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4 months ago

To suffer is to produce knowledge.

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6 months 1 week ago
He who lives as children live who does not struggle for his bread and does not believe that his actions possess any ultimate significance remains childlike.
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5 months 5 days ago

All honour to those who can abnegate for themselves the personal enjoyment of life, when by such renunciation they contribute worthily to increase the amount of happiness in the world; but he who does it, or professes to do it, for any other purpose, is no more deserving of admiration than the ascetic mounted on his pillar. He may be an inspiriting proof of what men can do, but assuredly not an example of what they should.

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Ch. 2
5 months 6 days ago

In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 27, § 370 Variant translation: To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties.
5 months 5 days ago

I deny that anyone knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. If men had ever been found in society without women, or women without men, or if there had been a society of men and women in which the women were not under the control of the men, something might have been positively known about the mental and moral differences which may be inherent in the nature of each. What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing - the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.

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Ch. 1
3 months 3 weeks ago

The mollusk's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

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E 52
6 months 1 week ago
But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new "things."
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5 months 5 days ago

Take the question whether other people exist. ...It is plain that it makes for happiness to believe that they exist - for even the greatest misanthropist would not wish to be deprived of the objects of his hate. Hence the belief that other people exist is, pragmatically, a true belief. But if I am troubled by solipsism, the discovery that a belief in the existence of others is 'true' in the pragmatist's sense is not enough to allay my sense of loneliness: the perception that I should profit by rejecting solipsism is not alone sufficient to make me reject it. For what I desire is not that the belief in solipsism should be false in the pragmatic sense, but that other people should in fact exist. And with the pragmatist's meaning of truth, these two do not necessarily go together. The belief in solipsism might be false even if I were the only person or thing in the universe.

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"William James's Conception of Truth" , published in Philosophical Essays, London, 1910
3 months 2 weeks ago

By reducing any quality to quantity, myth economizes intelligence: it understands reality more cheaply.

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p. 153
2 months 3 weeks ago

The ethical life... is maintained in being by a common culture, which also upholds the togetherness of society... Unlike the modern youth culture, a common culture sanctifies the adult state, to which it offers rites of passage.

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"Idle Hands" (p. 127)
5 months 3 weeks ago

I am a Roman citizen.

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Against Verres [In Verrem], part 2, book 5, section 57; reported in Cicero, The Verrine Orations, trans. L. H. G. Greenwood (1935), vol. 2, p. 629
3 months 1 week 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?
5 months 3 days ago

There have been men before ... who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself... as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.

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Ch. 9
1 month 2 weeks ago

Pain he endures, death he awaits.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.

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p. 192
3 months 3 weeks ago

When we desire to lead men to God, we must not simply overthrow their idols. In each of these images we must seek to discover what divine quality he who carved it sought.

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p. 117
1 month 1 day ago

Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.

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IV. 17, trans. George Long
3 months 6 days ago

Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.

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"Imitation and Gender Insubordination" in Inside/Out (1991) edited by Diana Fuss
3 months 2 weeks ago

If one assumes, as I do, that battery is caused by the belief permeating this culture that hierarchical rule and coercive authority are natural, then all our relationships tend to be based on power and domination, and thus all forms of battery are linked.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Thou shouldst not become presumptuous through much treasure and wealth; for in the end it is necessary for thee to leave all.

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5 months 5 days ago

Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.

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The Civil War in France : "The Third Address", May 1871
5 months 5 days ago

You will have seen that my brother died suddenly in Marseilles. I inherit from him a title, but not a penny of money, as he was bankrupt. A title is a great nuisance to me, and I am at a loss what to do, but at any rate I do not wish it employed in connection with any of my literary work. There is, so far as I know, only one method of getting rid of it, which is to be attainted of high treason, and this would involve my head being cut off on Tower Hill. This method seems to me perhaps somewhat extreme...

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Letter to W. W. Norton, 11 March, 1931
2 months 1 week ago

Hayek's blind spot with regard to politics was clear in the early 1980s when the first Thatcher government, in an attempt to reduce inflation and bring the public finances closer to a balanced budget, was raising interest rates and cutting public spending. As he had done during the 1930s, Hayek attacked these policies as not being severe enough. It would be better, he told me in a conversation we had around this time, if Thatcher imposed a more drastic contraction on the economy so that the wage-setting power of the trade unions could be broken. He appeared unfazed by unemployment, which was already higher (more than three million people) than at any time since the 1930s, and would rise much further if his recommendations were accepted.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

This mortal Don Quixote died and descended into hell, which he entered lance on rest, and freed all the condemned, as he freed the galley slaves, and he shut the gates of hell, and tore down the scroll that Dante saw there and replaced it by one on which was written "Long live hope!" and escorted by those whom he had freed, and they laughing at him, he went to heaven. And God laughed paternally at him, and this divine laughter filled his soul with eternal happiness.

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1 month 1 week ago

Love for distance and order, the ability to subordinate one's individualistic and passionate element to principles, the ability to take action and work above mere personhood, a feeling of dignity devoid of vanity are features of the true warrior spirit as essential as those which refer to actual combat.

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pp. 114-115
3 months 2 weeks ago

It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.

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p. 57
6 months 2 days ago

He is a dreamer of ancient times, or rather, of the myths of what ancient times used to be. Such men are harmless in themselves, but their queer lack of realism makes them fools for others.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.

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p. 315
4 months 4 weeks ago

The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. It's matrix-If you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being elliptical in order to come more quickly to my principle theme-is the determination of Being as presence in all sense of this word.

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Structure, Sign and Play
3 months 1 week ago

We will likely also find that the nature of the problem to be solved will be a principal determinant of the mix. With our growing understanding of the organization of judgmental and intuitive processes, of the specific knowledge that of the specific knowledge that is required to perform particular judgmental tasks, and of the cues that evoke such knowledge in situations in which it is relevant, we have a powerful new tool for improving expert judgment. We can specify the knowledge and the recognition capabilities that experts in a domain need to acquire, and use these specifications for designing appropriate learning procedures.

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p. 137.
1 month 3 weeks ago

If you let people follow their feelings, they will be able to do good. This is what is meant by saying that human nature is good.

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Book 6, pt. 1, v. 6
3 months 6 days ago

Nonviolent forms of resistance can and must be aggressively pursued. A practice of aggressive nonviolence is, therefore, not a contradiction in terms. Mahatma Gandhi insisted that satyagraha, or "soul force," his name for a practice and politics of nonviolence, is a nonviolent force, one that consists at once of an "insistence on truth ... that arms the votary with matchless power." To understand this force or strength, there can be no simple reduction to physical strength. At the same time, "soul force" takes an embodied form. The practice of "going limp" before political power is, on the one hand, a passive posture, and is thought to belong to the tradition of passive resistance; at the same time, it is a deliberate way of exposing the body to police power, of entering the field of violence, and of exercising an adamant and embodied form of political agency. It requires suffering, yes, but for the purposes of transforming both oneself and social reality.

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pp. 21-22
5 months 6 days ago

He that thinks diversion may not lie in hard and painful labour, forgets the early rising, hard riding, heat, cold and hunger of huntsmen, which is yet known to be the constant recreation of men of the greatest condition.

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Sec. 206
6 months 2 days 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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1 month 3 weeks ago

And some others that I have seen, were perhaps among the first. There is no third rising. Time sweeps all away with it so fast at this epoch. The Scottish Church has been short-lived, and was late in reaching thither.

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But in fact there is no circle at all in the formulation of our question. Beings can be determined in their being without the explicit concept of the meaning of being having to be already available. If this were not so there could not have been as yet any ontological knowledge. And prob­ably no one would deny the factual existence of such knowledge. It is true that "being" is "presupposed" in all previous ontology, but not as an available concept-not as the sort of thing we are seeking.

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Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)
2 months 3 weeks ago

For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.

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To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976), p. 38
5 months 4 days ago

Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.

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"Walter Savage Landor", from The Dial, xii, 1841
4 months ago

There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom - desire coordinated in the light of all experience - can tell us when to heal and when to kill. To observe processes and to construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy: and because in these days our means and instruments have multiplied beyond our interpretation and synthesis of ideals and ends, our life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. For a fact is nothing except in relation to desire; it is not complete except in relation to a purpose and a whole. Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

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Introduction : On the Uses of Philosophy
3 months 2 days ago

Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.

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(p. 109)
3 months 3 weeks ago

To regiment artists, to make them servants of some particular cause does violence to the very springs of artistic creation. But it does more than that. It betrays the very cause of a better future it would serve, for in its subjugation of the individuality of the artist it annihilates the source of that which is genuinely new. Where the regimentation is successful, it would cause the future to be but a rearrangement of the past.

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5 months 1 week ago

The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it.

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Section 4 : Sceptical Doubts Concerning The Operations of The Understanding
4 months 4 weeks ago

In situations of sparse resources along with degraded self-images and depoliticized sensibilities, one avenue for poor people is in existential rebellion and anarchic expression. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.

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The Role of Law in Progressive Politics in Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America
4 months 3 weeks ago

Speciesism is an attitude of prejudice towards beings because they're not members of our species, so just as racism means that you're prejudiced against beings who are not members of your race and sexism means you're prejudiced against people of the other sex. So we humans tend to be speciesist in we think that any being that is a member of the species homo sapien just automatically has a higher moral status and is more important than any being that is a member of any other species, irrespective of the actual characteristics of those beings.

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Peter Singer - The Genius of Darwin: The Uncut Interviews - Richard Dawkins, 2009.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Who is everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.

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