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7 months 1 week ago

If a woman becomes weary and at last dead from bearing, that matters not; let her only die from bearing, she is there to do it.

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Sermon Von dem ehelichen Stande (1519), p. 41 - as quoted in The Ethic of Freethought: A Selection of Essays and Lectures (1888) by Karl Pearson
3 months 2 weeks ago

I commend you and rejoice in the fact that you are persistent in your studies, and that, putting all else aside, you make it each day your endeavour to become a better man.

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8 months 6 days ago
For those who need consolation no means of consolation is so effective as the assertion that in their case no consolation is possible: it implies so great a degree of distinction that they at once hold up their heads again.
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3 months 1 day ago

Whatever this is that I am, it is flesh and a little spirit and an intelligence. This that I am, whatever it be, is mere flesh and a little breathe and the ruling Reason, This Being of mine, whatever it really is, consists of a little flesh, a little breath, and the part which governs.

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A little flesh, a little breath, and a Reason to rule all - that is myself. (Staniforth translation) II, 2
6 months 1 week ago

In no other country in the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States, and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned.

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Book Three, Chapter XXI.
6 months 4 weeks ago

In everything well known something worthy of thought still lurks.

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p. xxxix
5 months 3 weeks ago

What, by a word lacking even in grammar, is called amorality, is a thing that does not exist. If you are unwilling to submit to any norm, you have, nolens volens, to submit to the norm of denying all morality, and this is not amoral, but immoral. It is a negative morality which preserves the empty form of the other.

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Chapter XV: We Arrive At The Real Question
5 months 4 weeks ago

The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor - hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition.

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6 months 4 days ago

A subject interests me and holds my attention only so long as it presents me with difficulties, only so long as I am at odds with it and have, as it were, to struggle with it; but once I have mastered it I hurry on to something else, to a new subject; for my interest is not confined to any particular field or subject; it extends to everything human. This does not mean that I am an intellectual miser or egoist, who amasses knowledge for himself alone; by no means! What I do and think for myself, I must also think and do for others. But I feel the need of instructing others in a subject only so long as, while instructing others, I am also instructing myself.

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Lecture I, , R. Manheim, trans. (1967), p. 2
5 months 3 weeks ago

Of all kind of authors there are none I despise more than compilers, who search every where for shreds of other men's works, which they join to their own, like so many pieces of green turf in a garden: they are not at all superior to compositors in a printing house, who range the types, which, collected together, make a book, towards which they contribute nothing but the labours of the hand. I would have original writers respected, and it seems to me a kind of profanation to take those pieces from the sanctuary in which they reside, and to expose them to a contempt they do not deserve. When a man hath nothing new to say, why does not he hold his tongue? What business have we with this double employment?"

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No. 66.
3 months 1 week ago

Men's works also are naturally perishable and mutable and subject to every kind of alteration. But since God is eternal, it follows that of such sort are his ordinances also. And since they are such, they are either the natures of things or are accordant with the nature of things. For how could nature be at variance with the ordinance of God? How could it fall out of harmony therewith?

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3 months ago

I consider, that as generally as Chymists are wont to appeal to Experience, and as confidently as they use to instance the several substances separated by the Fire from a Mixt Body, as a sufficient proof of their being its component Elements: Yet those differing Substances are many of them farr enough from Elementary simplicity, and may be yet look'd upon as mixt Bodies, most of them also retaining, somewhat... of the Nature of those Concretes whence they were forc'd.

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7 months 6 days ago

Define your terms, you will permit me again to say, or we shall never understand one another.

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"Miracles", 1764
5 months 3 weeks ago

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

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Introduction, sect. 6
5 months 1 week ago

Even though the model referred to satisfies the theory, etc., it is 'unintended'; and we recognize that it is unintended from the description through which it is given (as in the intuitionist case). Models are not lost noumenal waifs looking for someone to name them; they are constructions within our theory itself. and they have names from birth.

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Models and Reality
4 months ago

Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.

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Ch. IV: "The Golden Rule and After", p. 105.
7 months 4 days ago

The question was, whether, if the reformers of society and government could succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were free and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures.

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(pp. 145-146)
11 months 1 week ago

In the more sophisticated versions of the critics of ideology - that developed by the Frankfurt School, for example - it is not just a question of seeing things (that is, social reality) as they 'really are," of throwing away the distorting spectacles of ideology; the main point is to see how the reality itself cannot reproduce itself without this so-called ideological mystification. The mask is not simply hiding the real state of things; the ideological distortion is written into its very essence... the moment we see it 'as it really is,' this being dissolves itself into nothingness or, more precisely, it changes into another kind of reality. That is why we must avoid simple metaphors of demasking, of throwing away the veils which are supposed to hide the naked reality.

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3 months ago

The socialist system of society should only be, and can only be, an historical product, born out of the school of its own experiences, born in the course of its realization, as a result of the developments of living history, which - just like organic nature of which, in the last analysis, it forms a part - has the fine habit of always producing along with any real social need the means to its satisfaction, along with the task simultaneously the solution. However, if such is the case, then it is clear that socialism by its very nature cannot be decreed or introduced by ukase. It has as its prerequisite a number of measures of force - against property, etc. The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive, cannot. New Territory. A thousand problems. Only experience is capable of correcting and opening new ways.

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Chapter Six, "The Problem of Dictatorship"
6 months 4 days ago

The science of government being, therefore, so practical in itself, and intended for such practical purposes, a matter which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be, it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes.

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6 months 4 days ago

I'll know how to die with courage; that is easier than living.

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Act II.
6 months 1 week ago

When an opinion has taken root in a democracy and established itself in the minds of the majority, it afterward persists by itself, needing no effort to maintain it since no one attacks it. Those who at first rejected it as false come in the end to adopt it as accepted, and even those who still at the bottom of their hearts oppose it keep their views to themselves, taking great care to avoid a dangerous and futile contest.

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Book Three, Chapter XXI.
6 months ago

Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Lying takes the form of mass media creating the myth that feminist movement has completely transformed society, so much so that the politics of patriarchal power have been inverted and that men, particularly white men, just like emasculated black men, have become the victims of dominating women. So, it goes, all men (especially black men) must pull together (as in the Clarence Thomas hearings) to support and reaffirm patriarchal domination. Add to this the widely held assumptions that blacks, other minorities, and white women are taking jobs from white men, and that people are poor and unemployed because they want to be, and it becomes most evident that part of our contemporary crisis is created by a lack of meaningful access to truth.

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Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
3 months 4 days ago

The standard that I always come back to is the health of the world, which is the same as our own personal health. We can't distinguish our health from the health of everything else. And we know enough from the ecologists now to know that health is a very complex and un-understandable complexity of relationships that makes the world whole.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

Liberalism has been very severely threatened in recent years. It's been threatened from a number of sources. So internationally you have two great powers, Russia and China, that are definitely not liberal polities, that have expansive ambitions... As Vladimir Putin said... in an iterview with the FT in 2019 "Liberalism is an obsolete doctrine." But the threat... also comes from other places. ...You have the rise of a populist nationalist right in many countries. This is Viktor Orbán in Hungary. This is Narendra Modi in India, Donald Trump in the United States, ...Marine Le Pen in France. All of them criticizing liberalism precisely for the tolerance that it permits and tries to deal with, in diverse and increasingly ethnically and racially diverse countries.

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5:36 Ref: Vladimir Putin says liberalism has 'become obsolete' (June 27, 2019) Financial Times.
3 months ago

Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity, but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat.

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The Junius Pamphlet
4 months 2 weeks ago

That mysterious independent variable of political calculation, Public Opinion.

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Universities, Actual and Ideal
3 months 4 weeks ago

Alas! Your dear friend and servant Galileo has been for the last month hopelessly blind; so that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which I by my marvelous discoveries and clear demonstrations had enlarged a hundred thousand times beyond the belief of the wise men of bygone ages, henceforward for me is shrunk into such a small space as is filled by my own bodily sensations.

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Letter to Élie Diodati (2 January 1638), as translated in The Private Life of Galileo : Compiled primarily from his correspondence and that of his eldest daughter, Sister Maria Celeste (1870) by Mary Allan-Olney, p. 279
6 months ago

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.

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3 months 1 day ago

"Those who have forgotten where the road leads." "They are at odds with what is all around them"-the all-directing logos. And "they find alien what they meet with every day."

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(Hays translation) IV, 46
5 months 3 weeks ago

Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.

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Ch. VI
7 months 3 days ago

This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

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Book I, Chapter 1, "The Law of Human Nature"
7 months 4 days ago

Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.

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The Civil War in France : "The Third Address", May 1871
6 months 4 weeks ago

Philosophy's position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name "theory of knowledge," has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy.

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p. 4
7 months 1 week ago

The Idols of Tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men. For it is a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of things. On the contrary, all perceptions as well of the sense as of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.

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Aphorism 41
3 months 3 weeks ago

A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the world's torrent.

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Torquato Tasso, Act I, sc. ii
11 months 1 week ago

In his seminar on The Ethic of Psychoanalysis, Lacan speaks of the role of the Chorus in classical tragedy: we, the spectators, came to the theatre worried, full of everyday problems, unable to adjust without reserve to the problems of the play, that is to feel the required fears and compassions - but not problem, there is a chorus, who feels the sorrow and the compassion instead of us - or, more precisely, we feel the required emotions through the medium of the chorus: 'You are then relieved of all worries, even if you do not feel anything, the Chorus will do so in your place.'

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7 months 3 days ago

Karsky: I met your father last week. Are you still interested in hearing how he is doing?

Hugo: No. 

Karsky: It is very probable that you will be responsible for his death.

Hugo: It is virtually certain that he is responsible for my life. We are even.

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Act 4, sc. 4
4 months 2 weeks ago

I don't believe a committee can write a book. ... It can, oh, govern a country, perhaps. But I don't believe it can write a book.

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Interviewed by Christopher Wright (1955). Printed in James Nelson (ed.) Wisdom: Conversations with the Elder Wise Men of Our Day (New York: Norton, 1958) p. 208
7 months 4 days ago

Unlimited exploitation of cheap labour-power is the sole foundation of their power to compete.

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Vol. I, Ch. 15, Section 8, pg. 520.
7 months 4 days ago

Since the working-class lives from hand to mouth,it buys as long as it has the means to buy.

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Vol. II, Ch. XX, p. 449.
5 months 3 weeks ago

There is nothing truly real, save that which feels, suffers, pities, loves and desires, save consciousness. And we need God in order to save consciousness; not in order to think existence, but in order to live it; not in order to know the why and how of it, but in order to feel the wherefore of it.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

Every morning I shall concern myself anew about the boundary Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No And pressing forward honor reality. We cannot avoid Using power, Cannot escape the compulsion To afflict the world, So let us, cautious in diction And mighty in contradiction, Love powerfully.

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"Power and Love"
6 months ago

The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not - which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams.

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par. 51 p.46
6 months 4 days ago

The nature of the Absolute State consists herein, -that all individual powers be directed towards the Life of the Race,-in place of which Race, the State puts the aggregate of its own Citizens. It therefore becomes necessary, first, that all Individuals, without exception, should be taken into equal consideration by the State; and second, that every Individual, with all his individual powers, without exception or reserve, should be taken into equal consideration. In a State so constituted, where all, as Individuals, are dedicated to the Race, it follows at the same time, that all without exception, with all the Rights which belong to them as component parts of the Race, are dedicated to all the other individual members of the State.

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p. 150-151

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