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The working class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility.

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3 months 1 week ago

The first and the simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind is Curiosity.

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Part I Section I
4 months 1 week ago

The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.

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Goethe; or, The Writer
3 months 6 days ago

Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

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Then what should we work for? Only this: proper understanding; unselfish action; truthful speech. A resolve to accept whatever happens as necessary and familiar, flowing like water from that same source and spring.

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(Hays translation) IV, 33
4 months 1 week ago

All poetry is misrepresentation.

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An Aphorism attributed to him according to John Stuart Mill (see Mill's essay On Bentham and Coleridge in Utilitarianism edt. by Mary Warnock p. 123).
4 months 1 week ago

The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.

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Ch. 9
1 month 3 weeks ago

For myself I say deliberately, it is better to have a millstone tied round the neck and be thrown into the sea than to share the enterprises of those to whom the world has turned, and will turn, because they minister to its weaknesses and cover up the awful realities which it shudders to look at.

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Aphorism #367, in Aphorisms and Reflections (1907) edited by Henrietta A. Huxley, his widow
4 months 1 week ago

Through laziness and cowardice a large part of mankind, even after nature has freed them from alien guidance, gladly remain immature. It is because of laziness and cowardice that it is so easy for others to usurp the role of guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor!

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3 months 6 days ago

When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.

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1 month 6 days ago

No effective blueprint [of a political alternative to Empire] will ever arise from a theoretical articulation such as ours.

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206
4 months 1 week ago

Manufacture was all the time sheltered by protective duties in the hoe market, by monopolies in the colonial market, and broad as much as possible by differential duties.

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ibid, pp. 183
2 months 2 weeks ago

To require that all of these must be reducible to a single version is to make the mistake of supposing that 'Which are the real objects?' is a question that makes sense independently of our choice of concepts.

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Lecture I: Is There Still Anything to Say about Reality and Truth?
3 months 2 weeks ago

How shall the dead arise, is no question of my faith; to believe only possibilities, is not faith, but mere philosophy.

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Section 48
1 month 3 weeks ago

Only two suppositions seem to be open to us - Either each species of crocodile has been specially created, or it has arisen out of some pre-existing form by the operation of natural causes. Choose your hypothesis; I have chosen mine. I can find no warranty for believing in the distinct creation of a score of successive species of crocodiles in the course of countless ages of time.

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4 months 1 week ago

Rights are, then, the fruits of the law, and of the law alone. There are no rights without law-no rights contrary to the law-no rights anterior to the law. Before the existence of laws there may be reasons for wishing that there were laws-and doubtless such reasons cannot be wanting, and those of the strongest kind;-but a reason for wishing that we possessed a right, does not constitute a right. To confound the existence of a reason for wishing that we possessed a right, with the existence of the right itself, is to confound the existence of a want with the means of relieving it. It is the same as if one should say, everybody is subject to hunger, therefore everybody has something to eat.

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Pannomial Fragments (c. 1831), quoted in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. III (1838), p. 221
5 months 1 week ago

Of things said without any combination, each signifies either substance or quantity or qualification or a relative or where or when or being-in-a-position or having or doing or being affected. To give a rough idea, examples of substance are man, horse; of quantity: four-foot, five-foot; of qualification: white, grammatical; of a relative: double, half, larger; of where: in the Lyceum, in the market-place; of when: yesterday, last-year; of being-in-a-position: is-lying, is sitting; of having: has-shoes-on, has-armour-on; of doing: cutting, burning; of being-affected: being-cut, being-burned.

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4 months 4 days ago

The circle of day and night is the law of the classical world: the most restricted but most demanding of the necessities of the world, the most inevitable but the simplest of the legislations of nature.This was a law that excluded all dialectics and all reconciliation, consequently laying the foundations for the smooth unity of knowledge as well as the uncompromising division of tragic existence. It reigns on a world without darkness, which knows neither effusiveness nor the gentle charms of lyricism. All is waking or dreams, truth or error, the light of being or the nothingness of shadow.

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Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
1 month 4 weeks ago

It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government, that, having become instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or to retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history.

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Speech in the House of Commons
3 months 1 day ago

There are two kinds of means. One kind is external to that which is accomplished; the other kind is taken up into the consequences and remains immanent in them. There are ends which are merely welcome cessations and there are ends that are fulfillments of what went before. The toil of the laborer is too often an antecedent to the wage he receives, as consumption of gasoline is merely a means to transportation. The means cease to act when the "end" is reached; one would be glad, as a rule, to get the result without having to employ the means. They are but the scaffolding.

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4 months 1 week ago

And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad.

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4 months 1 week ago

Our psychological experiences are all equally facts. There is nothing to choose between them. No psychological experience is "truer," so far as we are concerned, than any other. For even if one should correspond more closely to things in themselves as perceived by some hypothetical non-human being, it would be impossible for us to discover which it was. Science is no "truer" than common sense, or lunacy, or art, or religion. It permits us to organize our experience profitably; but tells us nothing about the real nature of the world to which our experiences are supposed to refer. From the internal reality, by which I mean the totality of psychological experiences, it actually separates us. Art, for example, deals with many more aspects of this internal reality than does science, which confines itself deliberately and by convention to the study of one very limited class of experiences - the experiences of sense.

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"One and Many," p. 5-6
3 months 2 days ago

Of all Discourse, governed by desire of Knowledge, there is at last an End, either by attaining, or by giving over.

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The First Part, Chapter 7, p. 30

No human acquisition is stable. Even what appears to us most completely won and consolidated can disappear in a few generations. This thing we call "civilization" - all these physical and moral comforts, all these conveniences, all these shelters, all these virtues and disciplines which have become habit now, on which we count, and which in effect constitute a repertory or system of securities which man made for himself like a raft in the initial shipwreck which living always is - all these securities are insecure securities which in the twinkling of an eye, at the least carelessness, escape from man's hands and vanish like phantoms.

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p. 25
4 months 1 week ago

As the analysis of a substantial composite terminates only in a part which is not a whole, that is, in a simple part, so synthesis terminates only in a whole which is not a part, that is, the world.

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1 week 2 days ago

The Sensations are the 'Objective', the Ideas the 'Subjective' part of every act of perception or knowledge.

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4 months 1 week ago

In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded. They divide their time between labour designed to postpone the moment of dissolution for themselves and frantic struggles to hasten it for others of their kind.

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Dreams and Facts, 1919
1 month 1 day ago

With his sharp power of vision, resolute power of action, I doubt not he could have learned to write Books withal, and speak fluently enough;-he did harder things than writing of Books. This kind of man is precisely he who is fit for doing manfully all things you will set him on doing.

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The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those fantastic "ideas" and looks life in the face, realises that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. As this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost - he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life.

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Chapter XIV: Who Rules The World?
1 week 3 days ago

This is the Supreme Duty of the man who struggles - to set out for the lofty peak which Christ, the first-born sone of salvation, attained. How can we begin? If we are to follow him we must have a profound knowledge of his conflict, we must relive his anguish: his victory over the blossoming snares of the earth, his sacrifice of the great and small joys of men and his ascent from sacrifice to sacrifice, exploit to exploit, to martyrdom's summit, the Cross.

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4 months 1 week ago

In a really equal democracy, every or any section would be represented, not disproportionately, but proportionately. ... Unless they are, there is not equal government, but a government of inequality and privilege: one part of the people rule over the rest: there is a part whose fair and equal share of influence in the representation is withheld from them, contrary to all just government, but, above all, contrary to the principle of democracy, which professes equality as its very root and foundation.

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Ch. VII: Of True and False Democracy; Representation of All, and Representation of the Majority only (p. 248)
4 months 1 week ago

The wraith of Sigmund said. "You know what this is, I suppose. Religious melancholia. Stop while there is time. If you dive, you dive into insanity."

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Pilgrim's Regress 168
3 weeks 3 days ago

My master Attalus used to say: "Evil herself drinks the largest portion of her own poison." The poison which serpents carry for the destruction of others, and secrete without harm to themselves, is not like this poison; for this sort is ruinous to the possessor.

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Line 22
3 months 5 days ago

It makes unavoidably necessary an entirely new organization of society in which production is no longer directed by mutually competing individual industrialists but rather by the whole society operating according to a definite plan and taking account of the needs of all.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

I'll admit, I was a naive globalist. I still believe in the ideal, but, I realize that those that hated the idea so much are the authors of the problem they see in it.

Now, I understand clearly, those that author the problem that makes globalization near impossible are also the ones who insist it will never work, nevertheless, human necessity remains a monolith and universal.

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2 months 6 days ago

In one way or another, all my books have been devoted to expounding and exploring the almost limitless power of the Darwinian principle-power unleashed whenever and wherever there is enough time for the consequences of primordial self-replication to unfold. Preface

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Christianity was an epidemic rather than a religion. It appealed to fear, hysteria and ignorance. It spread across the Western world, not because it was true, but because humans are gullible and superstitious.

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p. 212
2 months 6 days ago

As a liberal I would hesitate to propose a blanket ban on any style of dress because of the implications for individual liberty and freedom of choice.

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As quoted in Richard Dawkins causes outcry after likening the burka to a bin liner (10 August 2010), The Telegraph.

The self-discipline of the Social Democracy is not merely the replacement of the authority of bourgeois rulers with the authority of a socialist central committee. The working class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility.

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Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy
3 months 4 weeks ago

We are but numbers, born to consume resources.

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Book I, epistle ii, line 27
3 months 1 week ago

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to the good.

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Speech in opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings (18 February 1788), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Tenth (1899), p. 48
3 months 2 weeks ago

We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.

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"Conversation Between D'Alembert and Diderot"
4 months 1 week ago

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.

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Chapter I, Section 1, pg. 3-4
4 months 1 week ago

Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.

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3 months ago

The basic word I-Thou can be spoken only with one's whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a Thou to become; becoming I, I say Thou.

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2 months 1 week ago

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

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4 months 1 week ago

One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.

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