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1 week 6 days ago

Louisiana, as ceded by France to the United States, is made a part of the United States; its white inhabitants shall be citizens, and stand, as to their rights and obligations, on the same footing with other citizens of the United States, in analogous situations.

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Draft of proposed Amendment to the Constitution by Jefferson, who thought an amendment would be necessary to authorize the Louisiana Purchase to be incorporated into the United States
3 weeks ago

The wise man who has charge of governing the empire should know the cause of disorder before he can put it in order. Unless he knows its cause, he cannot regulate it.

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Book 4; Universal Love I
2 months 3 weeks ago

If we accept values as given and consistent, if we postulate an objective description of the world as it really is, and if we assume that the decision maker's computational powers are unlimited, then two important consequences follow. First, we do not need to distinguish between the real world and the decision maker's perception of it: he or she perceives the world as it really is. Second, we can predict the choices that will be made by a rational decision maker entirely from our knowledge of the real world and without a knowledge of the decision maker's perceptions or modes of calculation. (We do, of course, have to know his or her utility function.)

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The natural price, therefore, is, as it were, the central price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating.

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Chapter VII, p. 69.
4 months 2 weeks ago

The state is primarily an organization for killing foreigners.

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Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind (1960), p. 83
3 months 1 week ago

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

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1 week 6 days ago

The heart unites whatever the mind separates, pushes on beyond the arena of necessity and transmutes the struggle into love.

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3 months 1 week ago

Originally, ethics has no existence apart from religion, which holds it in solution.

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Ch. 1, The Confusion of Ethical Thought
5 months 1 week ago

Zeus, the god of gods, who rules according to law, and is able to see into such things, perceiving that an honourable race was in a woeful plight, and wanting to inflict punishment on them, that they might be chastened and improve, collected all the gods into their most holy habitation, which, being placed in the centre of the world, beholds all created things.

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3 months 1 week ago

The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries.

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3 months 1 week ago

I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

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3 months 5 days ago

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.

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An Essay on Liberation Beacon Press, 1969, p. 109
3 months 3 weeks ago

It is better to suffer, than to do, wrong.

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3 months 5 days ago

We return to our analysis of qualities. Something preserves itself throughout this flux, something that passes into other things, but also stands against them as a being for itself. This something can exist only as the product of a process through which it integrates its otherness with its own proper being. Hegel says that its existence comes about through 'the negation of the negation.' The first negation is the otherness in which it turns, and the second is the incorporation of this other into its own self. Such a process presupposes that things possess a certain power over their movement, that they exist in a certain self-relation that enables them to 'mediate' their existential conditions.

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P. 132-133
4 months 2 weeks ago

This bird sees the white man come and the Indian withdraw, but it withdraws not. Its untamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge... It remains to remind us of aboriginal nature.

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March 23, 1856; of the crow
3 weeks 2 days ago

I understand the task of sociology to be description and determination of the historical-psychological origin of those forms in which interactions take place between human beings. The totality of these interactions, springing from the most diverse impulses, directed toward the most diverse objects, and aiming at the most diverse ends, constitutes "society."

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p. 167
5 months ago

God, the supreme being, is neither circumscribed by space, nor touched by time; he cannot be found in a particular direction, and his essence cannot change. The secret conversation is thus entirely spiritual; it is a direct encounter between God and the soul, abstracted from all material constraints.

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3 weeks 3 days ago

Listen intently to a voice singing without words. It may charm you into crying, force you to dance, fill you with rage, or make you jump for joy. You can't tell where the music ends and the emotions begin, for the whole thing is a kind of music-the voice playing on your nerves as the breath plays on a flute. All experience is just that, except that its music has many more dimensions than sound. It vibrates in the dimensions of sight, touch, taste, and smell, and in the intellectual dimension of symbols and words-all evoking and playing upon each other.

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p. 95
3 months 3 days ago

Whoever desires to live among men has to obey their laws-this is what the secular morality of Western civilization comes down to. ... Rationality in the form of such obedience swallows up everything, even the freedom to think.

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p. 29.
1 week 6 days ago

This book is not a biography; it is the confession of every man who struggles. In publishing it I have fulfilled my duty, the duty of a person who struggled much, was embittered in his life,

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4 months 1 week ago

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

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Ch. 4
1 week 3 days ago

Concentrate every minute like a Roman-like a man-on doing what's in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions.

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(Hays translation) II, 5
4 months 3 weeks ago

Neither did the dispensation of God vary in the times after our Saviour came into the world; for our Saviour himself did first show His power to subdue ignorance, by His conference with the priests and doctors of the law, before He showed His power to subdue nature by His miracles. And the coming of this Holy Spirit was chiefly figured and expressed in the similitude and gift of tongues, which are but vehicula scientiæ.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The first-beginnings of things cannot be seen by the eyes.

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Book I, line 268 (tr. Munro)
1 month 4 days ago

The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind.

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The life of Friedrich Schiller: Comprehending an examination of his works (1825).
2 months 2 days ago

The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.

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Hallam', The Edinburgh Review (September 1828), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review, Vol. I (1843), p. 210

Every man knows that in his work he does best and accomplishes most when he has attained a proficiency that enables him to work intuitively. That is, there are things which we come to know so well that we do not know how we know them. So it seems to me in matters of principle. Perhaps we live best and do things best when we are not too conscious of how and why we do them.

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3 months 5 days ago

... I once shook hands with Longfellow at a garden party in 1881; and I often saw Dr. Holmes, who was our neighbor in Beacon Street: but Emerson I never saw.

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p. 50
4 months 3 days ago

Since ancient times, philosophers have maintained that to strive too hard for one's own happiness is self-defeating.

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Chapter 5, Reason And Genes, p. 145
4 months 3 weeks ago

Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.

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2 months 1 week ago

There is but a step between a proud man's glory and his disgrace.

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Maxim 138
1 week 5 days ago

More is given to us than to any people at any time before; and, therefore, more is required of us. We have made, and still are making, enormous advances on material lines. It is necessary that we commensurately advance on moral lines. Civilization, as it progresses, requires a higher conscience, a keener sense of justice, a warmer brotherhood, a wider, loftier, truer public spirit. Falling these, civilization must pass into destruction. It cannot be maintained on the ethics of savagery. For civilization knits men more and more closely together, and constantly tends to subordinate the individual to the whole, and to make more and more important social conditions.

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Ch. 21 : Conclusion
4 months 2 weeks ago

I thought that I was the only historian, that had at once neglected present power, interest, and authority, and the cry of popular prejudices; and as the subject was suited to every capacity, I expected proportional applause. But miserable was my disappointment: I was assailed by one cry of reproach, disapprobation, and even detestation; English, Scotch, and Irish, Whig and Tory, churchman and sectary, freethinker and religionist, patriot and courtier, united in their rage against the man, who had presumed to shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles I and the Earl of Strafford.

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My Own Life' (1776), quoted in David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-1777), ed. Eugene Miller (1985), p. xxxvii

The owl of Minerva first begins her flight with the onset of dusk.

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2 months 2 days ago

At last I have attained true glory. As I walked through Fleet Street the day before yesterday, I saw a copy of Hume at a bookseller's window with the following label: "Only 2l. 2s. Hume's History of England in eight volumes, highly valuable as an introduction to Macaulay." I laughed so convulsively that the other people who were staring at the books took me for a poor demented gentleman.

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Alas for poor David! Journal entry (8 March 1849), quoted in George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Volume II (1876), p. 253
4 months 2 weeks ago

As to the Approbation or Esteem of those Blockheads who call themselves the Public, & whom a Bookseller, a Lord, a Priest, or a Party can guide, I do most heartily despise it.

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Letter 138, To Gilbert Elliot of Minto; August 9, 1757

I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but I admire even more his contribution to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and body as one, and not two separate things.

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3 months 1 week ago

A finite interval of time generally contains an innumerable series of feelings; and when these become welded together in association the result is a general idea.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Boldness formerly was not the character of Atheists as such. ... But of late they are grown active, designing, turbulent, and seditious.

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"Thoughts on French Affairs" (December 1791), in Three Memorials on French Affairs (1797), p. 53
4 months 2 weeks ago

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

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January 5, 1856

The cause of anger is the belief that we are injured; this belief, therefore, should not be lightly entertained. We ought not to fly into a rage even when the injury appears to be open and distinct: for some false things bear the semblance of truth. We should always allow some time to elapse, for time discloses the truth.

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De Ira (On Anger): Book 2, cap. 22, line 2 Alternate translation: Time discovers truth. (translator unknown).
4 months 3 weeks ago

We must not attach knowledge to the mind, we have to incorporate it there.

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Ch. 25
3 months 4 days ago

Even to-day, in spite of some signs which are making a tiny breach in that sturdy faith, even to-day, there are few men who doubt that motorcars will in five years' time be more comfortable and cheaper than to-day. They believe in this as they believe that the sun will rise in the morning. The metaphor is an exact one. For, in fact, the common man, finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes that it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly-endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice.... These traits together make up the well-known psychology of the spoilt child. Chap.

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VI: The Dissection Of The Mass-Man Begins
2 months 2 weeks 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
1 month 1 week ago

We do not have and cannot have any means of discovering whether or not we are carried along in a uniform motion of translation.

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L'état actuel et l'avenir de la physique mathematique
2 months 3 weeks ago

They certainly demonstrate that Seth, whether an aspect of Jane Robert's unconscious mind or a genuine "spirit," was of a high level of intelligence. Yet when Jane Roberts produced a book that purported to be the after-death journal of the philosopher William James, it was difficult to take it seriously. James's works are noted for their vigour and clarity of style; Jane Robert's "communicator" writes like an undergraduate . . . there is a clumsiness here that is quite unlike James's swift-moving, colloquial prose.

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p. 390
4 months 3 weeks ago

In the same manner as we are cautioned by religion to show our faith by our works we may very properly apply the principle to philosophy, and judge of it by its works; accounting that to be futile which is unproductive, and still more so, if instead of grapes and olives it yield but the thistle and thorns of dispute and contention.

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Aphorism 73
4 months 1 week ago

Jupiter: I committed the first crime by creating men as mortals. After that, what more could you do, you the murderers?

Aegisteus: Come on; they already had death in them: at most you simply hastened things a little.

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Act 2

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