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If...we look at the essential characteristics of the Whig and the Tory, we may consider each of them as the representative of a great principle, essential to the welfare of nations. One is, in an especial manner, the guardian of liberty, and the other, of order. One is the moving power, and the other the steadying power of the state. One is the sail, without which society would make no progress, the other the ballast, without which there would be small safety in a tempest.

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The Earl of Chatham', The Edinburgh Review (October 1844), quoted in T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to The Edinburgh Review: A New Edition (1852), p. 725

As if to demonstrate, by a striking example, the impossibility of erecting any cerebral barrier between man and the apes, Nature has provided us, in the latter animals, with an almost complete series of gradations from brains little higher than that of a Rodent, to brains little lower than that of Man.

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Ch.2, p. 115
2 months 2 weeks ago

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

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Nature

It is almost impossible to bear the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard. G 4 Variant translations: It is almost impossible to carry the torch of wisdom through a crowd without singeing someone's beard. It is virtually impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd, without singeing someone's beard

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2 weeks 3 days ago

A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. The German's self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth - science - which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.

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Bk. IX, ch. 10
1 month 3 weeks ago

The first condition of unity is a subjective principle; and this principle in the Positive system is the subordination of the intellect to the heart: Without this the unity that we seek can never be placed on a permanent basis, whether individually or collectively. It is essential to have some influence sufficiently powerful to produce convergence amid the heterogeneous and often antagonistic tendencies of so complex an organism as ours.

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p. 24
1 month 2 weeks ago

Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security.

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3 months 2 weeks ago
He who lives as children live who does not struggle for his bread and does not believe that his actions possess any ultimate significance remains childlike.
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Sound knowledge respecting the habits and mode of life of the man-like Apes has been even more difficult of attainment than correct information regarding their structure.

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Ch.1, p. 36
1 month 3 weeks ago

The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual.

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Article on Government
4 weeks 1 day ago

The "dreams of youth" have become a proverb. That organisations, early rich, fall far short of their promise has been repeated to satiety. But is it extraordinary that it should be so? For do we ever utilise this heroism? Look how it lives upon itself and perishes for lack of food. We do not know what to do with it. We had rather that it should not be there. Often we laugh at it. Always we find it troublesome. Look at the poverty of our life! Can we expect anything else but poor creatures to come out of it?

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1 month 1 week ago

Death is too exact; it has all the reasons on its side. Mysterious for our instincts, it takes shape, to our reflection, limpid, without glamor, and without the false lures of the unknown. By dint of accumulating non-mysteries and monopolizing non-meanings, life inspires more dread than death: it is life which is the Great Unknown.

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1 month 1 week ago

It is not by genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

To understand oneself in existence is the Christian principle, except that this self has received much richer and much more profound qualifications that are even more difficult to understand together with existing. The believer is a subjective thinker, and the difference, is only between the simple person and the simple wise person. Here again the oneself is not humanity in general, subjectivity in general, and other such things, whereas everything becomes easy inasmuch as the difficulty is removed and the whole matter is shifted over into the shadow play of abstraction.

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1 week 6 days ago

I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave.

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Ch. 1. Why Are People?
1 month 2 weeks ago

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.

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Vol. 3, Ch. IX, State-Tamperings with Money and Banks
2 months 2 weeks ago

Two Chinamen visiting Europe went to the theatre for the first time. One of them occupied himself with trying to understand the theatrical machinery, which he succeeded in doing. The other, despite his ignorance of the language, sought to unravel the meaning of the play. The former is like the astronomer, the latter the philosopher.

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Vol. 2 "On Various Subjects" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
1 month 3 weeks ago

To understand a science it is necessary to know its history.

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A Course of Positive Philosophy (1832 - 1842) [Six volumes]
2 months 3 weeks ago

During such calm sunshine of the mind, these spectres of false divinity never make their appearance.

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Part XIV - Bad influence of popular religions on morality

When two do the same thing, it is not the same thing after all.

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Maxim 338
1 month 1 week ago

The RIGHT OF NATURE, which Writers commonly call Jus Naturale, is the Liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life; and consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own Judgement, and Reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.

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The First Part, Chapter 14, p. 64
2 months 2 weeks ago

Nothing is yet in its true form.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum. And here they will break out into their native music, and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns, and they mope and wallow like dogs!

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p. 165
2 weeks 6 days ago

The general nature of the speech act fallacy can be stated as follows, using "good" as our example. Calling something good is characteristically praising or commending or recommending it, etc. But it is a fallacy to infer from this that the meaning of "good" is explained by saying it is used to perform the act of commendation.

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P. 139.
3 months 2 days ago

The dominion of bad men is hurtful chiefly to themselves who rule, for they destroy their own souls by greater license in wickedness; while those who are put under them in service are not hurt except by their own iniquity. For to the just all the evils imposed on them by unjust rulers are not the punishment of crime, but the test of virtue. Therefore the good man, although he is a slave, is free; but the bad man, even if he reigns, is a slave, and that not of one man, but, what is far more grievous, of as many masters as he has vices; of which vices when the divine Scripture treats, it says, For of whom any man is overcome, to the same he is also the bond-slave.

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IV, 3 Variant translation: The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but — what is worse — the slave of as many masters as he has vices.
2 months 2 weeks ago

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.

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"Walter Savage Landor", from The Dial, xii, 1841
2 months 1 week ago

I believe that political power also exercises itself through the mediation of a certain number of institutions that seem to have nothing in common with political power, that have the appearance of being independent, but are not.

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Debate with Noam Chomsky, École Supérieure de Technologie à Eindhoven, November 1971
1 month 1 week ago

Were the ends of a person already explicit, there would be no room for development, for growth, for life; and consequently there would be no personality. The mere carrying out of predetermined purposes is mechanical. This remark has an application to the philosophy of religion. It is that genuine evolutionary philosophy, that is, one that makes the principle of growth a primordial element of the universe, is so far from being antagonistic to the idea of a personal creator, that it is really inseparable from that idea; while a necessitarian religion is in an altogether false position and is destined to become disintegrated. But a pseudo-evolutionism which enthrones mechanical law above the principle of growth is at once scientifically unsatisfactory, as giving no possible hint of how the universe has come about, and hostile to all hopes of personal relations to God.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.

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"One and Many," p. 3
3 months 2 weeks ago

Rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong. And so the rhetorician's business is not to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and wrong, but only to make them believe.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom.

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1 week 6 days ago

Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.

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1 month 1 week ago

Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.

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p. 45
1 month 1 week ago

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.

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2 months 4 days ago

Being summoned by the Athenians out of Sicily to plead for his life, Alcibiades absconded, saying that that criminal was a fool who studied a defence when he might fly for it.

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51 Alcibiades
2 months 2 weeks ago

I do not wish to force my thoughts upon you, but I feel forced myself. Little as I know of Captain Brown, I would fain do my part to correct the tone and the statements of the newspapers, and of my countrymen generally, respecting his character and actions. It costs us nothing to be just. We can at least express our sympathy with, and admiration of, him and his companions, and that is what I now propose to do.

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2 months 3 weeks 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 1 week ago

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.

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Attributed to Voltaire in Likharev, K.K. (2021). On Government and Politics. In: Likharev, K.K. (eds) Essential Quotes for Scientists and Engineers.
2 months 3 weeks ago

Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.

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Chapter x, Part II, p. 168.
3 weeks 4 days ago

In sum, a theory is only accepted if the theory has substantial, non-ad hoc, explanatory successes. This is in accordance with Popper; unfortunately, it is in even better accordance with the 'inductivist' accounts that Popper rejects, since these stress support rather than falsification.

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The 'corroboration' of theories
2 weeks 5 days ago

Whatever the explicit strategic or political aims of a war may be, they prove to be weak in comparison with its aims of destruction; what war destroys first are the very restrictions imposed on destructive license. If we can rightly speak about the unstated "aim" of war, it is neither primarily to alter the political landscape nor to establish a new political order, but rather to destroy the social basis of politics itself.

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p. 154
1 month 1 week ago

Every father is given the opportunity to corrupt his daughter's nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For what has been spoiled by the father can only be made good by a father, just as what has been spoiled by the mother can only be repaired by a mother. The disastrous repetition of the family pattern could be described as the psychological original sin, or as the curse of the Atrides running through the generations.

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Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955) CW 14: P. 232
1 month 4 weeks ago

If thou intend to do any good; tarry not till to-morrow! for thou knowest not what may chance thee this night.

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The man-like Apes... have certain characters of structure and of distribution in common.

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Ch.1, p. 34
1 month 2 weeks ago

There is but one way to bring about the triumph of liberty, of justice, and of peace in Europe's international relations, to make civil war impossible between the different peoples who make up the European family; and that is the formation of the United States of Europe.

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1 month 1 week ago

Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!

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2 months 2 weeks ago

The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Good order is the foundation of all good things.

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