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9 months 3 weeks ago

Anything could be found in figures if the search were long enough and hard enough and if the proper pieces of information were ignored or overlooked.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat, - men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the majority - demanding, not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension, immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice - comes graceful and beloved as a bride!

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p. 189
6 months 4 weeks ago

When a man is taken in a mystical sense, his qualities are often signified by his actions, and by the circumstances of things about him. So a Ruler is signified by his riding on a beast; a Warrior and Conqueror, by his having a sword and bow; a potent man, by his gigantic stature; a Judge, by weights and measures... the affliction or persecution which a people suffers in laboring to bring forth a new kingdom, by the pain of a woman in labor to bring forth a man-child; the dissolution of a body politic or ecclesiastic, by the death of a man or beast; and the revival of a dissolved dominion, by the resurrection of the dead.

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Vol. I, Ch. 2: Of the Prophetic Language
8 months 2 weeks ago

All those movements which took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which had the Reformation as their main expression and result should be analyzed as a great crisis of the Western experience of subjectivity and a revolt against the kind of religious and moral power which gave form, during the Middle Ages, to this subjectivity. The need to take a direct part in spiritual life, in the work of salvation, in the truth which lies in the Book-all that was a struggle for a new subjectivity.

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p. 782
4 months 3 weeks ago

Our people... will give you all the necessaries of war they produce, if, instead of the bankrupt trash they now are obliged to receive for want of any other, you will give them a paper promise funded on a specific pledge, and of a size for common circulation.

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Letter to James Monroe, 1815. ME 14:228
8 months 3 weeks ago

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

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The Method of Nature, 1841
8 months 3 weeks ago

In any case, if you ever leave me with a handsome man, do not tell me that you trust me because, let me warn you: that is not what will prevent me from deceiving you, if I want to. On the contrary.

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Jessica to her husband Hugo, Act 3, sc. 5
8 months 3 weeks ago

It is not the same thing. You are perhaps not lying, but you are not telling the truth.

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Act 1
5 months 3 weeks ago

If an action ... involves little profit but much righteousness, do it.

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Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 263
8 months ago

I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don't remember ever having seen one weep.

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"Paradox on Acting" (1830), as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker
8 months 2 weeks ago

Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'here are our monsters', without immediately turning the monsters into pets.

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Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and other small Seismisms, The States of Theory, ed. David Carroll, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
6 months 4 weeks ago

For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their simulation models.

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"The Precession of Simulacra," pp. 1-2
9 months 3 weeks ago

Great novelists are philosopher-novelists who write in images instead of arguments.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself withersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.

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Wealth
8 months 3 weeks ago

Communism... is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as the solution.

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Private Property and Communism, p. 43.
8 months 2 weeks ago

Now his principal doctrines were these. That atoms and the vacuum were the beginning of the universe; and that everything else existed only in opinion.

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(trans. by Robert Drew Hicks 1925) Often paraphrased as "Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion."
7 months 3 weeks ago

If there is a devil in human history, that devil is the principle of command. It alone, sustained by the ignorance and stupidity of the masses, without which it could not exist, is the source of all the catastrophes, all the crimes, and all the infamies of history.

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On the Program of the Alliance (1871), in Bakunin on Anarchy (1971), translated and edited by Sam Dolgoff Variant translation: If there is a devil in history, it is the power principle.
8 months 3 weeks ago

This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.

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-5.62
7 months 2 weeks ago

And seeing every man is presumed to do all things in order to his own benefit, no man is a fit Arbitrator in his own cause.

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The First Part, Chapter 15, p. 78
4 months 2 weeks ago

I have come to believe that the motion of the Earth cannot be detected by any optical experiment.

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9 months 2 weeks ago

All people respect and love their own parents and children, as well as the parents and children of others.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

Many Catholic mystics have affirmed that, at a certain stage of that contemplative prayer in which, according to the most authoritative theologians, the life of Christian perfection ultimately consists, it is necessary to put aside all thought of the Incarnation as distracting from the higher knowledge of that which has been incarnated. From this fact have arisen misunderstandings in plenty and a number of intellectual difficulties.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.

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Ch. 9
8 months 3 weeks ago

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

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Act 11, sc. 2
8 months 2 weeks ago

Sometimes, because my position has not been made clear enough, people think I'm a sort of radical anarchist who has an absolute hatred of power. No! What I am trying to do is to approach this extremely important and tangled phenomenon in our society, the exercise of power, with the most reflective, and I would say prudent attitude. Prudent in my analysis, in the moral and theoretical postulates I use: I try to figure out what's at stake. But to question the relations of power in the most scrupulous and attentive manner possible, looking into all the domains of its exercise, that's not the same thing as constructing a mythology of power as the beast of the apocalypse.

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"Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual", interview in History of the Present 4
6 months 3 weeks ago

And see, a kind, refined lady will devour the carcasses of these animals with full assurance that she is doing right, at the same time asserting two contradictory propositions: First, that she is, as her doctor assures her, so delicate that she cannot be sustained by vegetable food alone, and that for her feeble organism flesh is indispensable; and, secondly, that she is so sensitive that she is unable, not only herself to inflict suffering on animals, but even to bear the sight of suffering. Whereas the poor lady is weak precisely because she has been taught to live upon food unnatural to man; and she cannot avoid causing suffering to animals - for she eats them.

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Ch. IX
8 months 3 weeks ago

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

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Quoted in Library of Living Philosophers: The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, 1944
5 months 4 days ago

As for Hitler, he nourished a fundamental aversion to the monarchy and, as we have noted, his polemic against the Habsburgs, for instance, was of an unparalleled vulgarity. For Hitler, the Volk alone was the principle of legitimacy. He was established as its direct representative and guide, without intermediaries, and it was to follow him unconditionally. No higher princple existed or was tolerated by him. Therefore it is perfectly correct to speak of a consolidated populist dictatorship employing the tools of a single party and the myth of the Volk. Not only the ancient German traditions, but also the very concept of Reich and, as we shall see, the concept of race were brought by Hitler to the level of the masses, which implied their degradation and distorition. Still, in this context they became tools of great power.

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p. 35
8 months 3 weeks ago

I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others. Coming from a logician, this surprise surprised me.

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Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), Part III, chapter II, "Solipsism", p. 196
5 months 1 week ago

If you know that "I", in the sense of the person, the front, the ego, it really doesn't exist. Then...it won't go to your head too badly, if you wake up and discover that you're God.

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8 months 4 weeks ago

You must do nothing before him, which you would not have him imitate. If any thing escape you, which you would have pass as a fault in him, he will be sure to shelter himself under your example, and shelter himself so as that it will not be easy to come at him, to correct it in him the right way.

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Sec. 71
8 months 4 weeks ago

Truly, if the preservation of all mankind, as much as in him lies, were every one's persuasion, as indeed it is every one's duty, and the true principle to regulate our religion, politicks and morality by, the world would be much quieter, and better natur'd than it is.

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Sec. 116

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

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F 84
5 months 2 weeks ago

The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable.

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9 months 3 weeks ago

Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business; and it gives in the long run a net result of zero.

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Ch. 6, Laissez-Faire.
8 months 3 weeks ago

To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 3, § 39
7 months 3 weeks ago

Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.

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9 months 3 weeks ago

Perhaps then we must begin with such facts as are known to us from individual experience. It is necessary therefore that the person who is to study, with any tolerable chance of profit, the principles of nobleness and justice and politics generally, should have received a good moral training.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

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Ch. III: Of Individuality, As One of the Elements of Well-Being
5 months 6 days ago

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property were just what Aristotle did not talk about. They are the conditions of happiness; but the essence of happiness, according to Aristotle, is virtue. So the moderns decided to deal with the conditions and to let happiness take care of itself.

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Commerce and Culture, p. 284.
5 months 1 week ago

Mucius might have accomplished something more successful in that camp, but never anything more brave.

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7 months 1 week ago

What can characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality.

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Chapter one, The Country of the Blind

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