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4 months 6 days ago

It is a fact that Mussolini entered the scene of world politics as an ally of the democracies, while Lenin entered it as a virtual ally of imperial Germany.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way, - nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.

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The Dilemma of Determinism, 1884
7 months 3 weeks ago

France has done more for even English history than England has.

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John Stuart Mill. Michelet.On the writing of English history. Complete Works Vol 20. Page 221.
6 months 3 weeks ago

I have seen the truth; I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at. But how can I help believing it? I have seen the truth - it is not as though I had invented it with my mind, I have seen it, seen it, and the living image of it has filled my soul for ever. I have seen it in such full perfection that I cannot believe that it is impossible for people to have it.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Religious minds, which are distrustful of philosophic dogmas, fall into the error - inculcated by philosophy - of supposing that Providence is limited in its action; that is does not extend to the social world or the social relations of mankind, and that God has not determined upon any plan of social organization for the regulation of those relations. If they had a PROFOUND FAITH IN THE UNIVERSALITY OF PROVIDENCE, they would be convinced that all human needs must have been foreseen and provided for, and especially that the most urgent of them all could not have been overlooked - namely, the need of a social order for the regulation of our industrial and social relations.

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The Theory of Social Organization. Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier, p. 5.
6 months 2 weeks ago

From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.

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p. 71
6 months 2 weeks ago

Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word Liberty entire nations.

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Fragment No. 2
6 months 2 weeks ago

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.

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p 48
8 months 1 week ago

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

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3 months 2 weeks ago

A child raised every 2. years is of more profit then the crop of the best laboring man. in this, as in all other cases, providence has made our duties and our interests coincide perfectly.... [W]ith respect therefore to our women & their children I must pray you to inculcate upon the overseers that it is not their labor, but their increase which is the first consideration with us.

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In letter to plantation manager, as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson, by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine,
5 months 2 weeks ago

Better to be ignorant of a matter than half know it.

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Maxim 865
7 months 2 weeks ago

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

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Chapter 3, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, 1850
5 months 4 weeks ago

Economic man deals with the "real world" in all its complexity. Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastic simplified model... He makes his choices using a simple picture of the situation that takes into account just a few of the factors that he regards as most relevant and crucial.

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p. xxix; As cited in: Jesper Simonsen (1994) Administrative Behavior: How Organizations can be Understood in Terms of Decision Processes. Roskilde Universitet.
7 months 3 weeks ago

Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.

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V
7 months 1 week ago

Nay, men, if any of you had heeded what I was ever foretelling and advising, ye would now neither be fearing a single man nor putting your hopes in a single man.

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Quoted by Plutarch, Life of Cato the Younger, 52 Bernadotte Perrin, ed. Plutarch's Lives, Vol. 8, LCL 100 (1919), pp. 247, 361
6 months 1 week ago

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

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A Severed Head (1961); 1976, p. 181.
8 months 2 weeks ago

A fire eater must eat fire even if he has to kindle it himself.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.

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On Suicide
8 months 3 weeks ago

You wanted God's ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth so that he could properly fulfill your wish. And yet, if he were to share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Men grew desperate and the border between bitter frustration and wild destruction is sometimes easily crossed.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Lives matter in the sense that they assume physical form within the sphere of appearance; lives matter because they are to be valued equally.

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p. 12
6 months 2 weeks ago

I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

At the speed of light there is no sequence; everything happens at the same instant.

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6 months 1 week ago

The way in which a society organizes the life of its members ... is one "project" of realization among others. But once the project has become operative in the basic institutions and relations, it tends to become exclusive and to determine the development of the society as a whole.

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p. xlviii
3 months 3 weeks ago

Speak straight and clear! I only hear that manly prayerwhich like a huge fist breaks my head against the stones.

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Odysseus, Book VIII, line 530
6 months ago

Schizophrenia is like love: there is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon or entity; schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring machines, universal primary production as "the essential reality of man and nature".

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The Desiring Machine
7 months 4 weeks ago

Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.

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On Marriage
6 months 2 weeks ago

The education of the child must accord both in mode and arrangement with the education of mankind, considered historically. In other words, the genesis of knowledge in the individual, must follow the same course as the genesis of knowledge in the race. In strictness, this principle may be considered as already expressed by implication; since both being processes of evolution, must conform to those same general laws of evolution... and must therefore agree with each other. Nevertheless this particular parallelism is of value for the specific guidance it affords. To M. Comte we believe society owes the enunciation of it; and we may accept this item of his philosophy without at all committing ourselves to the rest.

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6 months 1 week ago

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

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A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
7 months 2 weeks ago

Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

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On the autobiographical nature of his films, in The Atlantic

The life of God - the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things - may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things.

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§ 19
7 months 2 weeks 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.

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Vol. I, Ch. 10, Section 5, pg. 296.
7 months 2 weeks ago

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

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To W. Lutoslawski, 5/6/1906
4 months 1 day ago

We say in popular speech that we come into this world, but we do nothing of the kind. We come out of it. In the same way as the fruit comes out of the tree, the egg from the chicken, and the baby from the womb, we are symptomatic of the universe. Just as in the retina there are myriads of little nerve endings, we are the nerve endings of the universe.

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p. 25
6 months 5 days ago

Some philosophers fail to distinguish propositions from judgments; ... But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.

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p. 259.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Boredom is a larval anxiety; depression, a dreamy hatred.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

While the Marxist faith in central planning is now confined to a few dingy sects, a quasi-religious belief in free markets continues to shape the policies of governments.Many writers have pointed to the havoc and ruin that have accompanied the imposition of free markets across the world. Whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America or post-communist Europe, policies of wholesale privatisation and structural adjustment have led to declining economic activity and social dislocation on a massive scale.

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"The end of the world as we know it," The Guardian
7 months 4 weeks ago

I will first discuss images according to the Law of Moses, and then according to the gospel. And I say at the outset that according to the Law of Moses no other images are forbidden than an image of God which one worships. A crucifix, on the other hand, or any other holy image is not forbidden. Heigh now! you breakers of images, I defy you to prove the opposite!

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pp. 85-86
7 months 2 weeks ago

Reason has always existed, but not always in a rational form.

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Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge, September 1843
2 weeks 1 day ago

I'd say being is the FOUNDATION of truth, language corresponds, then actions that preserve life are Good....

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7 months 4 weeks ago

But men must know that in this theater of man's life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

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Book II, xx, 8
8 months 3 weeks ago

How will one part of the infinite be above, and another below? Or how will it have extremes or a middle? Further still, every sensible body is in place; but the species and differences of place are upward and downward, before and behind, to the right hand and to the left: and these things not only thus subsist with relation to us, and by position, but have a definite subsistence in the universe itself. But it is impossible that these things should be in the infinite: and... that there should be an infinite place. But every body is in place; and therefore it is also impossible that there should be an infinite body. ...Therefore ...there is not an infinite body in energy.

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7 months 1 week ago

He will through life be master of himself and a happy man who from day to day can have said, "I have lived: tomorrow the Father may fill the sky with black clouds or with cloudless sunshine."

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Book III, ode xxix, line 41
7 months 1 week ago

To a wise man, the whole earth is open; for the native land of a good soul is the whole earth.

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Freeman (1948), p. 166 \

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