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5 months 2 days ago

If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things - praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts - not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They might break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

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5 months 4 weeks ago

There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules. There is but one moral code that the absurd man can accept, the one that is not separated from God: the one that is dictated. But it so happens that he lives outside that God. As for the others (I mean also immoralism), the absurd man sees nothing in them but justifications and he has nothing to justify. I start out here from the principle of his innocence. That innocence is to be feared. "Everything is permitted," exclaims Ivan Karamazov. That, too, smacks of the absurd. But on condition that it not be taken in a vulgar sense. I don't know whether or not it has been sufficiently pointed out that it is not an outburst of relief or of joy, but rather a bitter acknowledgment of a fact.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

If people were told: what makes carnal desire imperious in you is not its pure carnal element. It is the fact that you put into it the essential part of yourself-the need for Unity, the need for God - they wouldn't believe it. To them it seems obvious that the quality of imperious need belongs to the carnal desire as such. In the same way it seems obvious to the miser that the quality of desirability belongs to gold as such, and not to its exchange value.

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2 months 4 weeks ago

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

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Prince Otto, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
3 months 2 weeks ago

The uniting of Orthodoxy with state absolutism came about on the soil of a non-belief in the Divineness of the earth, in the earthly future of mankind; Orthodoxy gave away the earth into the hands of the state because of its own non-belief in man and mankind, because of its nihilistic attitude towards the world. Orthodoxy does not believe in the religious ordering of human life upon the earth, and it compensates for its own hopeless pessimism by a call for the forceful ordering of it by state authority.

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Nihilism On A Religious Soil
2 months 4 weeks ago

We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcase, has most time to consider others.

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314
3 months 1 day ago

The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.

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(p. 168)
3 months 4 weeks ago

"I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside." This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.

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5 months 1 week ago

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

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Ch. 39
4 months 3 weeks ago

Remember Bostrom's definition of existential risk, which refers to the annihilation not of human beings, but of "Earth-originating intelligent life." The replacement of our species by some other form of conscious intelligent life is not in itself, impartially considered, catastrophic. Even if the intelligent machines kill all existing humans, that would be...a very small part of the loss of value that Parfit and Bostrom believe would be brought about by the extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life. The risk posed by the development of AI, therefore, is not so much whether it is friendly to us, but whether it is friendly to the idea of promoting wellbeing in general, for all sentient beings it encounters, itself included.

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Chapter 15: Preventing Human Extinction (p. 176)

A horse at the end of the race...A dog when the hunt is over...A bee with its honey stored...And a human being after helping others. They don't make a fuss about it. They just go on to something else, as the vine looks forward to bearing fruit again in season. We should be like that. Acting almost unconsciously.

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(Hays translation) V, 6
3 months 3 weeks ago

Society ... can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens.

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p. 72
5 months 4 days ago

I don't care for the applause one gets by saying what others are thinking; I want actually to change people's thoughts. Power over people's minds is the main personal desire of my life; and this sort of power is not acquired by saying popular things.

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Letter to Lucy Martin Donnelly, February 10, 1916
1 month 4 weeks ago

Liberal values like tolerance and individual freedom are prized most intensely when they are denied: People who live in brutal dictatorships want the simple freedom to speak, associate, and worship as they choose. But over time life in a liberal society comes to be taken for granted and its sense of shared community seems thin.

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When thinking about Utilitarianism, the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people, I always caveat by saying “with mitigation”. We already know the common attack on Utilitarianism is the majority crushes those not in the majority. This is a problem that comes from any group that’s larger than any other group. Unless we want absolute atomization, in an absolute sense, this will always be an issue that has to be addressed. It’s not particular to Utilitarianism.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

If you know these things, happy you are if you do them.

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13:17, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures
5 months 2 days ago

So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: Hell is other people.

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Garcin, Act 1, sc. 5
5 months 1 week ago

In my opinion, all things in nature occur mathematically.

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Sources: Correspondence with Mersenne note for line 7 (1640), page 36, Die Wiener Zeit page 532 (2008); StackExchange Math Q/A Where did Descartes write...
1 month 3 days ago

If by religion, we are understand sectarian dogmas, in which no two of them agree, then your exclamation on that hypothesis is just, "that this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it." But if the moral precepts, innate in man, and made a part of his physical constitution, as necessary for a social being, if the sublime doctrines of philanthropism and deism taught us by Jesus of Nazareth, in which all agree, constitute true religion, then, without it, this would be, as you again say, "something not fit to be named, even indeed, a hell."

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3 months 2 weeks ago

A dangerous form of psychological splitting had to have taken place, and it continues to take place, in the psyches of many African Americans who can on one hand oppose racism, and then on the other hand passively absorb ways of thinking about beauty that are rooted in white supremacist thought.

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5 months 6 days ago

Even if there never have been actions arising from such pure sources, what is at issue here is not whether this or that happened; that, instead, reason by itself and independently of all appearances commands what ought to happen; that, accordingly, actions of which the world has perhaps so far given no example, and whose very practicability might be very much doubted by one who bases everything on experience, are still inflexibly commanded by reason ... because ... duty ... lies, prior to all experience, in the idea of a reason determing the will by means of apriori grounds.

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5 months 1 week ago

Every rich man is avaricious, in my opinion.

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Ch. 14
2 months 1 week ago

Humans already massively intervene in Nature, whether through habitat destruction, captive breeding programs for big cats, "rewilding", etc. So the question is not whether humans should "interfere", but rather what ethical principles should govern our interventions.

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The Antispeciesist Revolution, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 26 Jul. 2013
3 months 6 days ago

Not only does reality resist those who still criticize it, but it also abandons those who defend it. Maybe it is a way for reality to get its revenge from those who claim to believe in it for the sole purpose of eventually transforming it: sending back its supporters to their own desires.

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One man prays thus: How shall I be able to lie with that woman? Do thou pray thus: How shall I not desire to lie with her? Another prays: How shall I be released from this? Another prays: How shall I not desire to be released? Another thus: How shall I not lose my little son? Thou thus: How shall I not be afraid to lose him? In fine, turn thy prayers this way, and see what comes.

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IX, 40
6 months 1 day ago

You want to know whether I can make a long speech, such as you are in the habit of hearing; but that is not my way. Socrates speaking to Alcibiades

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5 months 1 week ago

To turn one's eyes away from Jesus means to turn them to the Law.

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Chapter 2
5 months 3 days ago

Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.

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Considerations by the Way
1 month 1 week ago

One indeed is the Creator of all things, but many are the creative powers revolving in the heavens; we must, therefore, place the influence of the Sun as intermediate with respect to each single operation affecting the earth. Moreover, the principle productive of Life is vastly superabundant in the Intelligible World; our world, also, is evidently full of generative life. It is therefore clear that the life-producing power of the sovereign Sun is intermediate between these two, since the phenomena of Nature bear testimony to the fact; for some kinds of things the Sun brings to perfection, others of them he brings to pass, others he regulates, others he excites, and there exists nothing that, without the creative influence of the Sun, comes to light and is born.

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5 months 1 week ago

The human understanding is unquiet; it cannot stop or rest, and still presses onward, but in vain. Therefore it is that we cannot conceive of any end or limit to the world, but always as of necessity it occurs to us that there is something beyond... But he is no less an unskilled and shallow philosopher who seeks causes of that which is most general, than he who in things subordinate and subaltern omits to do so.

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Aphorism 48
4 months 4 days ago

There ought to be system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The discovery that mass changes with velocity, a discovery made when minute bodies came under consideration, finally forced surrender of the notion that mass is a fixed and inalienable possession of ultimate elements or individuals, so that time is now considered to be their fourth dimension.

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1 month 3 days ago

Every village has its simpleton, and if one does not exist they invent one to pass the time.

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Ch. 8
5 months 3 days ago

In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

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Quotation and Originality
1 month 3 weeks ago

What postulate do we implicitly admit? It is that the duration of two identical phenomena is the same; or... that the same causes take the same time to produce the same effects. ...Is it impossible that experiment may some day contradict our postulate?

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1 month 4 weeks ago

To conceive the good, in fact, is not sufficient; it must be made to succeed among men. To accomplish this less pure paths must be followed.

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Ch. 5.
3 months 2 weeks ago

I have had a larger responsibility of human lives than ever man or woman had before. And I attribute my success to this - I never gave or took an excuse. Yes, I do see the difference now between me and other men. When a disaster happens, I act and they make excuses.

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Letter to Miss H. Bonham Carter, 1861. As quoted in The Gigantic Book of Teachers' Wisdom (2007) by Frank McCourt and Erin Gruwell, p. 410
5 months 3 days ago

The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,-a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

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par. 5
2 months 3 weeks ago

When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.

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Should he have spoken?, The New Criterion (September 2006), p. 22; also in The Roger Scruton Reader (2009) edited by Mark Dooley
5 months 3 days ago

Granted that any practice causes more pain to animals than it gives pleasure to man; is that practice moral or immoral? And if, exactly in proportion as human beings raise their heads out of the slough of selfishness, they do not with one voice answer 'immoral,' let the morality of the principle of utility be for ever condemned.

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Dr. Whewell on Moral Philosophy (1852), in Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical, vol. 2, London: John W. Parker and son, 1859, p. 485
1 month 3 days ago

A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.

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The Loss of the Future
3 months 2 weeks ago

Most men have nothing in their heads but their physical needs; put them on a desert island with nothing to occupy their minds and they would go insane. They lack real motive. The curse of civilization is boredom.

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Chapter Eight, The Outsider as a Visionary
5 months 4 days ago

All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 14, § 164
4 months 4 days ago

Men without their choice derive benefits from that association; without their choice they are subjected to duties in consequence of these benefits; and without their choice they enter into a virtual obligation as binding as any that is actual. Look through the whole of life and the whole system of duties. Much the strongest moral obligations are such as were never the results of our option. I allow, that if no supreme ruler exists, wise to form, and potent to enforce, the moral law, there is no sanction to any contract, virtual or even actual, against the will of prevalent power. On that hypothesis, let any set of men be strong enough to set their duties at defiance, and they cease to be duties any longer.

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p. 442
1 month 3 days ago

I felt that human partitions - bodies, brains, and souls - were capable of being demolished, and that humanity might return again, after frightfully bloody wandering, to its primeval, divine oneness. In this condition, there is no such thing as "me", "you", and "he"; everything is a unity and this unity is a profound mystic intoxication in which death loses its scythe and ceases to exist. Separately, we die one by one, but all together we are immortal. Like prodigal sons, after so much hunger, thirst, and rebellion, we spread our arms and embrace our two parents: heaven and earth.

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Liberty, Ch. 12, p. 105
3 months 2 weeks ago

How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.

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As quoted in The Book of Positive Quotations (2007) by John Cook, p. 479

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