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4 months 4 weeks ago

There is no problem in all mathematics that cannot be solved by direct counting. But with the present implements of mathematics many operations can be performed in a few minutes which without mathematical methods would take a lifetime.

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p. 197; On mathematics and counting.
5 months 1 week ago

In the United States, except for slaves, servants and the destitute fed by townships, everyone has the vote and this is an indirect contributor to law-making. Anyone wishing to attack the law is thus reduced to adopting one of two obvious courses: they must either change the nation's opinion or trample its wishes under foot.

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Chapter XIV.
5 months 3 weeks ago

We are but numbers, born to consume resources.

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Book I, epistle ii, line 27
6 months 6 days ago

Constitutional freedom, as the right of every citizen to have to obey no other law than that to which he has given his consent or approval.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

The true servants of God are not solicitous that He should order them to do what they desire to do, but that they may desire to do what He orders them to do.

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p. 616
2 months 3 weeks ago

At forty, I had attained the unperturbed mind.

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"Discipline and Character", no. 41
3 months 3 weeks ago

One naturally regrets not being an expert or one of those insiders who thoroughly understand. It's hell to be an amateur. A little reflection calms your sorrow, however. The experts in their own little speedboat, the rest of us floating with the rest of mankind in a great barge - that is the picture.

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The Day They Signed the Treaty (1979), p. 224
5 months 4 days ago

There was a time when religion was kept secret from popular belief within the mystery cults like a holy fire, sharing a common sanctuary with philosophy. The legends of antiquity name the earliest philosophers as the originators of these mystery cults, from which the most enlightened among the later philosophers, notably Plato, liked to educe their divine teachings. At that time philosophers still had the courage and the right to discuss the singly great themes, the only ones worthy of philosophizing and rising above common knowledge.

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P. 7
5 months 4 days ago

Yes! We believe in a higher principle than your virtue and the kind of morality you speak of so paltrily and without much conviction. We believe that there is no imperative or reward for virtue for the soul because it simply acts according to the necessity of its inherent nature. The moral imperative expresses itself in an ought and presupposes the concept of an evil next to that of good.

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P. 43
5 months 1 day ago

By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward.

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As quoted in The Explorers (1996) by Paolo Novaresio ISBN 1-55670-495-X
5 months 4 weeks ago

Of course, the aim of a constitutional democracy is to safeguard the rights of the minority and avoid the tyranny of the majority. Yet the concrete practice of the US legal system from 1883 to 1964 promoted a tyranny of the white majority much more than a safeguarding of the rights of black Americans.

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(p. 102-3)
4 months 4 weeks ago

Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free. War is the father and king of all, and has produced some as gods and some as men, and has made some slaves and some free.

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2 months 3 days ago

But it will be asked, are we to have no banks? Are merchants and others to be deprived of the resource of short accommodations, found so convenient? I answer, let us have banks; but let them be such as are alone to be found in any country on earth, except Great Britain. There is not a bank of discount on the continent of Europe (at least there was not one when I was there) which offers anything but cash in exchange for discounted bills.

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ME 13:277
4 months 3 weeks ago

In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour.

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Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), p. 54
5 months 4 weeks ago

The Sabbath is not simply a time to rest, to recuperate. We should look at our work from the outside, not just from within.

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p. 91e
4 months 2 weeks ago

True science teaches, above all, to doubt and be ignorant.

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6 months 1 week ago

The act of navigation is not favourable to foreign commerce, or to the growth of that opulence which can arise from it. ... As defence, however, is of much more importance than opulence, the act of navigation is, perhaps, the wisest of all the commercial regulations of England.

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Chapter II
7 months 4 days ago

Of things said without any combination, each signifies either substance or quantity or qualification or a relative or where or when or being-in-a-position or having or doing or being affected. To give a rough idea, examples of substance are man, horse; of quantity: four-foot, five-foot; of qualification: white, grammatical; of a relative: double, half, larger; of where: in the Lyceum, in the market-place; of when: yesterday, last-year; of being-in-a-position: is-lying, is sitting; of having: has-shoes-on, has-armour-on; of doing: cutting, burning; of being-affected: being-cut, being-burned.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

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

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6 months 6 days ago

The public use of a man's reason must be free at all times, and this alone can bring enlightenment among men...

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6 months 1 week ago

Here I stand; I can do no otherwise. God help me. Amen!

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As reported in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 186; and in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed.
2 months 3 weeks ago

When the oak-tree is felled, the whole forest echoes with it; but a hundred acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.

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On History.
6 months 1 week 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
4 months 3 weeks ago

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions. 

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As quoted in The Listener
6 months 1 week ago

She [virtue] requires a rough and stormy passage; she will have either outward difficulties to wrestle with, ... or internal difficulties.

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Book II, Ch. 11. Of Cruelty
4 months 5 days ago

There is a similarity between writers and SDS [Students for a Democratic Society, a radical left-wing group]: Plenty of paranoia, but no ideas.

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7 months ago

One might think that a period which, in a space of fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings should be condemned out of hand. But its culpability must still be understood... In more ingenuous times, when the tyrant razed cities for his own greater glory, when the slave chained to the conqueror's chariot was dragged through the rejoicing streets, when enemies were thrown to the wild beasts in front of the assembled people, the mind did not reel before such unabashed crimes, and the judgment remained unclouded. But slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or by a taste for the superhuman, in one sense cripple judgment. On the day when crime dons the apparel of innocence, through a curious transposition peculiar to our times, it is innocence that is called upon to justify itself.

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3 months 1 week ago

Tyranny offers relief from the burden of sanity and a licence to enact forbidden impulses of hatred and violence. By acting on these impulses and releasing them in their subjects tyrants give people a kind of happiness, which as individuals they may be incapable of achieving.

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An Old Chaos: What a Tyrant Can Do For You (p. 57)
2 months 3 days ago

The name philosopher, which meant originally 'lover of wisdom,' has come in some strange way to mean a man who thinks it is his business to explain everything in a certain number of large books. It will be found, I think, that in proportion to his colossal ignorance is the perfection and symmetry of the system which he sets up; because it is so much easier to put an empty room tidy than a full one.

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As quoted by A. D'Abro, The Evolution of Scientific Thought from Newton to Einstein
7 months 1 day ago

There can never be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corrdiors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save. There never was a man so helpless as one who cannot remember.

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7 months 1 day ago

Of all the cultural aspects of humanity, the only one which is not broken up into national or regional splinters is science. Different nations have different languages, they may have different religions, may have different dietaries, may have different holidays, different ways of thinking, but here's only one science. 

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Interview by Richard Heffner on The Open Mind (19 June 1988); video (25:31)
4 months 3 weeks ago

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science. What the mystic finds waiting for him, then, is a humanity which has been prepared to listen to his message by other mystics invisible and present in the religion which is actually taught. Indeed his mysticism itself is imbued with this religion, for such was its starting point. His theology will generally conform to that of the theologians. His intelligence and his imagination will use the teachings of the theologians to express in words what he experiences, and in material images what he sees spiritually. And this he can do easily, since theology has tapped that very current whose source is the mystical. Thus his mysticism is served by religion, against the day when religion becomes enriched by his mysticism. This explains the primary mission which he feels to be entrusted to him, that of an intensifier of religious faith.

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Chapter III : Dynamic Religion
6 months 3 days ago

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

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Chapter 3, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, 1850
4 months 3 days ago

When the woman showed her love for the children that were not her own, and wept over them, I saw in her the living God, and understood What men live by.

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Ch. XI
5 months 3 weeks ago

The distance between oneself and other persons and other species can fall anywhere on a continuum. Even for other persons the understanding of what it is like to be them is only partial, and when one moves to species very different from oneself, a lesser degree of partial understanding may still be available. The imagination is remarkably flexible. My point, however, is not that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat. I am not raising that epistemological problem. My point is rather that even to form a conception of what it is like to be a bat and a fortiori to know what it is like to be a bat, one must take up the bat's point of view.

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p. 172, note 8.
4 months 3 weeks ago

From whence it follows, that were the publique and private interest are most closely united, there is the publique most advanced.

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The Second Part, Chapter 19, p. 97
6 months 1 week ago

Another argument of hope may be drawn from this - that some of the inventions already known are such as before they were discovered it could hardly have entered any man's head to think of; they would have been simply set aside as impossible. For in conjecturing what may be men set before them the example of what has been, and divine of the new with an imagination preoccupied and colored by the old; which way of forming opinions is very fallacious, for streams that are drawn from the springheads of nature do not always run in the old channels.

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Aphorism 109
7 months 6 days 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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6 months 1 week ago

For we have in Latin only a few small streams and muddy puddles, while they have pure springs and rivers flowing in gold. I see that it is utter madness even to touch with the little finger that branch of theology that deals chiefly with the divine mysteries, unless one is also provided with the equipment of Greek.

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As quoted in Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (2017) by By Eric Metaxas, p. 85
6 months 2 weeks ago

Were I a nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan.

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Book I, ch. 16, 20.
7 months 4 days ago

What, exactly, have the errors of exegesis and philosophy done in order to confuse Christianity, and how have they confused Christianity? Quite briefly and categorically, they have simply forced back the sphere of paradox-religion into the sphere of aesthetics, and in consequence have succeeded in brings Christian terminology to such a pass that terms which, so long as they remain within their sphere, are qualitative categories, can be put to almost any use as clever expressions.

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