimony can be!

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Paradoxa Stoicorum; Paradox VI, 49
3 months 1 week ago

Today we have arrived at a point when the three principles [of modern resistance: 1. measure of efficacy, 2. the form of political and military organization correspond to the current forms of economic and social production, 3. democracy and freedom] coincide. The distributed network structure provides the model for an absolutely democratic organization that corresponds to the dominant forms of economic and social production and is also the most powerful weapon against the ruling power structure.

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88
4 months 2 weeks ago

Whatever it may be, animals have always had, until our era, a divine or sacrificial nobility that all mythologies recount. Even murder by hunting is still a symbolic relation, as opposed to an experimental dissection. Even domestication is still a symbolic relation, as opposed to industrial breeding. One only has to look at the status of animals in peasant society. And the status of domestication, which presupposes land, a clan, a system of parentage of which the animals are a part, must not be confused with the status of the domestic pet-the only type of animals that are left to us outside reserves and breeding stations-dogs, cats, birds, hamsters, all packed together in the affection of their master. The trajectory animals have followed, from divine sacrifice to dog cemeteries with atmospheric music, from sacred defiance to ecological sentimentality, speaks loudly enough of the vulgarization of the status of man himself.

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"The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses," p. 134
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is sometimes maintained that racial mixture is biologically undesirable. There is no evidence whatever for this view. Nor is there, apparently, any reason to think that Negroes are congenitally less intelligent than white people, but as to that it will be difficult to judge until they have equal scope and equally good social conditions.

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Part II: Man and Man, Ch. 12: Racial Antagonism, p. 108
6 months 2 weeks ago

The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth.

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Foreward (p. vii)
6 months 2 weeks ago

The very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.

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"The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna," Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 7 November 1848.
5 months 1 week ago

The Protestant churches generally hold that the elements of the sacrament are flesh and blood only in a tropical sense; they nourish our souls as meat and the juice of it would our bodies. But the Catholics maintain that they are literally just that; although they possess all the sensible qualities of wafer-cakes and diluted wine. But we can have no conception of wine except what may enter into a belief, either -

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5 months 1 week ago

Of all that makes us suffer, nothing - so much as disappointment - gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

When speaking of the new testament that you should read all the histories of Christ, as well of those whom a council of ecclesiastics have decided for us to be Pseudo-evangelists, as those they named Evangelists. Because these Pseudo-evangelists pretended to inspiration as much as the others, and you are to judge their pretensions by your own reason, & not by the reason of those ecclesiastics. Most of these are lost. There are some however still extant, collected by Fabricius which I will endeavor to get & send you.

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7 months 3 days ago

When the apostle James was talking about faith and works against those who thought their faith was enough, and didn't want to have good works, he said, You believe God is one; you do well; the demons also believe, and tremble.

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(Jas 2:19) 183:13:2
6 months 2 weeks ago

As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct.

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p. 486
2 months 2 weeks ago

It is irreverent to the Gods to give you this demonstration, but for your sakes it shall be done.

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As quoted in The Lives of the Sophists by Eunapius
4 months 2 weeks ago

Try not to have Emily exposed to hours and hours of TV. It is a vile drug which permeates the nervous system, especially in the young.

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Letter to son Eric McLuhan, regarding one of Eric's daughters, 1976
5 months ago

An ethos of freedom stops power from solidifying into domination and makes sure it remains an open game.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.

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III, 7
5 months 1 week ago

No criticism can be brought against a branch of technical science from outside; no thought fitted out with the knowledge of a period and setting its course by definite historical aims could have anything to say to the specialist. Such thought and the critical, dialectical element it communicates to the process of cognition, thereby maintaining conscious connection between that process and historical life, do not exist for empiricism; nor do the associated categories, such as the distinction between essence and appearance, identity in change, and rationality of ends, indeed, the concept of man, of personality, even of society and class taken in the sense that presupposes specific viewpoints and directions of interest.

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p. 145.
4 months 3 weeks ago

To conclude: there are two well-known minor ways in which language has mattered to philosophy. On the one hand there is a belief that if only we produce good definitions, often marking out different senses of words that are confused in common speech, we will avoid the conceptual traps that ensnared our forefathers. On the other hand is a belief that if only we attend sufficiently closely to our mother tongue and make explicit the distinctions there implicit, we shall avoid the conceptual traps. One or the other of these curiously contrary beliefs may nowadays be most often thought of as an answer to the question Why does language matter to philosophy? Neither seems to me enough.

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Ian Hacking (1975), Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?, p. 7.
6 months 2 weeks ago

I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of redemption absolutely incredible.

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Quoted in Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson, the Mind On Fire (Univ. of Calif Press 1995), p. 124
6 months 2 weeks ago

When He died in the Wounded World He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less. Each thing, from the single grain of Dust to the strongest eldil, is the end and the final cause of all creation and the mirror in which the beam of His brightness comes to rest and so returns to Him. Blessed be He!

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7 months 2 days ago

In theory there is nothing to hinder our following what we are taught; but in life there are many things to draw us aside.

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Book I, ch. 26, 3.
4 months 2 weeks ago

Never would the humanities or psychoanalysis have existed if it had been miraculously possible to reduce man to his "rational" behaviors.

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"The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses," p. 132
5 months 2 days ago

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.

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Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 1.
2 weeks 2 days ago

There's nothing physically precluding humanity from doing the right thing. As for generosity, that won't even be a virtue in a post scarcity world....

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6 months 1 week ago

From whence are these "rights of individuals" derived, and why should we care? Unless we presume the existence of some greater power that determines what is good, isn't it arbitrary to posit that human survival is more important than private property rights, an equally artificially construed concept? Isn't it arbitrary to assume that some sort of equality is preferable to a system where, say, the poor are assumed to have bad karma? If these 'rights of individuals' are derived only from shared humanity, then do 'individuals' (a thoroughly meaningless term, by the way), begin to lose them when they act inhumanely? And isn't it totally arbitrary to grant rights to humans rather than other creatures anyway?

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Lecture in New Haven, On Constructed Rights
1 month 6 days ago

"In every stock-jobbing swindle everyone knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety."
- Karl Marx

See biography for Karl Marx:
https://civilsimian.com/KarlMarx

Read Karl Marx's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/72/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

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7 months 2 weeks ago

If the ethical, that is, social morality is the highest ... then no categories are needed other than the Greek philosophical categories.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Here I stand; I can do no otherwise. God help me. Amen!

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As reported in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 186; and in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed.
5 months 4 weeks ago

Attempt nothing above thy strength!

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Find time still to be learning somewhat good, and give up being desultory.

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Meditations. ii. 7.
5 months 1 week ago

For Appetite with an opinion of attaining, is called HOPE.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

I have turned my entire attention to Greek. The first thing I shall do, as soon as the money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.

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Letter to Jacob Batt (12 April 1500); Collected Works of Erasmus Vol 1 (1974)
5 months 1 week ago

He that is not with me is against me: and he that gathereth not with me scattereth.

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Luke 11:23 (KJV)
6 months 1 week ago

The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather - not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.

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5 months ago

Every religious practice is an exercise in attention. A temple is the highest degree of attention.

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3 months 2 days ago

He who does not wish to die cannot have wished to live.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Bitter for a free man is the bondage of debt.

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Maxim 14 Variant: "Debt is the slavery of the free."
6 months 2 weeks ago

But then again of course I know perfectly well that He can't be used as a road. If you're approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you're not really approaching Him at all.

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7 months 1 week ago

If you reject absolutely any single sensation without stopping to discriminate with respect to that which awaits confirmation between matter of opinion and that which is already present, whether in sensation or in feelings or in any immediate perception of the mind, you will throw into confusion even the rest of your sensations by your groundless belief and so you will be rejecting the standard of truth altogether. If in your ideas based upon opinion you hastily affirm as true all that awaits confirmation as well as that which does not, you will not escape error, as you will be maintaining complete ambiguity whenever it is a case of judging between right and wrong opinion.

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6 months 1 week ago

Anytime two human beings find genuine pleasure, joy, and love, the stars smile and the universe is enriched. Yet as long as that pleasure, joy, and love is still predicated on myths of black sexuality, the more fundamental challenge of humane interaction remains unmet.

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(p85)

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