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2 months 2 weeks ago

The might which kills outright is an elementary and coarse form of might. How much more varied in its devices; how much more astonishing in its effects is that other which does not kill; or which delays killing.

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in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 155
3 weeks 4 days ago

The Soldier is perhaps one of the most difficult things to realise; but Governments, had they not realised him, could not have existed: accordingly he is here.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success.

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"Eliot and Conservatism" (p. 194)
4 months 4 days ago

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.

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Works and Days
5 months 1 day ago

This was her finest role and the hardest one to play. Choosing between heaven and a ridiculous fidelity, preferring oneself to eternity or losing oneself in God is the age-old tragedy in which each must play his part.

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1 month 1 week ago

The idea of a law of progress, or of an all but irresistible tendency to general improvement, is then merely a superstition, one of the tents of the modernist pseudo-religion of humanism. Even if such a law or tendency existed and were demonstrable, the liberal faith in progress would for Santayana be pernicious. For it leads to a corrupt habit of mind in which things are valued, not for their present excellence or perfection, but instrumentally, as leading to something better; and it insinuates into thought and feeling a sort of historical theodicy, in which past evil is justified as a means to present or future good. The idea of progress embodies a kind of time-worship (to adopt an expression used by Wyndham Lewis) in which the particularities of our world are seen and valued, not in themselves, but for what they might perhaps become, thereby leaving us destitute of the sense of the present and, at the same time, of the perspective of eternity.

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'Santayana's Alternative' (p.67-8)
2 months 2 weeks ago

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and, if need be, die for it.

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p. 100; Ch. 12, April 28, 1938.
2 months 2 weeks ago

You ask me why I do not write something... I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.

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Letter to a friend, quoted in The Life of Florence Nightingale (1913) by Edward Tyas Cook, p. 94

A vehement eros runs through the Universe. It is like the ether: harder than steel, softer than air. It cuts through and passes beyond all things, it flees and escapes.

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4 months 1 week ago

The child must be brought up free (that he allow others to be free). He must learn to endure the restraint to which freedom subjects itself for its own preservation (experience no subordination to his command). Thus he must be disciplined. This precedes instruction. Training must continue without interruption. He must learn to do without things and to be cheerful about it. He must not be obliged to dissimulate, he must acquire immediate horror of lies, must learn so to respect the rights of men that they become an insurmountable wall for him. His instruction must be more negative. He must not learn religion before he knows morality. He must be refined, but not spoiled (pampered). He must learn to speak frankly, and must assume no false shame. Before adolescence he must not learn fine manners ; thoroughness is the chief thing. Thus he is crude longer, but earlier useful and capable.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 3
2 months 2 days ago

Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things.

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(p. 90)
2 months 2 weeks ago

Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as the place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it - fragmentary and uncertain though it is - that distinguishes man from all other animals.

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p. 59
3 months 2 days ago

The pleasures of self-approbation, together with the right cultivation of all our pleasures, require individual independence. Without independence men cannot become either wise, or useful, or happy.

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"Summary of Principles" 1.3
2 months 3 weeks ago

Man must be free of it all, of his bad conscience and of the bad salvation from this conscience in order to become in truth the way. Now, he no longer promises others the fulfillment of his duties, but promises himself the fulfillment of man.

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p. 178
3 months 1 week ago

The following general definition of an animal: a system of different organic molecules that have combined with one another, under the impulsion of a sensation similar to an obtuse and muffled sense of touch given to them by the creator of matter as a whole, until each one of them has found the most suitable position for it shape and comfort.

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No. 51
2 months 2 days ago

Cartoons drove the photo back to myth and dream screen.

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4 months 6 days ago

Let me have none of your Popish stuff! Get away with you, good morning.

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Last words (June 1809), as quoted in The Fortnightly, vol. 25; vol. 31, p. 398

Animals come when their names are called. Just like human beings.

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p. 67e
2 weeks ago

In these days the angel of topology and the devil of abstract algebra fight for the soul of each individual mathematical domain.

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Weyl, Hermann. Invariants. Duke Math. J. 5 (1939), no. 3, 489--502. doi:10.1215/S0012-7094-39-00540-5. http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.dmj/1077491405.
2 months 3 weeks ago

To all this, someone is sure to object that life ought to subject itself to reason, to which we will reply that nobody ought to do what he is unable to do, and life cannot subject itself to reason. "Ought, therefore can," some Kantian will retort. To which we shall demur: "Cannot, therefore ought not." And life cannot submit itself to reason, because the end of life is living and not understanding.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The issue over there being classes seems more a question of convenient conceptual scheme; the issue over there being centaurs, or brick houses on Elm Street, seems more a question of fact. But I have been urging that this difference is only one of degree, and that it turns upon our vaguely pragmatic inclination to adjust one strand of the fabric of science rather than another in accommodating some particular recalcitrant experience. Conservatism figures in such choices, and so does the quest for simplicity.

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"Two Dogmas of Empiricism"
2 weeks 5 days ago

God, our Father, has given us the life and the art of healing to protect and maintain it.

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4 months 3 days ago

Virtue is the death of conscience because it is the habit of Good, and yet the ethic of the honest man infinitely prefers virtue to the noblest agonies of conscience. Thus, being poses nonbeing and eliminates it. There is only being.

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p. 402
4 months 1 week ago

The universal and lasting establishment of peace constitutes not merely a part, but the whole final purpose and end of the science of right as viewed within the limits of reason.

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2 months 1 week ago

To conclude: there are two well-known minor ways in which language has mattered to philosophy. On the one hand there is a belief that if only we produce good definitions, often marking out different senses of words that are confused in common speech, we will avoid the conceptual traps that ensnared our forefathers. On the other hand is a belief that if only we attend sufficiently closely to our mother tongue and make explicit the distinctions there implicit, we shall avoid the conceptual traps. One or the other of these curiously contrary beliefs may nowadays be most often thought of as an answer to the question Why does language matter to philosophy? Neither seems to me enough.

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Ian Hacking (1975), Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?, p. 7.
2 days ago

They also gave it the title of "opinion," because truth and falsity lie in opinion. And they called it "movement," "generation," "change," "division," "length," "multiplication," "addition," "kinship," "relativity," "the ratio in proportionality." For the relation of two numbers is of every conceivable form.

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On the Dyad
4 months 3 days ago

Listen to me: a family man is never a real family man. An assassin is never entirely assassin. They play a role, you understand. While a dead man, he is really dead. To be or not to be, right?

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Hugo, Act 4, sc. 6
3 months ago

There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.

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4 months 1 week ago

I suppose the body to be nothing but a statue or machine made of earth, which God forms with the explicit intention of making it as much as possible like us.

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Descartes, René (1662). Le Homme (The Treatise on Man), XI:119, CSM I:99 in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Descartes and the Pineal Gland - 2.1 "The Treatise of Man".
2 months 3 weeks ago

Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself - that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks - he lies to himself. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech - this thing that they call a social product - was made for lying.

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Niebla [Mist]
4 months 4 days ago

The gods sell anything to everybody at a fair price.

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Quotation and Originality
1 month 3 weeks ago

We should be clear that neither genuine religious nor genuine moral impulses will ever be expressed in terms that tie the two essentially together. If you view religion as necessary for ethics, you've reduced us to the ethical level of 4 year olds. "If you follow these commandments you'll go to heaven, if you don't' you'll burn in hell" is just a spectacular version of the carrots and sticks with which you raise your children.

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4 weeks 1 day ago

To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.

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Letter to his elder sister Henriette (1841).
1 week 5 days ago

Heinrich Himmler's political tendencies were philo-monarchist and Right-wing conservative, inherited from his father who had been the loyalist instructor of Heinrich, hereditary prince of Bavaria. He was especially fascinated by the ideal of the Order of Teutonic Knights, which we spoke of earlier. He wanted to make the SS a corps that would perform the same function of the state's central nucleus that the nobility had played with its unquestioning loyalty to the regime, but in a new form. For the formation of a man of the SS, he considered a blend of Spartan spirit and Prussian discipline. But he also had in view the order of Jesuits (Hitler jokingly used to call Himmler 'my Ignatius of Loyola').

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3 months 1 week ago

I intend no Monopoly, but a Community in Learning; I study not for my own sake only, but for theirs that study not for themselves.

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Section 3
4 months 3 days ago

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.

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L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason)
5 months 1 week ago
It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!
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2 months 1 week ago

Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is a generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.

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"The Precession of Simulacra," p. 1

Let opinion be taken away, and no man will think himself wronged. If no man shall think himself wronged, then is there no more any such thing as wrong.

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IV. 7, trans. Méric Casaubon
2 months 3 weeks ago

From the same it proceedeth,that men gives different names, to one and the same thing, from the difference of their own passions: As they that approve a private opinion, call it Opinion; but they that mislike it, Haeresie: and yet haeresie signifies no more than private opinion; but has only agreater tincture of choler.

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The First Part, Chapter 11, p. 50
4 months 5 days ago

Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.

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Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League in London, March 1850
5 months 1 day ago

The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Power is more 'spacious' than violence. And violence becomes power if it 'gives itself more time.' Looked at from this perspective, power rests on an excess of space and time.

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4 months 5 days ago

Since property here exists in the form of stock, its movement and transfer become purely a result of gambling on the stock exchange, where the little fish are swallowed by the sharks and the lambs by the stock exchange wolves.

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Vol. III, Ch. XXVII, The Role of Credit, p. 440.
4 months 4 days ago

Pray go back and recollect one of the conclusions to which I sought to lead you in my very first lecture. You may remember how I there argued against the notion that the worth of a thing can be decided by its origin. Our spiritual judgment, I said, our opinion of the significance and value of a human event or condition, must be decided on empirical grounds exclusively. If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology; if not, we ought to make short work of it, no matter what supernatural being may have infused it.

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Lecture IX, "Conversion, concluded"
4 months 3 weeks ago

The Yin based its propriety on that of the Xia, and what it added and subtracted is knowable. The Zhou has based its propriety on that of the Shang and what it added and subtracted is knowable. In this way, what continues from the Chou, even if 100 generations hence, is knowable.

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4 months 1 week ago

This return of Republics back to their principles also results from the simple virtue of one man, without depending on any law that excites him to any execution: none the less, they are of such influence and example that good men desire to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life contrary to those examples.

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Book 3, Ch. 1
3 months 1 week ago

Men that look upon my outside, perusing only my condition, and fortunes, do err in my altitude; for I am above Atlas his shoulders.

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Section 11

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