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7 months 2 days ago

It is impossible that each of the elements should be infinite. For that is body which has interval on all sides; and that is infinite which has extension without bound.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually 'thinking' it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics-the model of all neo-positivistic thinking-lies in just this 'intellectual economy.' Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. ... Reason ... becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced.

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p. 23.
6 months 2 weeks ago

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

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(1).
4 months 2 weeks ago

"A man thinks he is dying for his country," said Anatole France, "but he is dying for a few industrialists." But even that is saying too much. What one dies for is not even so substantial and tangible as an industrialist.

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p. 224
3 months 2 weeks ago

Economic reforms based on the idea of limitless growth in a limited world, can only be maintained by the powerful grabbing the resources of the vulnerable. The resource grab that is essential for "growth" creates a culture of rape-the rape of the earth, of local self-reliant economies, and of women.

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On economic reforms in India and rape in India, from "Vandana Shiva: Our Violent Economy is Hurting Women " article in Yes Magazine
9 months 4 weeks ago

Anybody can become angry, that is easy, but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody's power and it is not easy.

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2 months 1 week ago

The last fact which knowledge can discover is that the world is a manifestation, and in every way a puzzling manifestation, of the universal will to live.

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6 months ago

I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.

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Letter to Sheldon Vanauken (14 December 1950), quoted in Sleuthing C. S. Lewis (2001) by Kathryn Ann Lindskoog, p. 393
5 months 3 weeks ago

In writing what he does not speak, what he would never say and, in truth, would probably never even think, the author of the written speech is already entrenched in the posture of the sophist; the man of non-presence and non-truth. Writing is thus already on the scene. The incompatibility between written and the true is clearly announced at the moment Socrates starts to recount the way in which men are carried out themselves by pleasure, become absent from themselves, forget themselves and die in the thrill of song.

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Plato's Pharmacy, Pharmacia
4 months 2 weeks ago

Warmth, warmth, more warmth! for we are dying of cold and not of darkness. It is not the night that kills, but the frost.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The ego involved in responsibility is me and no one else, me with whom one whould have liked to pair up a sister soul, from whom one would have substitution and sacrifice.

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The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 116
4 months 3 weeks ago

The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities and put themselves in their place. Then, also, is produced the phenomenon of agglomeration, of "the full." For that reason, as Spengler has very well observed, it was necessary, just as in our day, to construct enormous buildings. The epoch of the masses is the epoch of the colossal.

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Chap.II: The Rise Of The Historic Level
1 month 3 weeks ago

The mass of a body is a measure of its energy content.

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2 weeks 6 days ago

"The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."
- Thomas Henry Huxley

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One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.

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Book 2, "The Melodious Child Dead in Me"
2 months 3 weeks ago

Wine is a mixture of moisture and light.

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As quoted in Lorenzo Magalotti's Scientific and Scholarly Letter
5 months 6 days ago

I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.

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Book Four, Chapter VII.

What's crazy to me is that the situation for basic education has become so bad it's not even necessary for you create something new, help develop a new direction and so forth....just posting the great ideas of the past alone is fighting the fight that has to be won, the battle against brain eroding anti-intellectualism.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am opposed. I feel with them, that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

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6 months ago

A conception of justice cannot be deduced from self evident premises or conditions on principles; instead, its justification is a matter of the mutual support of many considerations, of everything fitted together into one coherent view.

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Chapter I, Section 4, p. 21
3 months 1 week ago

Given our anthropocentric bias, thinking of non-human vertebrates not just as equivalent in moral status to toddlers or infants, but as though they were toddlers or infants, is a useful exercise. Such reconceptualisation helps correct our lack of empathy for sentient beings whose physical appearance is different from "us". Ethically, the practice of intelligent "anthropomorphism" shouldn't be shunned as unscientific, but embraced insofar as it augments our stunted capacity for empathy. Such anthropomorphism can be a valuable corrective to our cognitive and moral limitations. This is not a plea to be sentimental, simply for impartial benevolence.

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Reprogramming Predators, BLTC Research, 2009
7 months 2 days ago

Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be, and similarly everything that depends on art or any rational cause, and especially if it depends on the best of all causes. To entrust to chance what is greatest and most noble would be a very defective arrangement.

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6 months 1 day ago

By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manip­ulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms- elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest-will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitari­anism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slo­gans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial-but democracy and free­dom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of sol­diers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.

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Chapter 3, p. 25
4 months 3 weeks ago

Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith - of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

We are not arrogant, not hubristic, to celebrate the sheer bulk and detail of what we know through science. We are simply telling the honest and irrefutable truth. Also honest is the frank admission of how much we don't yet know - how much more work remains to be done. That is the very antithesis of hubristic arrogance. Science combines a massive contribution, in volume and detail, of what we do know with humility in proclaiming what we don't. Religion, by embarrassing contrast, has contributed literally zero to what we know, combined with huge hubristic confidence in the alleged facts it has simply made up.

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The Intellectual and Moral Courage of Atheism
5 months 2 days ago

In England ... everything becomes professional ... even the rogues of that island are pedants.

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"Selected Aphorisms from the Lyceum (1797)"
6 months 2 days ago

Only that position can impart dignity in which we do not appear as servile tools but rather create independently within our circle.

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Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 38
3 weeks ago

"From the fame opinion of a soul distinct from the body came the practice of praying, first for the dead, and then to them with a long train of other absurd opinions, and superstitious practices."
- Joseph Priestley

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6 months 1 day ago

Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.

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Ch.10
6 months 1 day ago

Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.

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Chapter 11 (p. 106)
5 months 3 weeks ago

Kant's philosophy shifts for the first time the whole of modern thought and being (Desein) into the clarity and transparency of the foundation (Begrundung). This determines every attitude toward knowledge since then, as well as the bounds (Abgrenzungen) and appraisals of the sciences in the nineteenth century up to the present time. Therein Kant towers so far above all who precede and follow that even those who reject him or go beyond him still remain entirely dependent upon him.

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p. 55-56
6 months 2 days ago

If you think that your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument, rather than by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young in what is called "education". This last is particularly dastardly, since it takes advantage of the defencelessness of immature minds. Unfortunately it is practiced in greater or less degree in the schools of every civilised country.

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p. 220
4 months 2 weeks ago

If we want a love which will protect the soul from wounds we must love something other than God.

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p. 62
1 month 4 weeks ago

Furthermore, the monad produces itself and is produced from itself, since it is self-sufficient and has no power set over it and is everlasting; and it is evidently the cause of permanence, just as God is thought to be in the case of actual physical things, and to be the preserver and maintainer of natures.

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On the Monad
7 months 2 days ago

Lord Jesus Christ, our foolish minds are weak; they are more than willing to be drawn-and there is so much that wants to draw us to itself. There is pleasure with its seductive power, the multiplicity with its bewildering distractions, the moment with its infatuating importance and the conceited laboriousness of busyness and the careless time-wasting of light-mindedness and the gloomy brooding of heavy-mindedness-all this will draw us away from ourselves to itself in order to deceive us. But you, who are truth, only you, our Savior and Redeemer, can truly draw a person to yourself, which you have promised to do-that you will draw all to yourself. Then may God grant that by repenting we may come to ourselves, so that you, according to your Word, can draw us to yourself-from on high, but through lowliness and abasement.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Those, no doubt, are in some way fortunate who have brought themselves, or have been brought by others, to obey some ultimate principle before the bar of which all problems can be brought. Single-minded monists, ruthless fanatics, men possessed by an all-embracing coherent vision do not know the doubts and agonies of those who cannot wholly blind themselves to reality.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system.

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(p. 298)
6 months 2 days ago

The State is a collection of officials, different for difference purposes, drawing comfortable incomes so long as the status quo is preserved. The only alteration they are likely to desire in the status quo is an increase of bureaucracy and the power of bureaucrats.

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Ch. 12: Free Thought and Official Propaganda
2 months 2 weeks ago

The English, generally remarkable for doing very good things in a very bad manner, seem to have reserved the maturity and plenitude of their awkwardness for the pulpit.

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Vol. I, ch. 3, p. 83
4 months 3 weeks ago

This mutual dependencies no longer the dialectical relationship between master and servant, which has been broken in the struggle for mutual recognition, but rather a vicious circle which encloses both the master and the servant. Do the technicians rule, or is their rule that of the others, who rely on the technicians as their planners and executors?

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p. 33
1 month 4 weeks ago

There is perhaps nothing more interesting than to listen to a superior man talk of what he does not know. He advances slowly, and scarcely puts his foot down without knowing if the ground is solid; he looks for plausible analogies; he tries to attach his ideas to higher and incontestable principles; he always has the tone of looking, never that of teaching; and it often happens that, even if he is mistaken, he leaves a great enough idea of his mental honesty.

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p. 43
4 months 3 weeks ago

Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

The little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world. The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life. Naturally this is not a conscious, intellectual process.

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The Theory of Psychoanalysis
3 months 2 weeks ago

We have classical associations and great names of our own which we can confidently oppose to the most splendid of ancient times. Senate has not to our ears a sound so venerable as Parliament. We respect the Great Charter more than the laws of Solon. The Capitol and the Forum impress us with less awe than our own Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey... The list of warriors and statesmen by whom our constitution was founded or preserved, from De Montfort down to Fox, may well stand a comparison with the Fasti of Rome. The dying thanksgiving of Sydney is as noble as the libation which Thrasea poured to Liberating Jove: and we think with far less pleasure of Cato tearing out his entrails than of Russell saying, as he turned away from his wife, that the bitterness of death was past.

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'History', The Edinburgh Review (May 1828), quoted in The Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay, Vol. I (1860), p. 252
4 months 1 week ago

The similarity between Marxism and neoconservativism might be expressed in the following way: both perspectives say that certain injustices can't be cured under our present system of political democracy and mixed economy. The Marxist concludes that we have to overthrow the present system and the neoconservative concludes that we have to live with the injustices. But they are both wrong.

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How Not to Solve Ethical Problems
6 months 4 days ago

Natural science is throughout either a pure or an applied doctrine of motion.

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Preface, Tr. Bax, 1883

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