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6 months 3 weeks ago

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

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Part IV: America,Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey, 1926
4 months 3 weeks ago

We are not yet speaking about equality if we have not yet spoken about equal grievability, or the equal attribution of grievability. Grievability is a defining feature of equality. Those whose grievability is not assumed are those who suffer inequality-unequal value.

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p. 108
3 months 3 days ago

A man may own a thousand acres of land, and yet he still sleeps upon a bed of five feet.

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p. 38 (Chinese saying)
2 months 3 weeks ago

All things are interwoven with one another; a sacred bond unites them; there is scarcely one thing that is isolated from another. Everything is coordinated, everything works together in giving form to one universe. The world-order is a unity made up of multiplicity: God is one, pervading all things; all being is one, all law is one (namely, the common reason which all thinking persons possess) and all truth is one- if, as we believe, there can be but one path to perfection for beings that are alike in kind and reason.

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VII. 9, trans. Maxwell Staniforth
7 months 3 weeks ago

If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

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3 months 1 week ago

I will tell you: that perfect man, who has attained virtue, never cursed his luck, and never received the results of chance with dejection; he believed that he was citizen and soldier of the universe, accepting his tasks as if they were his orders. Whatever happened, he did not spurn it, as if it were evil and borne in upon him by hazard; he accepted it as if it were assigned to be his duty. "Whatever this may be,"he says, "it is my lot; it is rough and it is hard, but I must work diligently at the task."

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Each visitor performed the ceremony of greeting this old aunt whom not one of them knew, not one of them wanted to know, and not one of them cared about; Anna Pávlovna observed these greetings with mournful and solemn interest and silent approval. The aunt spoke to each of them in the same words, about their health and her own, and the health of Her Majesty, "who, thank God, was better today." And each visitor, though politeness prevented his showing impatience, left the old woman with a sense of relief at having performed a vexatious duty and did not return to her the whole evening.

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Bk. I, Ch. II
6 months 3 weeks ago

I cannot read a sentence in the book of the Hindoos without being elevated as upon the table-land of the Ghauts. It has such a rhythm as the winds of the desert, such a tide as the Ganges, and seems as superior to criticism as the Himmaleh Mounts. Even at this late hour, unworn by time with a native and inherent dignity it wears the English dress as indifferently as the Sanscrit.

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August 6, 1841
2 months 3 weeks ago

Militarism in both its forms - as war and as armed peace - is a legitimate child, a logical result of capitalism, which can only be overcome with the destruction of capitalism, and that hence whoever honestly desires world peace and liberation from the tremendous burden of armaments must also desire Socialism. Only in this way can real Social Democratic enlightenment and recruiting be carried on in connection with the armaments debate.

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5 months 3 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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6 months 3 weeks ago

If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution-then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.

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Wanted, A New Pleasure
5 months 1 week ago

Its first ethical precept is the identity of means used and aims sought. The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and wellbeing. Unless this be the essential aim of revolution, violent social changes would have no justification. For external social alterations can be, and have been, accomplished by the normal processes of evolution. Revolution, on the contrary, signifies not mere external change, but internal, basic, fundamental change. That internal change of concepts and ideas, permeating ever-larger social strata, finally culminates in the violent upheaval known as revolution.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The relation of feeling toward art and its bringing-forth can be one of production or one of reception and enjoyment.

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p. 78
5 months 1 week ago

The real importance of Swedenborg lies in the doctrines he taught, which are the reverse of the gloom and hell-fire of other breakaway sects. He rejects the notion that Jesus died on the cross to atone for the sin of Adam, declaring that God is neither vindictive nor petty-minded, and that since he is God, he doesn't need atonement. It is remarkable that this common-sense view had never struck earlier theologians. God is Divine Goodness, and Jesus is Divine Wisdom, and Goodness has to be approached through Wisdom. Whatever one thinks about the extraordinary claims of its founder, it must be acknowledged that there is something very beautiful and healthy about the Swedenborgian religion. Its founder may have not been a great occultist, but he was a great man.

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p. 280
5 months 1 week ago

The power of God is the worship He inspires. The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.

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Ch. 12: "Religion and Science", pp. 268-269
6 months 3 weeks ago

You shall find, that there cannot be a greater spur to the attaining what you would have the eldest learn, and know himself, than to set him upon teaching it his younger brothers and sisters.

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Sec. 119
2 months 2 weeks ago

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation.

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No. 1
5 months 1 week ago

When I first read The Wretched of the Earth I heard a new history spoken-the voice of the decolonised subject raised in resistance. That voice . . . articulated a yearning for freedom that was so intense and a quality of emotional hunger that was so fierce that it was overwhelming. Dying into the text, I abandoned and forgot myself. The lust for freedom in those pages awakened and resurrected me.

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Gender and Decolonization in the Congo (2010) ISBN 978-0-230-11040-3
3 weeks 4 days ago

Thinking, talking and writing IS action...

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

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The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) p. 248.
4 months 3 weeks ago

Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful.

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The less identity, the more violence. "Violence in the media." Canadian Forum. Volume 56, 1976, p. 9
6 months 3 weeks ago

Facts are ventriloquists' dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.

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"Bruno Rontini"
2 months 3 weeks ago

Nations are barbarian in their infancy but not savage. The barbarian is a proportional mean between the savage and the citizen. He already possesses no end of knowledge: he has habitations, some agriculture, domestic animals, laws, a cult, regular tribunals; he lacks only the sciences.

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p. 25
6 months 3 weeks ago

Morality is everywhere the same for all men, therefore it comes from God; sects differ, therefore they are the work of men.

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"Atheist", 1764
6 months 3 weeks ago

If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as "spiritual life," "God," "soul," "cross," etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.

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June 15, 1844
3 months 2 weeks ago

India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Naturalism is a word of many meetings in philosophy as well as in art. like most isms - classicism and romanticism, idealism and realism in art - it's has become an emotional term, a war cry of partisans.

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p. 157
6 months 3 weeks ago

Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.

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"Is Life Worth Living?"
3 months 1 week ago

If religion has put forward the proposition that we are all of us sinners, I set another against it: we are all of us perfect! Because, in each moment, we are all we can be, and never need to be more.

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Landstreicher, p. 226
7 months 1 week ago

I am not my soul.

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Super I ad Corinthios, 15.2
5 months 1 week ago

The vanity of the passing world and love are the two fundamental and heart-penetrating notes of true poetry. And they are two notes of which neither can be sounded without causing the other to vibrate. The feeling of the vanity of the passing world kindles love in us, the only thing that triumphs over the vain and transitory, the only thing that fills life again and eternalizes it.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Armies are necessary, before all things, for the defense of governments from their own oppressed and enslaved subjects.

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Chapter VII, Significance of Compulsory Service
6 months 2 weeks ago

I would in fact tend to have more confidence in the outcome of a democratic decision if there was a minority that voted against it, than if it was unanimous... Social psychology has amply shown the strength of this bandwagon effect.

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Habermas (1993) "Further reflections on the public sphere", in: Craig Calhoun Eds. Habermas and the Public Sphere. MIT Press. p. 441
3 months 6 days ago

We have learned to tolerate the facts of war: that men are killed en masse - some twenty million in the Second World War - that whole cities and their inhabitants are annihilated by the atomic bomb, that men are turned into living torches by incendiary bombs. We learn of these things from the radio or newspapers and we judge them according to whether they signify success for the group of peoples to which we belong, or for our enemies. When we do admit to ourselves that such acts are the results of inhuman conduct, our admission is accompanied by the thought that the very fact of war itself leaves us no option but to accept them. In resigning ourselves to our fate without a struggle, we are guilty of inhumanity.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Every change in the social order, every revolution in property relations, is the necessary consequence of the creation of new forces of production which no longer fit into the old property relations. Private property has not always existed. When, towards the end of the Middle Ages, there arose a new mode of production which could not be carried on under the then existing feudal and guild forms of property, this manufacture, which had outgrown the old property relations, created a new property form, private property. And for manufacture and the earliest stage of development of big industry, private property was the only possible property form; the social order based on it was the only possible social order.

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7 months 3 days ago

Leave the ass burdened with laws behind in the valley. But your conscience, let it ascend with Isaac into the mountain.

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Chapter 2, Verse 14
6 months 3 weeks ago

I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'

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"Sermons in Cats"
4 months 3 weeks ago

Fortune is like glass-the brighter the glitter, the more easily broken.

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Maxim 280
5 months 2 weeks ago

Be it well understood, I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not. Freedom is not an activity pursued by an entity that, apart from and previous to such pursuit, is already possessed of a fixed being. To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity, not to have subscribed to a determined being, to be able to be other than what one was, to be unable to install oneself once and for all in any given being. The only attribute of the fixed, stable being in the free being is this constitutive instability.

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"Man has no nature"
7 months 1 week ago

Don't hold yourselves cheap, seeing that the creator of all things and of you estimates your value so high, so dear, that he pours out for you every day the most precious blood of his only-begotten Son.

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216:3:1
6 months 3 weeks ago

The public is a ferocious beast: one must chain it up or flee from it.

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Letter to Mademoiselle Quinault, quoted in Charles Sainte-Beuve, "Lettres inédites de Voltaire," Causeries de Lundi (20 October 1856) ; an English translation can be found on this page:
6 months 3 weeks ago

A circuit performed by a capital and meant to be a periodical process, not an individual act, is called its turnover. The duration of this turnover is determined by the sum of its time of production and its time of circulation.

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Volume II, Ch. VII, p. 158.
7 months 3 weeks ago

Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The new science of communication is percept, not concept.

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(p. 259)
6 months 3 weeks ago

Do the essences of proposition and of the truth determine themselves from out of the essence of the thing, or does the essence of the thing determine itself from out of the essence of the proposition? The question is posed as an either/or. However does this either/or itself suffice? Are the essence of the thing and the essence of the proposition only built as mirror images because both of them together determine themselves from out of the same but deeper lying root? However, what and where can be this common ground for the essence of the thing and of the proposition and of their origin? The unconditioned (Unbedingt)? We stated at the beginning that what conditions the essense of the thing in its thingness can no longer itself be thing and conditioned, it must be an unconditioned (Un-bedingtes).

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p. 47

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