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Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
1 month 4 weeks ago
How do we account for the...

How do we account for the current paranormal vogue in the popular media? Perhaps it has something to do with the millennium - in which case it's depressing to realise that the millennium is still three years away.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
3 months 3 weeks ago
All those movements which took place...

All those movements which took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which had the Reformation as their main expression and result should be analyzed as a great crisis of the Western experience of subjectivity and a revolt against the kind of religious and moral power which gave form, during the Middle Ages, to this subjectivity. The need to take a direct part in spiritual life, in the work of salvation, in the truth which lies in the Book-all that was a struggle for a new subjectivity.

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p. 782
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 1 day ago
Ever from one who comes to-morrow...

Ever from one who comes to-morrow Men wait their good and truth to borrow.

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Merlin's Song, II
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3 months 2 days ago
Every man has some reminiscences which...

Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.

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Part 1, Chapter 11
Philosophical Maxims
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1 week 5 days ago
Woe to that nation whose literature...

Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print", it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

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Variant translation, as quoted in TIME
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
2 weeks 2 days ago
Let words proceed as they please,...

Let words proceed as they please, provided only your soul keeps its own sure order, provided your soul is great and holds unruffled to its ideals, pleased with itself on account of the very things which displease others, a soul that makes life the test of its progress, and believes that its knowledge is in exact proportion to its freedom from desire and its freedom from fear.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months 4 weeks ago
This was her finest role and...

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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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
4 months 3 days ago
My body and my will are...

My body and my will are one.

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Book 1
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
4 months 4 days ago
I freely admit that the remembrance...

I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.

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Philosophical Maxims
Lin Yutang
Lin Yutang
1 week 2 days ago
A man who has to be...

A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined for him already.

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p. 163
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 months 2 weeks ago
Imagine a book of unexplained mysteries...

Imagine a book of unexplained mysteries written by a contemporary of Shakespeare. It might include the mystery of the falling stars that sweep through the sky foretelling disaster; the mystery of the Kraken, the giant sea devil with 50-foot tentacles; the mystery of monster bones, sometimes found in caves or on beaches. Such a book would be a curious mixture of truth and absurdity, fact and legend. We would all feel superior as we turned its pages and murmured: "Of course, they didn't know about comets and giant squids and dinosaurs." If this book should happen to find its way into the hands of our remote descendants, they may smile pityingly and say: "It's incredible to think that they knew nothing about epsilon fields or multiple psychic feedback or cross gravitational energies. They didn't even know about the ineluctability of time." But let us hope that such a descendant is in a charitable mood, and might add: "And yet they managed to ask a few of the right questions."

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p. 142
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 2 days ago
All traditional logic habitually assumes that...

All traditional logic habitually assumes that precise symbols are being employed. It is therefore not applicable to this terrestial life but only to an imagined celestial existence... logic takes us nearer to heaven than other studies.

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Vagueness', first published in The Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, 1 June, 1923
Philosophical Maxims
Pythagoras
Pythagoras
3 months 1 week ago
Sobriety is the strength of the...

Sobriety is the strength of the soul, for it preserves its reason unclouded by passion.

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As quoted in The History of Philosophy: From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Present Century (1819) by William Enfield Sobriety is the strength of the mind
Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
3 months 6 days ago
Muhammad brought down from heaven and...

Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others.

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Book One, Chapter V.
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
4 weeks 1 day ago
In philosophy...
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
3 weeks 3 days ago
And now the sagacious reader, who...

And now the sagacious reader, who is capable of reading into these lines what does not stand written in them, but is nevertheless implied, will be able to form some conception of the serious feelings with which I then set foot in Emmendingen.

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Autobiography: Truth and Poetry Book xviii. London 1884 p. 115 books.google.de
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
4 months 5 days ago
It seldom happens, however, that a...

It seldom happens, however, that a great proprietor is a great improver.

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Chapter IV, p. 420.
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 weeks ago
No one should try to live...

No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 3 weeks ago
Self-pity is not as sterile as...

Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 2 days ago
The whole conception of God is...

The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.

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"What We Must Do"
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
2 months 2 weeks ago
We can know only one thing...

We can know only one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.

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p. 216
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months ago
'But what of the poor Ghosts...

But what of the poor Ghosts who never get into the omnibus at all?' 'Everyone who wishes it does. Never fear. There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.

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Ch. 9, p. 72; part of this has also been rendered in a variant form, and quoted as:
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
3 weeks 3 days ago
But among all the discoveries and...

But among all the discoveries and corrections probably none has resulted in a deeper influence on the human spirit than the doctrine of Copernicus.... Possibly mankind has never been demanded to do more, for considering all that went up in smoke as a result of realizing this change: a second Paradise, a world of innocence, poetry and piety: the witness of the senses, the conviction of a poetical and religious faith. No wonder his contemporaries did not wish to let all this go and offered every possible resistance to a doctrine which in its converts authorized and demanded a freedom of view and greatness of thought so far unknown indeed not even dreamed of.

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Zur Farbenlehre, Materialien zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre (1810), Frankfurt am Main, 1991, Seite 666.
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
3 weeks 4 days ago
If all the parts….

If all the parts of the universe are interchained in a certain measure, any one phenomenon will not be the effect of a single cause, but the resultant of causes infinitely numerous; it is, one often says, the consequence of the state of the universe the moment before.

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Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
3 months 2 days ago
All men that are ruined, are...

All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.

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No. 1, volume v, p. 286
Philosophical Maxims
William Godwin
William Godwin
2 months 4 weeks ago
Anarchy, in its own nature, is...

Anarchy, in its own nature, is an evil of short duration. The more horrible are the mischiefs it inflicts, the more does it hasten to a close.

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Book 7, Ch. 5
Philosophical Maxims
William Kingdon Clifford
William Kingdon Clifford
1 day ago
I hold in fact(1) That small...

I hold in fact(1) That small portions of space are in fact of a nature analogous to little hills on a surface which is on the average flat; namely, that the ordinary laws of geometry are not valid in them.(2) That this property of being curved or distorted is continually being passed on from one portion of space to another after the manner of a wave.(3) That this variation of the curvature of space is what really happens in that phenomenon which we call the motion of matter, whether ponderable or etherial.(4) That in the physical world nothing else takes place but this variation, subject possibly to the law of continuity.

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Abstract
Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
4 months 1 week ago
Love to his soul gave eyes;...

Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
2 months 3 weeks ago
This idea is that laws which...

This idea is that laws which purport to be statements of what actually occurs are statistical in character as distinct from so-called dynamic laws that are abstract and mathematical, and disguised definitions. Recognition of the statistical nature of physical laws was first effected in the case of gases when it became evident that generalizations regarding the behavior of swarms of molecules were not descriptions or predictions of the behavior of any individual particle. A single molecule is not and cannot be a gas. It is consequently absurd to suppose that a scientific law is about the elementary constituents of a gas. It is a statement of what happens when a large number of such constituents interact with one another under certain conditions.

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Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3 months 2 days ago
It seemed clear to me that...

It seemed clear to me that life and the world somehow depended upon me now. I may almost say that the world now seemed created for me alone: if I shot myself the world would cease to be at least for me. I say nothing of its being likely that nothing will exist for anyone when I am gone, and that as soon as my consciousness is extinguished the whole world will vanish too and become void like a phantom, as a mere appurtenance of my consciousness, for possibly all this world and all these people are only me myself.

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Philosophical Maxims
Sydney Smith
Sydney Smith
2 weeks 2 days ago
It is always right that a...

It is always right that a man should be able to render a reason for the faith that is within him.

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Vol. I, ch. 3, p. 91
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
3 months 3 weeks ago
As long as we try to...

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.

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Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
4 months 4 weeks ago
Science is a systematic method for...

Science is a systematic method for studying and working out those generalizations that seem to describe the behavior of the universe. It could exist as a purely intellectual game that would never affect the practical life of human beings either for good or evil, and that was very nearly the case in ancient Greece, for instance. Technology is the application of scientific findings to the tools of everyday life, and that application can be wise or unwise, useful or harmful. Very often, those who govern technological decisions are not scientists and know little about science.

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Philosophical Maxims
Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon
2 months 1 week ago
If there were no limits to...

If there were no limits to human rationality administrative theory would be barren. It would consist of the single precept: Always select that alternative, among those available, which will lead to the most complete achievement of your goals.

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Simon (1945, p. 240); As cited in:
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 2 days ago
It is remarkable, that almost all...

It is remarkable, that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or to acknowledge the personality of God. ... In reading a work on agriculture, we have to skip the author's moral reflections, and the words "Providence" and "He" scattered along the page, to come at the profitable level of what he has to say. What he calls his religion is for the most part offensive to the nostrils. ... There is more religion in men's science than there is science in their religion.

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Philosophical Maxims
Max Stirner
Max Stirner
2 weeks 3 days ago
The will is not fundamentally right,...

The will is not fundamentally right, as the practical ones would like very much to assure us; one may not pass over the desire for knowledge in order to stand immediately in the will, but knowledge perfects itself to will when it desensualizes itself and creates itself as a spirit "which builds its own body."

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p. 21
Philosophical Maxims
Porphyry
Porphyry
3 months 2 weeks ago
The fleshless diet contributes to health...

The fleshless diet contributes to health and to a suitable endurance of hard work in philosophy.

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1, 2, 1
Philosophical Maxims
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
3 months 6 days ago
Scepticism is the first step towards...

Scepticism is the first step towards truth. Variant: A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence skepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone.

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As quoted in The Anchor Book of French Quotations with English Translations (1963) by Norbert Gutermam
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 2 days ago
I take it for granted, when...

I take it for granted, when I am invited to lecture anywhere, - for I have had a little experience in that business, - that there is a desire to hear what I think on some subject, though I may be the greatest fool in the country, - and not that I should say pleasant things merely, or such as the audience will assent to; and I resolve, accordingly, that I will give them a strong dose of myself. They have sent for me, and engaged to pay for me, and I am determined that they shall have me, though I bore them beyond all precedent.

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p. 484
Philosophical Maxims
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
2 months 1 week ago
I believe that freedom is not...

I believe that freedom is not a constant attribute that "we have" or "we don't have"; perhaps there is only one reality: the act of liberating ourselves in the process of using choices. Every step in life that heightens the maturity of man heightens his ability to choose the freeing alternative. I believe that "freedom of choice" is not always equal for all men at every moment. The man with an exclusively necrophilic orientation; who is narcissistic; or who is symbiotic-incestuous, can only make a regressive choice. The free man, freed from irrational ties, can no longer make a regressive choice.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emmanuel Levinas
Emmanuel Levinas
2 months 3 weeks ago
The mores I return to myself,...

The mores I return to myself, the more I divest myself, under the traumatic effect of persecution , of my freedom as a constituted, wilful, imperialistic subject, the more I discover myself to be responsible' the more just I am, the more guilty I am. I am 'in myself' through others.

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The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 102
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
4 months 3 days ago
The example of the Jews, in...

The example of the Jews, in many things, may not be imitated by us; they had not only orders to cut off several nations altogether, but if they were obliged to war with others, and conquered them, to cut off every male; they were suffered to use polygamy and divorces, and other things utterly unlawful to us under clearer light.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 1 day ago
Language is a city to the...

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.

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Quotation and Originality
Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
2 months 1 week ago
Women are never supposed to have...

Women are never supposed to have any occupation of sufficient importance not to be interrupted, except "suckling their fools "; and women themselves have accepted this, have written books to support it, and have trained themselves so as to consider whatever they do as not of such value to the world or to others, but that they can throw it up at the first "claim of social life." They have accustomed themselves to consider intellectual occupation as a merely selfish amusement, which it is their " duty " to give up for every trifler more selfish than themselves.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Gray
John Gray
1 month 1 week ago
Their minds befogged by fashionable nonsense...

Their minds befogged by fashionable nonsense about globalisation, western leaders believe liberal democracy is spreading unstoppably. The reality is continuing political diversity. Republics, empires, liberal and illiberal democracies, and a wide variety of authoritarian regimes will be with us for the foreseeable future. Globalisation is nothing more than the industrialisation of the planet, and increasing resource nationalism is an integral part of the process. (So is accelerating climate change, but that's another story.) As industrialisation spreads, countries that control natural resources use these resources to advance their strategic objectives.

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Folly of the progressive fairytale, The Observer
Philosophical Maxims
Will Durant
Will Durant
3 weeks ago
Here is a fulfillment of long...

Here is a fulfillment of long centuries of civilization and culture; here, in romantic love, more than the triumph of thought or the victories of power is the topmost reach of human beings.

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Ch. 2 : On Youth
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
5 months 2 days ago
I have needed God every day...

I have needed God every day to defend myself against the abundance of thoughts.

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Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 3 weeks ago
The superior man examines his heart,...

The superior man examines his heart, that there may be nothing wrong there, and that he may have no cause for dissatisfaction with himself. That wherein the superior man cannot be equaled is simply this, his work which other men cannot see.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
2 months 2 weeks ago
We find here the final application...

We find here the final application of the doctrine of objective immortality. Throughout the perishing occasions in the life of each temporal Creature, the inward source of distaste or of refreshment, the judge arising out of the very nature of things, redeemer or goddess of mischief, is the transformation of Itself, everlasting in the Being of God. In this way, the insistent craving is justified - the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 months 1 day ago
Further acquaintance with the labors of...

Further acquaintance with the labors of the Quakers and their works - with Fox, Penn, and especially the work of Dymond (published in 1827) - showed me not only that the impossibility of reconciling Christianity with force and war had been recognized long, long ago, but that this irreconcilability had been long ago proved so clearly and so indubitably that one could only wonder how this impossible reconciliation of Christian teaching with the use of force, which has been, and is still, preached in the churches, could have been maintained in spite of it.

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Chapter I, The Doctrine of Non-resistance to Evil by Force has been Professed by a Minority of Men from the Very Foundation of Christianity
Philosophical Maxims
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