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4 months 2 weeks ago

it is absurd ... to hope that maybe another Newton may some day arise, to make intelligible to us even the genesis of but a blade of grass

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("Dialectic of Teleological Judgment" §75)
2 weeks 2 days ago

Our people... will give you all the necessaries of war they produce, if, instead of the bankrupt trash they now are obliged to receive for want of any other, you will give them a paper promise funded on a specific pledge, and of a size for common circulation.

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Letter to James Monroe, 1815. ME 14:228
3 months 1 week ago

Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves - that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

I pray you, magnificent Sir, do not trouble yourself to return to us, but await our coming to you.

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Third Dialogue
3 months 3 weeks ago

If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil. That is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions but rather their inequality which may give rise thereto.

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Book Three, Chapter XXI.
1 month 1 day ago

When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces upon me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool.

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Peter Plymley's Letters (1808), Letter IV
3 months 1 week ago

Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name; and we forbad him, because he followeth not with us. And Jesus said unto him, Forbid him not: for he that is not against us is for us.

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Luke 9:49-50 (KJV)
3 months 3 days ago

But the truth is that my work - I was going to say my mission - is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Wherever Law ends, Tyranny begins.

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Second Treatise of Government, Sec. 202
5 months 2 weeks ago

If a man knows what it is right to do, he does not require a formal reason. And a person that has been thus trained, either possesses these first principles already, or can easily acquire them.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The instinctive foundation of the intellectual life is curiosity, which is found among animals in its elementary forms. Intelligence demands an alert curiosity, but it must be of a certain kind. The sort that leads village neighbours to try to peer through curtains after dark has no very high value. The widespread interest in gossip is inspired, not by a love of knowledge but by malice: no one gossips about other people's secret virtues, but only about their secret vices. Accordingly most gossip is untrue, but care is taken not to verify it. Our neighbour's sins, like the consolations of religion, are so agreeable that we do not stop to scrutinise the evidence closely.

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On Education, Especially in Early Childhood (1926), Ch. 2: The Aims of Education, p. 50
2 months 2 weeks ago

Although it is commonly supposed that war making is the specific activity of nations, the blind rage that motivates war destroys the very social bonds that make nations possible. Of course, it can fortify the nationalism of a nation, producing a provisional coherence bolstered by war and enmity, but it also erodes the social relations that make politics possible. The power of destruction unleashed by war breaks social ties and produces anger, revenge, and distrust ("embitterment") such that it becomes unclear whether reparation is possible, undermining not only those relations that may have been built in the past, but also the future possibility of peaceful coexistence.

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p. 154
4 months 2 weeks ago

Speaking generally, he holds dominion, to whom are entrusted by common consent affairs of state - such as the laying down, interpretation, and abrogation of laws, the fortification of cities, deciding on war and peace, &c. But if this charge belong to a council, composed of the general multitude, then the dominion is called a democracy; if the council be composed of certain chosen persons, then it is an aristocracy ; and, if, lastly, the care of affairs of state, and, consequently, the dominion rest with one man, then it has the name of monarchy.

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Ch. 2, Of Natural Right
2 months 1 week ago

A developed legal system, with elaborate common law rights, and supported by a system of natural justice, was the most precious legacy of our empire. If it were still permissible to defend colonization, I should justify it in terms of this bequest, and at the same time contrast the colonization of Africa with the Soviet "colonization" of eastern Europe, which has advanced not by the generation but by the destruction of law.

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A colonial inheritance once again cast off', The Times (6 September 1983), p. 10
4 months 2 weeks ago

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

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The Criticism of the Gotha Program (1875) Variant translation: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
4 months 2 weeks ago

A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

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pp. 366-67
1 month 1 week ago

What has philosophy got to do with measuring anything? It's the mathematicians you have to trust, and they measure the skies like we measure a field.

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Matteo in Concerning the New Star
2 months 3 weeks ago

All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.

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As quoted in Lichtenberg : A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions (1959) by Joseph Peter Stern, p. 84
1 month 1 week ago

The rudest heathen that worshipped Canopus, or the Caabah Black-Stone, he, as we saw, was superior to the horse that worshipped nothing at all! Nay there was a kind of lasting merit in that poor act of his; analogous to what is still meritorious in Poets: recognition of a certain endless divine beauty and significance in stars and all natural objects whatsoever.

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5 months 2 days ago

He who created us without our help will not save us without our consent.

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St. Augustine, Sermo 169, 11, 13: PL 38, 923 as quoted in Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S. J.. Saved: A Bible Study Guide for Catholics (p. 15). Our Sunday Visitor. Kindle Edition.
3 months 1 week ago

People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.

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Introduction to 1891 edition of Karl Marx's, The Civil War in France
3 months 2 weeks ago

Justice was in all countries originally administered by the priesthood; nor indeed could laws in their first feeble state have either authority or sanction, so as to compel men to relinquish their natural independence, had they not appeared to come down to them enforced by beings of more than human power. The first openings of civility have been everywhere made by religion. Amongst the Romans, the custody and interpretation of the laws continued solely in the college of the pontiffs for above a century.

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An Essay towards an Abridgment of English History (1757-c. 1763), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI (1856), p. 196
4 months 4 weeks ago

The principles of pleasure are not firm and stable. They are different in all mankind, and variable in every particular with such a diversity that there is no man more different from another than from himself at different times.

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2 weeks 2 days ago

One of our fan-coloring biographers, who paints small men as very great, inquired of me lately with real affection too, whether he might consider as authentic, the change of my religion much spoken of in some circles. Now this supposed that they knew what had been my religion before, taking for it the word of their priests, whom I certainly never made the confidants of my creed. My answer was "say nothing of my religion. It is known to my God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one."

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Letter to John Adams (11 January 1817), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12, pp. 48-49
4 months 2 weeks ago

It is, I think, safe to say that nothing was more alien to the minds of the scientists, who brought about the most radical and most rapid revolutionary process the world has ever seen, than any will to power. Nothing was more remote than any wish to 'conquer space' and to go to the moon. It was indeed their search for 'true reality' that led them to lose confidence in appearances, in the phenomena as they reveal themselves of their own accord to human sense and reason. They were inspired by an extraordinary love of harmony and lawfulness which taught them that they would have to step outside any merely given sequence or series of occurrences if they wanted to discover the overall beauty and order of the whole, that is, the universe.

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On scientific discovery, in Between Past and Future (1961) as quoted in Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today's political times
2 months 2 weeks ago

The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.

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The Illusion of the End (1992) (L'Illision de la Fin) Tr. Chris Turner, 1994, Stanford University Press, ISBN 0804725012, p. 26, "The Event Strike"
4 months 2 weeks ago

We live to improve, or we live in vain.

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Address and Declaration at a Select Meeting of the Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty (August 20, 1791) p. 5
2 months 4 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
1 week 6 days ago

In the case of all things which have a certain constitution, whatever harm may happen to any of them, that which is affected becomes consequently worse; but in like case, a man becomes both better... and more worthy of praise, by making the right use of these accidents.

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X, 33
1 month 1 day ago

Impurity is caused by attitude, not events.

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(trans. Emily Wilson)
2 months 3 weeks ago

Roughly speaking, rationality is concerned with the selection of preferred behavior alternatives in terms of some system of values, whereby the consequences of behavior can be evaluated.

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p. 84.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Mother love is stronger than the filth and scabbiness on a child, and so the love of God toward us is stronger than the dirt that clings to us.

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94
2 months 2 weeks ago

There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.

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Chapter 5
1 month 1 week ago

One whose intentions and thoughts are cultivated will disregard wealth and nobility. One whose greatest concern is for the Way and righteousness will take lightly kings and dukes. It is simply that when one examines oneself on the inside, external goods carry little weight. A saying goes, "The gentleman makes things his servants. The petty man is servant to things.

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Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 263
3 weeks 5 days ago

Man is something that is to be overcome.Logically considered, this, too, presents a contradiction: he who overcomes himself is admittedly the victor, but he is also the defeated. The ego succumbs to itself, when it wins; it achieves victory, when it suffers defeat. Yet the contradiction only arises when the two aspects of this unity are hardened into opposed, mutually exclusive conceptions. It is precisely the fully unified process of the moral life which overcomes and surpasses every lower state by achieving a higher one, and again transcends this latter state through one still higher. That man overcomes himself means that he reaches out beyond the bounds that the moment sets for him. There must be something at hand to be overcome, but it is only there in order to be overcome. Thus even as an ethical agent, man is the limited being that has no limit.

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p. 5-6 part of the first essay "Life as Transcendence"
4 months 2 weeks ago

History teaches us that war is not inevitable. Once again, it is for us to choose whether we use war or some other method of settling the ordinary and unavoidable conflicts between groups of men.

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What Are You Going To Do About It? , The case for constructive peace, 1936
4 months 2 weeks ago

An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

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April 20, 1840
5 months 2 weeks ago

For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Instinctively we divide mankind into friends and foes - friends, towards whom we have the morality of co-operation; foes, towards whom we have that of competition. But this division is constantly changing; at one moment a man hates his business competitor, at another, when both are threatened by Socialism or by an external enemy, he suddenly begins to view him as a brother. Always when we pass beyond the limits of the family it is the external enemy which supplies the cohesive force. In times of safety we can afford to hate our neighbour, but in times of danger we must love him.

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Authority and the Individual, 1949
3 months 2 weeks ago

Mankind will never be, in an eminent degree, virtuous and happy till each man shall possess that portion of distinction and no more, to which he is entitled by his personal merits. The dissolution of aristocracy is equally the interest of the oppressor and the oppressed. The one will be delivered from the listlessness of tyranny, and the other from the brutalizing operation of servitude.

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Book V, Chapter 11, "Moral Effects of Aristocracy"
4 months 2 weeks ago

Considering the optimistic turn taken by world trade AT THIS MOMENT...it is some consolation at least that the revolution has begun in Russia, for I regard the convocation of 'notables' to Petersburg as such a beginning. ... On the Continent revolution is imminent and will, moreover, instantly assume a socialist character.

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Letter to Friedrich Engels (8 October 1858), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 40. Letters 1856-59 (2010), pp. 346-347
2 months 1 week ago

In one way or another, all my books have been devoted to expounding and exploring the almost limitless power of the Darwinian principle-power unleashed whenever and wherever there is enough time for the consequences of primordial self-replication to unfold. Preface

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1 month 1 day ago

Unjust dominion cannot be eternal.

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2 months 1 week ago

All of us need an identity which unites us with our neighbours, our countrymen, those people who are subject to the same rules and the same laws as us, those people with whom we might one day have to fight side by side to protect our inheritance, those people with whom we will suffer when attacked, those people whose destinies are in some way tied up with our own.

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Rivers of Blood BBC2 documentary
2 months 2 weeks ago

Literature is idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines in only twenty-six symbols, ten arabic numbers, and about eight punctuation marks.

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Public conversation with Lee Stringer, in Like Shaking Hands With God
4 months 1 week ago

Anytime two human beings find genuine pleasure, joy, and love, the stars smile and the universe is enriched. Yet as long as that pleasure, joy, and love is still predicated on myths of black sexuality, the more fundamental challenge of humane interaction remains unmet.

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(p85)
5 months 2 days ago

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

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2 months 1 week ago

I confess I have no great notion of the use of books, except to amuse a railway journey; although, I believe, there are some very exact treatises on astronomy, the use of the globes, agriculture, and the art of making paper flowers. Upon the less apparent provinces of life I fear you will find nothing truthful.

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The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the Young Man in Holy Orders.
3 months 1 week ago

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

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The Message to the Planet (1989) p. 43.

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