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5 months 6 days ago

Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.

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Ch. 31. Of Divine Ordinances, tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842
3 months 3 weeks ago

Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.

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The French Revolution, Bk. V, ch. 4
3 weeks 4 days ago

Be not unwilling in what thou doest, neither selfish nor unadvised nor obstinate; let not over-refinement deck out thy thought; be not wordy nor a busybody.

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III, 5
5 months ago

The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.

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Earliest citation to Paine appears to be in "Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Communism Vol. XXIV". Not found in any of his works.
4 weeks 1 day ago

I thank God that this refreshing childhood vision still lives inside me in all its fullness of color and sound. This is what keeps my mind untouched by wastage, keeps it from withering and running dry. It is the sacred drop of immortal water which prevents me from dying. When I wish to speak of the sea, woman, or God in my writing, I gaze down in my breast and listen carefully to what the child within me says. He dictates to me; and if it sometimes happens that I come close to these great forces of the sea, woman, and God, approach them by means of words and depict them, I owe it to the child who still lives within me. I become a child again to enable myself to view the world always for the first time, with virgin eyes.

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The Son, Ch. 4, p. 49
3 months 2 weeks ago

In a free nation, it matters not whether individuals reason well or ill; it is sufficient that they do reason. Truth arises from the collision and from hence springs liberty, which is a security from the effects of reasoning.

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Quoted by Thomas Erskine in the trial of Thomas Paine, 1792

I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European governments.

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Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington, Paris,
5 months 1 week ago

Do not wonder, if the common people speak more truly than those of high rank; for they speak with more safety.

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Exempla Antithetorum, IX. Laus, Existimatio (Pro.)
3 months 2 weeks ago

All metaphysical theories are inconclusively vulnerable to positivist attack.

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Ch. 9, p. 127
4 months 4 weeks ago

Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given. For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.

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19:11-12 (KJV)
4 months 4 weeks ago

Those who have been inspired to action by the doctrine of the class war will have acquired the habit of hatred, and will instinctively seek new enemies when the old ones have been vanquished. But in actual fact the psychology of the working man in any of the Western democracies is totally unlike that which is assumed in the Communist Manifesto. He does not by any means feel that he has nothing to lose but his chains, nor indeed is this true. The chains which bind Asia and Africa in subjection to Europe are partly riveted by him. He is himself part of a great system of tyranny and exploitation. Universal freedom would remove, not only his own chains, which are comparatively light, but the far heavier chains which he has helped to fasten upon the subject races of the world.

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Ch. VI: International Relations
3 months 3 weeks ago

Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.

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16:23 (KJV)
1 month 2 weeks ago

It is always a genial laughter. Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty; never. No man who can laugh, what we call laughing, will laugh at these things. It is some poor character only desiring to laugh, and have the credit of wit, that does so. Laughter means sympathy.

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5 months 6 days ago

Who does not in some sort live to others, does not live much to himself.

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Book III, Ch. 10
1 month 1 week ago

But both courses are to be avoided; you should not copy the bad simply because they are many, nor should you hate the many because they are unlike you.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.

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Ch. 18: The Taming of Power
4 months 3 weeks ago

A great myth is relevant as long as the predicament of humanity lasts; as long as humanity lasts. It will always work, on those who can receive it, the same catharsis.

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"Haggard Rides Again", in Time and Tide, Vol. XLI, 9/3/1960
5 months 2 weeks ago

Chance seldom interferes with the wise man; his greatest and highest interests have been, are, and will be, directed by reason throughout his whole life.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.

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Pt II, p. 189
3 months 3 weeks ago

The evil of marriage, as is it practiced in the European countries, extends further than we have yet described. The method is for a thoughtless and romantic youth of each sex, to come together, to see each other, for a few times, and under circumstances full of delusion and then to vow eternal attachment. What is the consequence of this? In almost every instance they find themselves deceived. They are reduced to make the best of an irretrievable mistake. They are led to conceive it their wiser policy, to shut their eyes upon realities, happy, if by any perversion of intellect, they can persuade themselves that they were right in their first crude opinion of each other. Thus the institution of marriage is made a system of fraud; and men who carefully mislead their judgement in the daily affair of their life, must be expected to have a crippled judgement in every other concern.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.

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p. 213
3 months 3 weeks ago

From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.

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1 month 1 week ago

We celebrate the most solemn of our Games, dedicating it to the honour of the "Invincible Sun," during which it is not lawful for anything cruel (although necessary), which the previous month presented in its Shows, should be perpetrated on this occasion. The Saturnalia, being the concluding festival, are closely followed in cyclic order by the Festival of the Sun; the which I hope that the Powers above will grant me frequently to chaunt, and to celebrate; and above all others may the Sovereign Sun, lord of the universe! He who proceeding from all eternity in the generative being of the Good, stationed as the central one amidst the central intelligible deities, and replenishing them all with concord, infinite beauty, generative superabundance, and perfect intelligence, and with all blessings collectively without limit of time; and in time present illuminating his station which moves as the centre of all the heavens, his own possession from all eternity!

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2 months 3 weeks ago

With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life.

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(p. 177)
4 months 3 weeks ago

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

My poor opinion is, that the closest connexion between Great Britain and Ireland, is essential to the well being, I had almost said, to the very being, of the two Kingdoms. ... I think indeed that Great Britain would be ruined by the separation of Ireland; but, as there are degrees even in ruin, it would fall the most heavily on Ireland. By such a separation Ireland would be the most completely undone Country in the world; the most wretched, the most distracted and, in the end, the most desolate part of the habitable Globe.

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Letter to an unknown correspondent (February 1797), quoted in R. B. McDowell (ed.)
3 months 3 weeks ago

Sometimes I had an overwhelming urge to speak, not about that, but only to hint that there were some curious things about me which no one knew of. I wanted to find out whether other people had undergone similar experiences. I never succeeded in discovering so much as a trace of them in others. As a result, I had the feeling that I was either outlawed or elect, accursed or blessed.

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p. 41
2 months 3 weeks ago

The greatest of empires, is the empire over one's self.

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Maxim 891

It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read. By the same test the world must judge me. But this does not satisfy the priesthood. They must have a positive, a declared assent to all their interested absurdities. My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest.

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Letter to Mrs. Harrison Smith
5 months 3 weeks ago

For man to become successful, for man to establish himself as the ruler of the planet, it was necessary for him to use his brain as something more than a device to make the daily routine of getting food and evading enemies a little more efficient. Man had to learn to control his environment.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

Now men seem, not unreasonably, to form their notions of the supreme good and of happiness from the lives of men.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

I do not believe that science per se is an adequate source of happiness, nor do I think that my own scientific outlook has contributed very greatly to my own happiness, which I attribute to defecating twice a day with unfailing regularity.

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Letter to W. W. Norton (publisher), 27 January, 1931
2 weeks 4 days ago

We are inclined to overemphasize the material influences in history. The Russians especially make this mistake. Intellectual values and ethnic influences, tradition and emotional factors are equally important. If this were not the case, Europe would today be a federated state, not a madhouse of nationalism.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noises of the street, nor the false dawn of early morning: and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

You don't have to be a scientist - you don't have to play the Bunsen burner - in order to understand enough science to overtake your imagined need and fill that fancied gap. Science needs to be released from the lab into the culture.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

And thus the soul pities God and feels itself pitied by him; loves Him and feels loved by Him, sheltering its misery in the bosom of the eternal and infinite misery, which, in eternalizing itself and infinitizing itself, is the supreme happiness itself.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such ... That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

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5 months 1 week ago

Nay, number (itself) in armies, importeth not much, where the people is of weak courage; for (as Virgil saith) it never troubles the wolf how many the sheep be.

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Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral (1597), XXIX: "Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates."
4 months 4 weeks ago

In democratic countries, the most important private organizations are economic. Unlike secret societies, they are able to exercize their terrorism without illegality, since they do not threaten to kill their enemies, but only to starve them.

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Ch. 12: Powers and forms of governments
3 weeks 4 days ago

If the gods care not for me and for my children, There is a reason for it.

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VII, 41
5 months 3 weeks ago

There's something about a pious man such as he. He will cheerfully cut your throat if it suits him, but he will hesitate to endanger the welfare of your immaterial and problematical soul.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

While there may exist no more than the normal extent of disagreement about the meaning of particular terms or theses contained in these works, there is a startling degree of divergence about the central view, the basic political attitude of Machiavelli.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

At this very moment, I am suffering - as we say in French, j'ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.

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1 month 1 week ago

Would you not think him an utter fool who wept because he was not alive a thousand years ago? And is he not just as much of a fool who weeps because he will not be alive a thousand years from now? It is all the same; you will not be, and you were not. Neither of these periods of time belongs to you.

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