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6 months 3 weeks ago

Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 26, § 321
6 months 3 weeks ago

Money often costs too much.

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Wealth
5 months 2 weeks ago

Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous relics of earlier evolutionary stages going back to even the reptilian age, so the human psyche is likewise a product of evolution which, when followed up to its origins, show countless archaic traits.

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p. 126
6 months 2 weeks ago

The new governmental reason does not deal with what I would call the things in themselves of governmentality, such as individuals, things, wealth, and land. It no longer deals with these things in themselves. It deals with the phenomena of politics, that is to say, interests, which precisely constitute politics and its stakes; it deals with interests, or that respect in which a given individual, thing, wealth, and so on interests other individuals or the collective body of individuals. ... In the new regime, government is basically no longer to be exercised over subjects and other things subjected through these subjects. Government is now to be exercised over what we could call the phenomenal republic of interests. The fundamental question of liberalism is: What is the utility value of government and all actions of government in a society where exchange determines the value of things?

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Lecture 2, January 17, 1979, pp. 45-46
5 months 1 week ago

There is no tyranny in the world more hateful than that of ideas. Ideas bring ideophobia, and the consequence is that people begin to persecute their neighbors in the name of ideas. I loathe and detest all labels, and the only label that I could now tolerate would be that of ideoclast or idea breaker.

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Recalled by Walter Starkie from a conversation he had with Unamuno, as related in the Epilogue of Unamuno.
5 months 6 days ago

When I first read The Wretched of the Earth I heard a new history spoken-the voice of the decolonised subject raised in resistance. That voice . . . articulated a yearning for freedom that was so intense and a quality of emotional hunger that was so fierce that it was overwhelming. Dying into the text, I abandoned and forgot myself. The lust for freedom in those pages awakened and resurrected me.

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Gender and Decolonization in the Congo (2010) ISBN 978-0-230-11040-3
6 months 1 week ago

Tomorrow we will be back on the vast ocean.

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The Routledge Dictionary of Latin Quotations: The Illiterati's Guide to Latin Maxims, Mottoes, Proverbs and Sayings
5 months 1 week ago

Not by way of reason, but only by way of love and suffering, do we come to the living God, the human God. Reason rather separates us from Him. We cannot first know Him in order that afterward we may love Him; we must begin by loving Him, longing for Him, hungering after Him, before knowing Him. The knowledge of God proceeds from the love of God, and this love has little or nothing of the rational in it. For God is indefinable. To seek to define Him is to seek to confine Him within the limits of our mind - that is to say, to kill Him. In so far as we attempt to define Him, there rises up before us - Nothingness.

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4 months 1 week ago

To the Whigs of the seventeenth century we owe it that we have a House of Commons. To the Whigs of the nineteenth century we owe it that the House of Commons has been purified. The abolition of the slave trade, the abolition of colonial slavery, the extension of popular education, the mitigation of the rigour of the penal code, all, all were effected by that party; and of that party, I repeat, I am a member. I look with pride on all that the Whigs have done for the cause of human freedom and of human happiness. I see them now hard pressed, struggling with difficulties, but still fighting the good fight. At their head I see men who have inherited the spirit and the virtues, as well as the blood, of old champions and martyrs of freedom... While one shred of the old banner is flying, by that banner will I at least be found.

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Speech in Edinburgh (29 May 1839), quoted in Speeches of the Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay, M.P. (1854), pp. 183-184
3 months 1 week ago

May not this religious reticence, in these devout good souls, be perhaps a merit, and sign of health in them? Jocelin, Eadmer, and such religious men, have as yet nothing of 'Methodism;' no Doubt or even root of Doubt. Religion is not a diseased self-introspection, an agonising inquiry: their duties are clear to them, the way of supreme good plain, indisputable, and they are traveling on it. Religion lies over them like an all-embracing heavenly canopy, like an atmosphere and life-element, which is not spoken of, which in all things is presupposed without speech. Is not serene or complete Religion the highest aspect of human nature.

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He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.

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B 30
3 months 3 days ago

We cannot abdicate our conscience to an organization, nor to a government. 'Am I my brother's keeper?' Most certainly I am! I cannot escape my responsibility by saying the State will do all that is necessary. It is a tragedy that nowadays so many think and feel otherwise.

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p. 309
5 months 2 weeks ago

Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be . . . optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?

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5 months 2 weeks ago

I am displeased with everything. If they made me God, I would immediately resign.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.

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3 months 3 days ago

The way to true mysticism leads up through rational thought to deep experience of the world and of our will-to-live. We must all venture once more to be "thinkers," so as to reach mysticism, which is the only direct and the only profound world-view. We must all wander in the field of knowledge to the point where knowledge passes over into experience of the world. We must all, through thought, become religious.This rational thought must become the prevailing force among us, for all the valuable ideas that we need develop out of it. In no other fire than that of the mysticism of reverence for life can the broken sword of idealism be forged anew.

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7 months 1 week ago

The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration: this may be called perfect virtue.

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3 months 1 week ago

Perhaps its destruction has been brought about only that it may be raised up again to a better destiny. Oftentimes a reverse has but made room for more prosperous fortune. Many structures have fallen only to rise to a greater height.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

I like a church, I like a cowl, I love a prophet of the soul, And on my heart monastic aisles Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles; Yet not for all his faith can see, Would I that cowled churchman be. Why should the vest on him allure, Which I could not on me endure?

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The Problem, st. 1
6 months 3 weeks ago

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

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Act 1
7 months 2 weeks ago

The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

You should hammer your iron when it is glowing hot.

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Maxim 262
2 months 3 weeks ago

All hypotheses respecting the manner in which the elements of inorganic bodies are arranged in space, must be constructed with regard to the general facts of crystallization.

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In Administrative Behavior, bounded rationality is largely characterized as a residual category - rationality is bounded when it falls short of omniscience. And the failures of omniscience are largely failures of knowing all the alternatives, uncertainty about relevant exogenous events, and inability to calculate consequences. There was needed a more positive and formal characterization of the mechanisms of choice under conditions of bounded rationality... Two concepts are central to the characterization: search and satisficing.

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p. 502; As cited in Barros (2010, p. 464-5).
7 months ago

The mad mob does not ask how it could be better, only that it be different. And when it then becomes worse, it must change again. Thus they get bees for flies, and at last hornets for bees. Whether Soldiers Can Also Be in a State of Grace

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1526
5 months 3 weeks ago

Strong as it looks at the outset, State-agency perpetually disappoints every one. Puny as are its first stages, private efforts daily achieve results that astound the world.

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Vol. 3, Ch. VII, Over-Legislation
6 months 1 week ago

Authority and place demonstrate and try the tempers of men, by moving every passion and discovering every frailty.

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Comparison of Demosthenes and Cicero 3 (Tr. Dryden and Clough)
6 months 3 days ago

Having departed from your house, turn not back; for the furies will be your attendants.

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Symbol 15
7 months 3 weeks ago
It is mere illusion and pretty sentiment to expect much from mankind if he forgets how to make war. And yet no means are known which call so much into action as a great war, that rough energy born of the camp, that deep impersonality born of hatred, that conscience born of murder and cold-bloodedness, that fervor born of effort of the annihilation of the enemy, that proud indifference to loss, to one's own existence, to that of one's fellows, to that earthquake-like soul-shaking that a people needs when it is losing its vitality.
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5 months 3 weeks ago

All those instances to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted Nature recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction of their youth.

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No. 1, volume v, p. 286
5 months 4 weeks ago

Few men think; yet all have opinions.

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Philonous to Hylas. The Second Dialogue. This appears in a passage first added in the third edition
2 months 1 week ago

The standard bearers have grown weak in the defense of their priceless heritage, and the powers of darkness have been strengthened thereby. Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character; it becomes lack of power to act with courage proportionate to danger. All this must lead to the destruction of our intellectual life unless the danger summons up strong personalities able to fill the lukewarm and discouraged with new strength and resolution.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

All's well that ends well; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive.

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Letter to Lucy Donnely, April 22, 1906
5 months 1 week ago

If all men, by the act of being born, are destined to suffer violence, that is a truth to which the empire of circumstances closes their minds.

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in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 163
7 months 1 day ago

Libraries are as the shrine where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.

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2 months 1 week ago

I do not think that religion is the most important element. We are held together rather by a body of tradition, handed down from father to son, which the child imbibes with his mother's milk. The atmosphere of our infancy predetermines our idiosyncrasies and predilections.

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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 1 week ago

Men ... ask nothing better, it would seem, than to leave their destiny, their life, and all their thoughts in the hands of a few men with a gift for the exclusive manipulation of this or that technique.

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"Wave Mechanics," p. 75
2 months 3 weeks ago

You have your brush, you have your colours, you paint paradise, then, in you go.

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As quoted in Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 2, No. 2, Nikos Kazantzakis

Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.

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F 100
2 months 2 weeks ago

One is immediately struck with the obstinacy and rigid consistency with which Lenin and his comrades stuck to this slogan, a slogan which is in sharp contradiction to their otherwise outspoken centralism in politics as well as to the attitude they have assumed towards other democratic principles. Wile they showed a quite cool contempt for the Constituent Assembly, universal suffrage, freedom of press and assemblage, in short for the whole apparatus of basic democratic liberties of the people which, taken all together, constituted the "right of self-determination" inside Russia, they treated the right of self-determination of peoples as a jewel of democratic policy for the sake of which all practical considerations of real criticism had to be stilled.

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Chapter Three, "Nationalities Question"
6 months 3 weeks ago

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power. You can think about only what you know, so you ought to learn something; on the other hand, you can know only what you have thought about.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 22, § 257 "On Thinking for Yourself" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms(1970) as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
2 months 3 weeks ago

Poetry can be written only because it has been written.

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"The Responsibility of the Poet"
4 months 3 weeks ago

If people would but understand that they are not the sons of some fatherland or other, nor of Governments, but are sons of God, and can therefore neither be slaves nor enemies one to another - those insane, unnecessary, worn-out, pernicious organizations called Governments, and all the sufferings, violations, humiliations and crimes which they occasion, would cease.

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Patriotism and Government

A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.

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As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) edited by Alan Lindsay Mackay, p. 153
4 months 1 week ago

All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are moreover so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them.

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3 months 3 days ago

When you tell a girl how beautiful she is, she will say, "Now isn't that just like a man! All you men think about is bodies. OK, so I'm beautiful, but I got my body from my parents and it was just luck. I prefer to be admired for myself, not my chassis." Poor little chauffeur! All she is saying is that she has lost touch with her own astonishing wisdom and ingenuity, and wants to be admired for some trivial tricks that she can perform with her conscious attention. And we are all in the same situation, having dissociated ourselves from our bodies and from the whole network of forces in which bodies can come to birth and live.

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p. 112

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