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2 months 3 weeks ago

He [the devil] always sends errors into the world in pairs-pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.

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Book IV, chapter 6, "Two Notes"
1 month 1 week ago

Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and - so far as may be - efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests.

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Preface, pp. ix-x
1 month 2 weeks ago

Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.

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2 months 5 days ago

It is difficult to walk at one and the same time many paths of life.

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Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus

There are Plebes in all classes.

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As quoted by Julien Coupat in Interview with Julien Coupat, 2009
1 month 5 days ago

Though he made a joke when asked to do the right thing, he always did it. He was so much more in earnest than he appeared. He did not do himself justice.

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On Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, as quoted in Victorian England : Aspects of English and Imperial History, 1837-1901 (1973) by Lewis Charles Bernard Seaman, p. 108
1 month 3 weeks ago

The breath of an aristocrat is the death rattle of freedom.

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Act I.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one's beloved... it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied.

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Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 123
2 months 3 weeks ago

The society adopts neither rites nor priesthood, and it will never lose sight of the resolution not to advance any thing as a society inconvenient to any sect or sects, in any time or country, and under any government. It will be seen that it is so much the more easy for the society to keep within this circle, because, that the dogmas of the Theophilanthropists are those upon which all the sects have agreed, that their moral is.that upon which there has never been the least dissent; and that the name they have taken expresses the double end of all the sects, that of leading to the adoration of God and love of man.

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Introduction
2 months 3 weeks ago

This sacrifice of common sense is the certain badge which distinguishes slavery from freedom; for when men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon. 

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"Reflections on Titles", Pennsylvania Magazine
2 months 3 weeks ago

In the natural state no concept of God can arise, and the false one which one makes for himself is harmful. Hence the theory of natural religion can be true only where there is no science; therefore it cannot bind all men together.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 60
1 month 2 weeks ago

For the Lawes of Nature (as Justice, Equity, Modesty, Mercy, and (in summe)doing to others, as wee would be done to,) of themselves, without the terrour of some Power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our naturall Passions, that carry us to Partiality, Pride, Revenge, and the like. And Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.

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The Second Part, Chapter 17, p. 85
2 months 3 weeks ago

The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.

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Ch. 2 "On the Problem of a Theory of Scientific Method", Section 11: Methodological Rules as Conventions, p. 32.
3 months 3 weeks ago

The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife etc., is sure to be noticed.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

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Pt II, p. 178
2 months 3 weeks ago

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

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Greatness
1 month 2 weeks ago

What, by a word lacking even in grammar, is called amorality, is a thing that does not exist. If you are unwilling to submit to any norm, you have, nolens volens, to submit to the norm of denying all morality, and this is not amoral, but immoral. It is a negative morality which preserves the empty form of the other.

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Chapter XV: We Arrive At The Real Question
1 month 1 week ago

An imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it - neither higher nor lower.

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p. 240

It is the indignity of being treated as disposable that pushes people towards religious fundamentalism in order to retrieve a sense of self, of meaning, of significance. This is why globalization breeds religious fundamentalism and free markets create terrorism and extremism, not democracy.

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(p80)
3 months 3 weeks ago
Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities? It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a "truth" of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions.
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2 months 1 week ago

Education is an ornament for the prosperous, a refuge for the unfortunate.

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Freeman (1948), p. 161
1 month 2 weeks ago

I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death. Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter.

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Revelation 1:18-19
3 months 3 weeks ago

Titles are an important part of a story and I take considerable care in choosing one. In fact, I cannot start a story until I have chosen a title.

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3 months 1 day ago

There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.

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Book III, Ch. 13
1 month 3 weeks ago

Every state, like every theology, assumes man to be fundamentally bad and wicked.

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As quoted in Michael Bakunin (1937), E.H. Carr, p. 453
1 month 3 weeks ago

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.

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1 month 1 week ago

Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.

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p. 203.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

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1836
3 months 2 days ago

Though I certainly deserve no ill treatment from mortals, yet if the insults and repulses I receive were attended with any advantage to them, I would content myself with lamenting in silence my own unmerited indignities and man's injustice.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

To say, therefore, that thought cannot happen in an instant, but requires a time, is but another way of saying that every thought must be interpreted in another, or that all thought is in signs.

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Vol. V, par. 254
2 months 3 weeks ago

In the name of national security, the Commission's hearings were held in secret, thereby continuing the policy which has marked the entire course of the case. This prompts my second question: If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security? Indeed, precisely the same question must be put here as was posed in France during the Dreyfus case: If the Government is so certain of its case, why has it conducted all its inquiries in the strictest secrecy? "

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16 Questions on the Assassination" in The Minority of One, ed. M.S. Arnoni (1964-09-06), pp. 6-8
2 months 3 weeks ago

The philosophy of nature must not be unduly terrestrial; for it, the earth is merely one of the smaller planets of one of the smaller stars of the Milky Way. It would be ridiculous to warp the philosophy of nature in order to bring out results that are pleasing to the tiny parasites of this insignificant planet. Vitalism as a philosophy, and evolutionism, show, in this respect, a lack of sense of proportion and logical relevance. They regard the facts of life, which are personally interesting to us, as having a cosmic significance, not a significance confined to the earth's surface. Optimism and pessimism, as cosmic philosophies, show the same naive humanism; the great world, so far as we know it from the philosophy of nature, is neither good nor bad, and is not concerned to make us happy or unhappy. All such philosophies spring from self-importance and are best corrected by a little astronomy.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.

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2 weeks 6 days ago

We are interested in others, when they are interested in us.

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Maxim 16

No being can be what he is unless he is putting his essence into action in his field.

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Vol. 3
3 weeks 5 days ago

Distinctive signs, full signs, never seduce us.

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(p. 59)
1 month 3 days ago

Nietzsche's break with Schopenhauer rests on precisely this point; it is a matter of knowing whether the will is unitary or multiple.

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p. 7
1 month 2 weeks ago

It is necessary to insist upon this extraordinary but undeniable fact: experimental science has progressed thanks in great part to the work of men astoundingly mediocre, and even less than mediocre. That is to say, modern science, the root and symbol of our actual civilization, finds a place for the intellectually commonplace man and allows him to work therein with success.

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Chapter XII: The Barbarism Of "Specialisation"
2 months 3 weeks ago

Life has no meaning a priori ... It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.

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p. 58
3 months 2 weeks ago

He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The Bible and science agree in being unable to say anything certainly about what happened before the beginning. There is this difference. The Bible will never be able to tell us. It has reached its final form, and it simply doesn't say. Science, on the other hand, is still developing, and the time may come when it can answer questions that, at present, it cannot.

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2 weeks 2 days ago

People reserve their best thinking for their professional specialties and, next in line, for serious matters confronting the alert citizen -economics, politics, the disposal of nuclear waste, etc. The day's work done, they want to be entertained.

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p. 16
2 months 2 weeks ago

When I say that this phase is necessary, the word phase is perhaps not the most rigorous one. It is not a question of a chronological phase, a given moment, or a page that one day simply will be turned, in order to go on to other things. The necessity of this phase is structural; it is the necessity of an interminable analysis: the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself. Unlike those authors whose death does not await their demise, the time for overturning is never a dead letter.

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p. 41-42
1 month 2 weeks ago

Christian Kings may erre in deducing a Consequence, but who shall Judge?

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The Third Part, Chapter 43, p. 330
2 months 2 weeks ago

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. - And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

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§ 129
2 months 2 weeks ago

People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them - that does not occur to them.

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p. 36e
3 months 3 weeks ago

A person can perhaps succeed in hiding his sins from the world, he can perhaps be foolishly happy that he succeeds, or yet, a little more honest, admit that it is a deplorable weakness and cowardliness that he does not have the courage to become open-but a person cannot hide his sins from himself.

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