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5 months 2 days ago

Administration is not unlike play-acting. The task of the good actor is to know and play his role, although different roles may differ greatly in content. The effectiveness of the performance will depend on the effectiveness of the play and the effectiveness with which it is played. The effectiveness of the administrative process will vary with the effectiveness of the organization and the effectiveness with which its members play their parts.

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p. 252; As cited in: Herbert Simon (1996) The Sciences of the Artificial. page xii.
5 months 2 weeks ago

The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.

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The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon)
7 months 3 days ago

Whatever you see in the more material part of yourself, learn to refer to God and to the invisible part of yourself. In that way, whatever offers itself to the senses will become for you an occasion for the practice of piety.

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The Erasmus Reader (1990), p. 141.
6 months 2 weeks ago

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.

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Section 9
3 months 2 weeks ago

Marxism was a philosophical or semi-philosophical doctrine and a political ideology which was used by the communist state as the main source of legitimacy and the obligatory faith.

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New Preface, p. v
2 months 3 weeks ago

A Natural Group is steadily fixed, though not precisely limited; it is given in position, though not circumscribed; it is determined, not by a boundary without, but by a central point within; -not by what it strictly excludes, but by what it eminently includes; - by a Type, not by a Definition.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

I have received, sir, your new book against the human species, and I thank you for it. You will please people by your manner of telling them the truth about themselves, but you will not alter them. The horrors of that human society-from which in our feebleness and ignorance we expect so many consolations-have never been painted in more striking colours: no one has ever been so witty as you are in trying to turn us into brutes: to read your book makes one long to go on all fours. Since, however, it is now some sixty years since I gave up the practice, I feel that it is unfortunately impossible for me to resume it: I leave this natural habit to those more fit for it than are you and I.

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Letter to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, August 30, 1755 referring to Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality.
2 months 2 weeks ago

How easy it is to repel and to wipe away every impression which is troublesome or unsuitable, and immediately to be in all tranquility. To shrug it all off and wipe it clean--every annoyance and distraction--and reach utter stillness. Child's play.

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(Hays translation) V, 2
5 months 3 weeks ago

The proper method for hastening the decay of error is not by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavour to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself.

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Vol. 2, bk. 8, ch. 6
5 months 2 weeks ago

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

"If God did not exist, he would have to be invented." But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.

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Voltaire quoting himself in his Letter to Prince Frederick William of Prussia (28 November 1770), translated by S.G. Tallentyre, Voltaire in His Letters, 1919
4 months 2 days ago

Human intuitions are systematically biased. Evolutionary psychology explains how our moral intuitions and the rationalisations they spawn have been shaped by millennia of natural selection to maximise the inclusive fitness of our genes, not to track the welfare of other sentient beings impartially conceived. Many human cultures have found nothing intuitively wrong with aggressive warfare, slavery, wife-beating, infanticide or female genital mutilation. Ultimately, folk morality is a doomed enterprise as hopeless as folk physics. A mature posthuman ethics, I'd argue, must be committed to the well-being of all sentient life; and mature posthuman technology offers the means to deliver that commitment.

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"Post-Darwinian Ethics?", H+ Magazine, May 2009
6 months 3 weeks ago

Stop Traveller! Near this place lieth John Locke. If you ask what kind of a man he was, he answers that he lived content with his own small fortune. Bred a scholar he made his learning subservient only to the cause of truth. This thou will learn from his writings, which will show thee everything else concerning him, with greater truth, than the suspect praises of an epitaph. His virtues, indeed, if he had any, were too little for him to propose as matter of praise to himself, or as an example to thee. Let his vices be buried together. As to an example of manners, if you seek that, you have it in the Gospels; of vices, to wish you have one nowhere; if mortality, certainly, (and may it profit thee), thou hast one here and everywhere.

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Epitaph, as translated from the Latin.
6 months 1 week ago

The investigation of the meaning of words is the beginning of education.

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Arrian, Discourses of Epictetus, i. 17
6 months 3 weeks ago

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours Vijaya in Island.

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1962
2 months 3 weeks ago

The general form of the total conception of ideology is being used by the analyst when he has the courage to subject not just the adversary's point of view but all points of view, including his own, to the ideological analysis.At the present stage of our understanding it is hardly possible to avoid this general formulation of the total conception of ideology, according to which the thought of all parties in all epochs is of an ideological character.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Of course, I had to own that he was right; I didn't feel much regret for what I'd done. Still, to my mind, he overdid it, and I'd have liked to have a chance of explaining to him, in a quite friendly, almost affectionate way, that I have never been able to really regret anything in all my life. I've always been far too much absorbed in the present moment, or the immediate future, to think back.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

We are in hell and I will have my turn!

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Inès warns Garcin and Estelle not to make love in her presence, Act 1, sc. 5
3 months 2 weeks ago

It depends on what we read, after all manner of Professors have done their best for us.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

An evil may be real, tho' its cause has no relation to us: It may be real, without being peculiar: It may be real, without shewing itself to others: It may be real, without being constant: And it may be real, without falling under the general rules. Such evils as these will not fail to render us miserable, tho' they have little tendency to diminish pride: And perhaps the most real and the most solid evils of life will be found of this nature.

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Part 1, Section 6
5 months 6 days ago

The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.

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p. 139
5 months 1 week ago

Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified.

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3 months 2 days ago

Universal love is really the way of the sage-kings. It is what gives peace to the rulers and sustenance to the people. The gentleman would do well to understand and practise universal love; then he would be gracious as a ruler, loyal as a minister, affectionate as a father, filial as a son, courteous as an elder brother, and respectful as a younger brother. So, if the gentleman desires to be a gracious ruler, a loyal minister, an affectionate father, a filial son, a courteous elder brother, and a respectful younger brother, universal love must be practised. It is the way of the sage-kings and the great blessing of the people.

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Book 4; Universal Love III
6 months 1 week ago

It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country.

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Book III, ode ii, line 13
7 months 3 weeks ago

Every art, and every system, and in like manner every action and purpose aims, it is thought, at some good; for which reason a common and by no means a bad description of the good is, that at which all things aim.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

It is crazy to want what is impossible. And impossible for the wicked not to do so.

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V, 17, (Hays translation) To seek what is impossible is madness: and it is impossible that the bad should not do something of this kind.
6 months 3 weeks ago

Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. 

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To his young son from the Yosemite Valley on
3 months 3 days ago

As a general rule, all that has been hitherto advanced respecting the nature of this deity, must be understood to refer to his properties: for the nature of the god is not one thing, and his influence another: and truly, besides these two, his energy a third thing: seeing that all things which he wills, these he is, he can, and he works. For neither doth he will that which he is not; nor is he without strength to do that which he wills; nor doth he will that which he cannot effect. Now this is very different in the case of men, for theirs is a double nature mixed up in one, that of soul and body; the former divine, the latter full of darkness and obscurity: hence naturally arise warfare and discord between the two.

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7 months 3 days ago

There is nothing I congratulate myself on more heartily than on never having joined a sect.

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As quoted in Thomas More and Erasmus (1965) by Ernest Edwin Reynolds, p. 248 [citation needed]
7 months 1 week ago

Since it is Reason which shapes and regulates all other things, it ought not itself to be left in disorder.

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Book I, ch. 17, 1.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Form may then be defined as the operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfillment.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The retinue of a grandee in China or Indostan accordingly is, by all accounts, much more numerous and splendid than that of the richest subjects of Europe.

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Chapter XI, Part III, Third Period, p. 240.
6 months 3 weeks ago

Apart from autograph hunters, I get... many letters from Hindus, beseeching me to adopt some form of mysticism, from young Americans, asking me where I think the line should be drawn in petting, and from Poles, urging me to admit that while all other nationalism may be bad that of Poland is wholly noble. I get letters from engineers who cannot understand Einstein, and from parsons who think that I cannot understand Genesis, from husbands whose wives have deserted them - not (they say) that that would matter, but the wives have taken the furniture with them, and what in these circumstances should an enlightened male do? ...I get letters (concerning whose genuineness I am suspicious) trying to get me to advocate abortion, and I get letters from young mothers asking my opinion of bottle-feeding.

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Letter to Mr C. L. Aiken, March 19, 1930
2 months 3 weeks ago

But with respect to future debt; would it not be wise and just for that nation to declare in the constitution they are forming that neither the legislature, nor the nation itself can validly contract more debt, than they may pay within their own age, or within the term of 19 years.

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Letter to James Madison (6 September 1789) ME 7:455, Papers 15:393
2 months 3 weeks ago

The Constitution of the United States asserts that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty.

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Letter to Justice William Johnson
6 months 2 weeks ago

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)
5 months 3 weeks ago

The moment a sovereign removes the idea of security and protection from his subjects, and declares that he is everything and they nothing, when he declares that no contract he makes with them can or ought to bind him, he then declares war upon them: he is no longer sovereign; they are no longer subjects.

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Speech in opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings (16 February 1788), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Ninth (1899), p. 459
2 months 3 weeks ago

Whereas, our tenet ever was, and, indeed, it is almost the only landmark which now divides the federalists from the republicans, that Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated;...

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6 months 3 weeks ago

We may well be ashamed to tell what things we have read or heard in our day. I do not know why my news should be so trivial, - considering what one's dreams and expectations are, why the developments should be so paltry. The news we hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. It is the stalest repetition.

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p. 491
2 months 3 weeks ago

Blessed are those eyes that have seen more water than any man! Blessed be that haughty mind that aimed at the greatest hope! May you be blessed who row the current your life longand now with dry unfreshened lips descend to Hadesto find the hidden deathless springs and slake your thirst! My son, it's death who keeps and pours the deathless waters.

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Voice of the Nile, from Odysseus' story, Book VIII, line 1290 (the first line is taken from an Egyptian hieroglyph.)
6 months 3 weeks ago

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.

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"Civil Disobedience"
4 months 3 weeks ago

Be your money's master, not its slave.

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Maxim 657

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