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1 month 4 weeks ago

Freedom of religion, restricted only from acts of trespass on that of others.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science - problems like good and evil, beauty and ugliness, order and freedom, life and death; so soon as a field of inquiry yields knowledge susceptible of exact formulation it is called science. Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Buddhism calls anger "corruption of the mind," Manicheism "root of the tree of death." I know this, but what good does it do me to know?

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6 months 3 days ago

If I had as clear an idea of ghosts, as I have of a triangle or a circle, I should not in the least hesitate to affirm that they had been created by God; but as the idea I possess of them is just like the ideas, which my imagination forms of harpies, gryphons, hydras, &c., I cannot consider them as anything but dreams, which differ from God as totally as that which is not differs from that which is.

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Letter to Hugo Boxel (October 1674) The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (1891) Tr. R. H. M. Elwes, Vol. 2, Letter 58 (54).
6 months 1 week ago

He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor's or an ordinary man's, it is still a life subject to all human accidents.

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Ch. 13
5 months 4 weeks ago

What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

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On Revolution (1963), ch. 2
5 months 4 weeks ago

Either the USSR was not the country of socialism, in which case socialism didn't exist anywhere and doubtless, wasn't possible: or else, socialism was that, this abominable monster, this police state, the power of beasts of prey.

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p. 184
5 months 4 weeks ago

Although I consider our political world to be the best of which we have any historical knowledge, we should beware of attributing this fact to democracy or to freedom. Freedom is not a supplier who delivers goods to our door. Democracy does not ensure that anything is accomplished - certainly not an economic miracle. It is wrong and dangerous to extol freedom by telling people that they will certainly be all right once they are free. How someone fares in life is largely a matter of luck or grace, and to a comparatively small degree perhaps also of competence, diligence, and other virtues. The most we can say of democracy or freedom is that they give our personal abilities a little more influence on our well-being.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Since, of desires some are natural and necessary; others natural, but not necessary; and others neither natural nor necessary, but the offspring of false judgment; it must be the office of temperance to gratify the first class, as far as nature requires: to restrain the second within the bounds of moderation; and, as to the third, resolutely to oppose, and, if possible, entirely repress them.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

It is now generally accepted that the roots of our ethics lie in patterns of behavior that evolved among our pre-human ancestors, the social mammals and that we retain within our biological nature elements of these evolved responses. We have learned considerably more about these responses, and we are beginning to to understand how they interact with our capacity to reason.

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Preface To The 2011 edition, p. xi
4 months 3 weeks ago

The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick or a self-destroying or even murderous obsession. Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.

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The Philosopher's Pupil (1983) p. 76.
3 months 2 weeks ago

If the hypothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have arisen from non-living matter; for by the hypothesis the condition of the globe was at one time such, that living matter could not have existed in it, life being entirely incompatible with the gaseous state.

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In the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ninth edition, (1876) Vol. III, "Biology", p. 689. Also quoted in Joseph Cook (1878), Biology, with Preludes on Current Events, Houghton, Osgood, p. 39
6 months 1 week ago

Who does not in some sort live to others, does not live much to himself.

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Book III, Ch. 10
6 months 3 weeks ago

The orators and the despots have the least power in their cities since they do nothing that they wish to do, practically speaking, though they do whatever they think to be best.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

Dean Swift's rule is as good for women as for men - never to talk above a half minute without pausing, and giving others an opportunity to strike in.

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Parisian Morals and Manners, published in The Edinburgh Review (1843)
4 months 2 weeks ago

The more the concept of reason becomes emasculated, the more easily it lends itself to ideological manipulation and to propagation of even the most blatant lies. ... Subjective reason conforms to anything.

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pp. 24-25.
5 months 3 weeks ago

What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.

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(2) Original German: Was der Fall ist, die Tatsache, ist das Bestehen von Sachverhalten.
6 months 2 days ago

I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: "Well, let them eat cake".

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This passage contains a statement Qu'ils mangent de la brioche that has usually come to be attributed to Marie Antoinette; this was written in 1766, when Marie Antoinette was 10
6 months 1 week ago

These philosophers of the world place contrarieties in the same subject; for the one attributed greatness to nature and the other weakness to this same nature, which could not subsist; whilst faith teaches us to place them in different subjects: all that is infirm belonging to nature, all that is powerful belonging to grace. Such is the marvelous and novel union which God alone could teach, and which he alone could make, and which is only a type and an effect of the ineffable union of two natures in the single person of a Man-God.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

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3 months 4 weeks ago

The strongest of all warriors are these two - Time and Patience.

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Bk. X, ch. 16
4 months 3 weeks ago

The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

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p. 107
5 months 4 weeks ago

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

Recompense hatred with justice, and recompense kindness with kindness.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

All is ephemeral - fame and the famous as well.

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IV, 35
6 months 1 day ago

Let me give two cautions. 1) The one is, that you keep them to the practice of what you would have grow into a habit with them, by kind words, and gentle admonitions, rather as minding them of what they forget, than by harsh rebukes and chiding, as if they were wilfully guilty. 2) Another thing you are to take care of, is, not to endeavour to settle too many habits at once, lest by variety you confound them, and so perfect none. When constant custom has made any one thing easy and natural to 'em, and they practice it without reflection, you may then go on to another.

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Sec. 66
3 months 3 weeks ago

We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans - convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.

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" A Second Half Life" (1991), p. 324
6 months 1 day ago

"Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst!

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6 months 2 days ago

The offender never forgives.

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Émile et Sophie, ou Les Solitaires, "Lettre Première", 1781
5 months 4 days ago

The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence.

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Book One, Chapter II.
5 months 4 days ago

I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern states. The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies.

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Chapter XVIII.

The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many.

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Pt. IV, sec. 3, ch. 3
1 month 2 weeks ago

I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one?

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4 months 1 week ago

There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another, This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

I've never been an optimist but that's fine because pessimists have the possibility of being agreeably surprised, and that's a reason for being pessimistic, but I've always defended a certain kind of pessimism because what is known as optimism is really a collection of illusions and I think one must recognise what all religious people know, which is that human beings are imperfect and fallen and there's no way in which they can alone surmount the problems which they themselves create.

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From an interview with George Eaton "The Roger Scruton interview: the full transcript", New Statesman
5 months 4 days ago

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.

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Chapter XV.
2 months 3 weeks ago

To this end they make a shield of their hypocritical zeal for religion. They go about invoking the Bible, which they would have minister to their deceitful purposes. Contrary to the sense of the Bible and the intention of the holy Fathers, if I am not mistaken, they would extend such authorities until even in purely physical matters - where faith is not involved - they would have us altogether abandon reason and the evidence of our senses in favor of some biblical passage, though under the surface meaning of its words this passage may contain a different sense.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

A scholar who loves comfort is not worthy of the name.

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2 months 2 weeks ago

A man is as old as his arteries, and as young as his ideas.

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Ch. 4 : On Old Age
5 months 4 weeks ago

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours Vijaya in Island.

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1962
5 months 4 weeks ago

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

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December 20, 1822
2 months 2 weeks ago

And yet life, Lucilius, is really a battle.

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the ultimate end, with reference to and for the sake of which all other things are desirable...is an existence exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments...This, being, according to the utilitarian opinion, the end of human action, is necessarily also the standard of morality; which may accordingly be defined, the rules and precepts for human conduct, by the observance of which an existence such as has been described might be, to the greatest extent possible, secured to all mankind; and not to them only, but, so far as the nature of things admits, to the whole sentient creation.

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Ch. 2

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