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3 months 3 weeks ago

Arms are not yet taken up; but virtually, you are in a civil war. You are not people of differing opinions in a public council;-you are enemies, that must subdue or be subdued, on the one side or the other. If your hands are not on your swords, their knives will be at your throats. There is no medium,-there is no temperament,-there is no compromise with Jacobinism.

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Letter to William Windham (30 December 1794), quoted in R. B. McDowell (ed.)
3 months 1 week ago

The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.

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p. 32
3 months 1 week ago

The concept of labor is not peripheral in Hegel's system, but is the central notion through which he conceives the development of society. Driven by the insight that opened this dimension to him, Hegel describes the mode of integration prevailing in a commodity-producing society in terms that clearly fore-shadow Marx's critical approach.

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P. 78
3 months 3 weeks ago

They who bow to the enemy abroad will not be of power to subdue the conspirator at home.

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p. 18
4 months 4 days ago

But Hermotimus, the Colophonian, rendered more abundant what was formerly published by Eudoxus and Theætetus, and invented a multitude of elements, and wrote concerning some geometrical places. But Philippus the Mendæan, a disciple of Plato, and by him inflamed in the mathematical disciplines, both composed questions, according to the institutions of Plato, and proposed as the object of his enquiry whatever he thought conduced to the Platonic philosophy.

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Ch. IV.
4 months 3 weeks ago

The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.

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The sciences that are expressed by numbers or by other small signs, are easily learned; and... this facility rather than its demonstrability is what has made the fortune of algebra.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

No one is so modest as not to believe himself a competent amateur sleuth.

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1 month 1 day ago

Only at quite rare moments have I felt really glad to be alive. I could not but feel with a sympathy full of regret all the pain that I saw around me, not only that of men but that of the whole creation. From this community of suffering I have never tried to withdraw myself. It seemed to me a matter of course that we should all take our share of the burden of pain which lies upon the world.

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3 months 4 days ago

Men can be provincial in time, as well as in place.

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Preface, p. ix
5 months 2 weeks ago

Scientists have pushed back the horizon of time from the biblical 6,000 years to 4,600,000,000 years for the age of Earth a 760,000-fold increase.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

It is understandable then that tragic heroes, unlike the baroque characters who had preceded them, could never be mad, and that inversely madness could never take on the tragic value we have known since Nietzsche and Artaud. In the classical epoch, tragic characters and the mad face each other without any possible dialogue or common language, for the one can only pronounce the decisive language of being, where the truth of light and the depths of night meet in a flash, and the other repeats endlessly an indifferent murmur where the empty chatter of the day is cancelled out by the deceptive lies of the shadows.

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Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
3 months 2 weeks ago

I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i.e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.

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Preface to Second Edition
2 months 2 weeks ago

With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life.

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(p. 177)
4 months 2 weeks ago

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.

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Beauty
1 month 2 weeks ago

You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers.

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Ch. I: "Routineer and Inventor", p. 30.
5 months 6 days ago

Will is to grace as the horse is to the rider.

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2 weeks 3 days ago

All is ephemeral - fame and the famous as well.

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IV, 35
5 months 2 weeks ago

Such was the vast power which the god settled in the lost island of Atlantis; and this he afterwards directed against our land for the following reasons, as tradition tells: For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well-affectioned towards the god, whose seed they were; for they possessed true and in every way great spirits, uniting gentleness with wisdom in the various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one another.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

"They would say," he answered, "that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience."

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Ch. 7 : The Pendragon, section 2
3 months 1 week ago

Once the needs of hunger are satisfied - and they are soon satisfied - the vanity, the necessity - for it is a necessity - arises of imposing ourselves upon and surviving in others. Man habitually sacrifices his life to his purse, but he sacrifices his purse to his vanity. He boasts even of his weakness and his misfortunes, for want of anything better to boast of, and is like a child who, in order to attract attention, struts about with a bandaged finger.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The animals are much more content with mere existence than we are; the plants are wholly so; and man is so according to how dull and insensitive he is. The animal's life consequently contains less suffering but also less pleasure than the human's, the direct reason being that on the one hand it is free from care and anxiety and the torments that attend them, but on the other is without hope and therefore has no share in that anticipation of a happy future which, together with the enchanting products of the imagination which accompany it, is the source of most of our greatest joys and pleasures. The animal lacks both anxiety and hope because its consciousness is restricted to what is clearly evident and thus to the present moment: the animal is the present incarnate.

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Vol. 2 "On the Suffering of the World" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
3 months 2 weeks ago

Situation seems to be the mould in which men's characters are formed.

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Letter 23
3 months 2 weeks ago

Do you know that ages will pass and mankind will proclaim in its wisdom and science that there is no crime and, therefore no sin, but that there are only hungry people. "Feed them first and then demand virtue of them!" - that is what they will inscribe on their banner which they will raise against you and which will destroy your temple.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Both in England and on the Continent a graduated property tax (l'impôt progressif) has been advocated, on the avowed ground that the state should use the instrument of taxation as a means of mitigating the inequalities of wealth. I am as desirous as any one that means should be taken to diminish those inequalities, but not so as to relieve the prodigal at the expense of the prudent.To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbours. It is not the fortunes which are earned, but those which are unearned, that it is for the public good to place under limitation.

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Book V, Chapter II
4 months 2 weeks ago

This investigation aims to analyze the type "bourgeois public sphere". Its particular approach is required, to begin with, by the difficulties specific to an object whose complexity precludes exclusive reliance on the specialized methods of a single discipline. Rather, the category. "public sphere" must be investigated within the broad field formerly reflected in the perspective of the traditional science of "politics."' When particular social-scientific discipline, this object disintegrates. The problems that result from fusing aspects of sociology and economics, of constitutional law and political science, and of social and intellectual history are obvious: given the present state of differentiation and specialization in the social sciences, scarcely anyone will be able to master several, let alone all, of these disciplines.

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p.xvii
3 months 1 week ago

Thought must be judged by something that is not thought, by its effect on production or its impact on social conduct, as art today is being ultimately gauged in every detail by something that is not art, be it box-office or propaganda value.

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describing the pragmatist view, p. 51.
2 months 2 weeks ago

The pre-atomist multisensory void was an animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval, neither container nor contained, acoustic space penetrated by tactility.

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p. 34
3 months 3 weeks ago

Applaud us when we run, console us when we fall, cheer us when we recover.

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Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election (6 September 1780), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II (1855), p. 129
4 months 2 weeks ago

We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim. The Past is for us; but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul.

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Quotation and Originality
5 months 2 weeks ago

Modesty is an unnatural attitude, and one which is only with difficulty taught to children.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

But by far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and deceptions of the senses; in that things which strike the sense outweigh things which do not immediately strike it, though they be more important. Hence it is that speculation commonly ceases where sight ceases; insomuch that of things invisible there is little or no observation.

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Aphorism 50
3 months 1 week ago

A Covenant not to defend my selfe from force, by force, is always voyd.

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The First Part, Chapter 14, p. 69
3 months 1 week ago

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.

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Ch. 2, sect. 3
2 months 3 days ago

Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.

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Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis
1 month 1 day ago

The mistake made by all previous systems of ethics has been the failure to recognize that life as such is the mysterious value with which they have to deal. All spiritual life meets us within natural life. Reverence for life, therefore, is applied to natural life and spiritual life alike. In the parable of Jesus, the shepherd saves not merely the soul of the lost sheep but the whole animal. The stronger the reverence for natural life, the stronger grows also that for spiritual life.

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p. 264
5 months 2 weeks ago

An unpleasant nest of nasty, materialistic and aggressive people, careless of the rights of others, imperfectly democratic at home though quick to see the minor slaveries of others, and greedy without end.

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4 weeks ago

If the rulers sincerely desire the empire to be wealthy and dislike to have it poor, desire to have it orderly and dislike to have it chaotic, they should bring about universal love and mutual aid. This is the way of the sage-kings and the way to order for the world, and it should not be neglected.

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Book 4; Universal Love II
4 months 2 weeks ago

The end of man (as a factual anthropological limit) is announced to thought from the vantage of the end of man (as a determined opening or the infinity of a telos). Man is that which is in relation to his end, in the fundamentally equivocal sense of the word. Since always.

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"The Ends of Man," Margins of Philosophy, tr. w/ notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1982. (original French published in Paris, 1972, as Marges de la philosophie). p. 123

If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

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F 39
4 months 3 weeks ago

He would have left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.

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2 months 4 weeks 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.
4 months 3 weeks ago

The chief objection I have to Pantheism is that it says nothing. To call the world "God" is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for the word "world".

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On Pantheism as quoted in Faiths of Famous Men in Their Own Words (1900) by John Kenyon Kilbourn; also in Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays (2007), p. 40
1 month 3 weeks ago

Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just.

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Ch. 7 : Distributive Justice, Section I, The Entitlement Theory, p. 151

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