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Suppose a surface to be part red and part blue; so that every point on it is either red or blue, and of course, no part can be both red and blue. What then, is the color of the surface in the immediate neighborhood of the point. ...it follows that the boundary is half red and half blue. In like manner, we find it necessary to hold that consciousness essentially occupies time... Thus, the present is half past and half time to come. ...Take another case: the velocity of a particle at any instant of time is its mean velocity during an infinitesimal instant in which that time is consumed. Just so, my immediate feeling is my feeling through an infinitesimal duration containing the present instant.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

I care little about the sword: I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in this world, with any sword or tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of. We will let it preach, and pamphleteer, and fight, and to the uttermost bestir itself, and do, beak and claws, whatsoever is in it; very sure that it will, in the long-run, conquer nothing which does not deserve to be conquered. What is better than itself, it cannot put away, but only what is worse. In this great Duel, Nature herself is umpire, and can do no wrong: the thing which is deepest-rooted in Nature, what we call truest, that thing and not the other will be found growing at last.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

What is love's perfection? To love our enemies, and to love them to the end that they may be our brothers.

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First Homily, as translated by John Burnaby (1955), p. 266
4 months 4 weeks ago

There has been an inversion in the hierarchy of the two principles of antiquity, "Take care of yourself" and "Know yourself." In Greco-Roman culture, knowledge of oneself appeared as the consequence of the care of the self. In the modern world, knowledge of oneself constitutes the fundamental principle.

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"Technologies of the Self," Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (1994), p. 228
3 months 2 weeks ago

Violence and freedom are the two endpoints on the scale of power.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The "old maid" with her repressed cravings for tenderness, sex, and propagation, is rarely quite free of ressentiment. What we call "prudery," in contrast with true modesty, is but one of the numerous variants of sexual ressentiment. The habitual behavior of many old maids, who obsessively ferret out all sexually significant events in their surroundings in order to condemn them harshly, is nothing but sexual gratification transformed into ressentiment satisfaction. Thus the criticism accomplishes the very thing it pretends to condemn.

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L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 61-62
3 months 3 weeks ago

When scientists take part in activity they transform themselves from scientists into acting beings, that is, they become elements, data, facts; as soon as they reflect on their activity, however, they are re-transformed into scientists. The trained specialist qua scientist looks upon himself as a chain of judgments and inferences; qua member of society, he regard himself as a mere object. The same holds for everyone. The individual is divided into innumerable functions, the interconnection of which are unknown. In society a man is pater familias under one aspect, business man under another, thinker under a third; to be more precise, he is not a human being at all, but all these aspects and many more in an inevitable succession.

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p. 155.
3 months 2 weeks ago

The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

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p. 209
1 month 2 weeks ago

Mercy often means giving death, not life.

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line 329
3 months ago

The individual selectionist would admit that groups do indeed die out, and that whether or not a group goes extinct may be influenced by the behaviour of the individuals in that group. He might even admit that if only the individuals in a group had the gift of foresight they could see that in the long run their own best interests lay in restraining their selfish greed, to prevent the destruction of the whole group. How many times must this have been said in recent years to the working people of Britain? But group extinction is a slow process compared with the rapid cut and thrust of individual competition. Even while the group is going slowly and inexorably downhill, selfish individuals prosper in the short term at the expense of altruists. The citizens of Britain may or may not be blessed with foresight, but evolution is blind to the future.

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Ch. 1. Why Are People?
3 months 2 days ago

It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.

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Kenneth Boulding in McLuhan: Hot & Cool (1967) p. 68
5 months 4 days ago

Our psychological experiences are all equally facts. There is nothing to choose between them. No psychological experience is "truer," so far as we are concerned, than any other. For even if one should correspond more closely to things in themselves as perceived by some hypothetical non-human being, it would be impossible for us to discover which it was. Science is no "truer" than common sense, or lunacy, or art, or religion. It permits us to organize our experience profitably; but tells us nothing about the real nature of the world to which our experiences are supposed to refer. From the internal reality, by which I mean the totality of psychological experiences, it actually separates us. Art, for example, deals with many more aspects of this internal reality than does science, which confines itself deliberately and by convention to the study of one very limited class of experiences - the experiences of sense.

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"One and Many," p. 5-6
5 months 3 weeks ago

To give one's self earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.

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4 months 4 days ago

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts!

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Ch. 8, Humanity
1 month 2 weeks ago

There are two threats to reason, the opinion that one knows the truth about the most important things and the opinion that there is no truth about them. Both of these opinions are fatal to philosophy; the first asserts that the quest for truth is unnecessary, while the second asserts that it is impossible. The Socratic knowledge of ignorance, which I take to be the beginning point of all philosophy, defines the sensible middle ground between two extremes.

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"Western Civ," p. 18.
2 months 2 weeks ago

As Gandhi taught, freedom can be reclaimed only by refusing to cooperate with unjust, immoral laws. The fight for truth-employing the principles of civil disobedience, nonviolence, and noncooperation-is not just our right as free citizens of free societies. It is our duty as citizens of the earth.

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(p184)
3 months 1 week ago

"If he is this good at acting crazy, it's because he is." Nor is military psychology mistaken in this regard: in this sense, all crazy people simulate, and this lack of distinction is the worst kind of subversion. It is against this lack of distinction that classical reason armed itself in all its categories. But it is what today again outflanks them, submerging the principle of truth.

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"The Precession of Simulacra," p. 4
1 month 3 weeks ago

World,-this man is not a slave with thee! None of thy promotions is necessary for him. His place is with the stars of Heaven: to thee it may be momentous, to him it is indifferent, whether thou place him in the lowest hut, or forty feet higher at the top of thy stupendous high tower, while here on Earth. The joys of Earth that are precious, they depend not on thee and thy promotions. Food and raiment, and, round a social hearth, souls who love him, whom he loves: these are already his. He wants none of thy rewards;

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1 month 2 weeks ago

It was a great deed to conquer Carthage, but a greater deed to conquer death.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Be a craftsman in speech that thou mayest be strong, for the strength of one is the tongue, and speech is mightier than all fighting.

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Translated by J. H. Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933) p. 131
5 months 1 week ago

It would be better to have no laws at all than to have them in such profusion as we do.

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Ch. 13
5 months 6 days ago

It is the privilege of true genius, and certainly of the genius that opens a new road, to make without punishment great mistakes.

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"Siècle de Louis XIV," ch. 32 (1751), qtd. in Arthur Schopenhauer, "The World as Will and Representation," Criticism of the Kantian philosophy, 1818
5 months 1 week ago

The will is not free to strive toward whatever is declared good.

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Thesis 10
5 months 1 week ago

The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness; her state is like that in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene.

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Book I, Ch. 26
5 months 6 days ago

In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.

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Vol. 2, Ch. 27, § 370 Variant translation: To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties.
1 month 1 day ago

That which makes the man no worse than he was makes his life no worse: it has no power to harm, without or within.

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IV, 8
5 months 6 days ago

To understand political power aright, and derive from it its original, we must consider what estate all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man.

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Second Treatise of Government, Ch. II, sec. 4
5 months 5 days ago

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Neither art nor wisdom may be attained without learning.

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4 months 1 week ago

So many of my thoughts and feelings are shared by the English that England has turned into a second native land of the mind for me.

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Journeys to England and Ireland, 1835.
4 months 5 days ago

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

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Volume iii, p. 274
1 month 4 weeks ago

There is a left wing version of this longing for community... because in a liberal society we never move as quickly as we should towards full equality, and therefore there are many marginalized groups who feel that the liberal society is... hypocritical, that it's promising an equality of recognition, and of rights, but it is not delivering... and therefore the very concept of liberal universalism is challenged in favor of a definition of rights that is tied to the specific groups.

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18:44
5 months 5 days ago

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

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Ch. 1: Introductory
5 months 1 week ago

Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.

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Part 1, Section 1
3 months 2 weeks ago

Disciplinary society is still governed by no. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers.

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Source: Page 8
5 months 5 days ago

The love of power is a part of human nature, but power-philosophies are, in a certain precise sense, insane. The existence of the external world, both that of matter and of other human beings, is a datum, which may be humiliating to a certain kind of pride, but can only be denied by a madman. Men who allow their love of power to give them a distorted view of the world are to be found in every asylum: one man will think he is Governor of the Bank of England, another will think he is the King, and yet another will think he is God. Highly similar delusions, if expressed by educated men in obscure language, lead to professorships in philosophy; and if expressed by emotional men in eloquent language, lead to dictatorships. Certified lunatics are shut up because of the proneness to violence when their pretensions are questioned; the uncertified variety are given control of powerful armies, and can inflict death and disaster upon all sane men within their reach.

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Ch. 16: Power philosophies
1 month 2 weeks ago

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

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1 month 4 days ago

The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war, but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.

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Peaceableness Toward Enemies
3 months 3 weeks ago

We can only learn to love by loving.

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The Bell (1958), ch. 19; 2001, p. 219.
4 months 4 days ago

...for stones, plants, and animals there is no God, but only for man.

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5 months 5 days ago

Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor.

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Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 2, pg. 49.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Venerate the martyrs, praise, love, proclaim, honor them. But worship the God of the martyrs.

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273:9; translation from: The works of Saint Augustine, John E. Rotelle, New City Press, ISBN 1565480600 ISBN 9781565480605 p. 21
6 months 1 day ago

The rest of the story, to Grand's thinking, was very simple. The common lot of married couples. You get married, you go on loving a bit longer, you work. And you work so hard that it makes you forget to love.

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4 months 1 week ago

We term sleep a death, and yet it is waking that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life.

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Section 12
1 month 2 weeks ago

There is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.

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Inside Information
4 months 1 week ago

There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult-to begin a war and to end it.

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Book Three, Chapter XXII.
4 months 2 weeks ago

There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacings of the spheres.

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As quoted in the preface of the book entitled Music of the Spheres by Guy Murchie
6 months 5 days ago

The two guides call out to a man early and late. And yet, no, for when remorse calls to a man it is always late. The call to find the way again by seeking out God in the confession of sins is always at the eleventh hour. Whether you are young or old, whether you have sinned much or little, whether you have offended much or neglected much, the guilt makes this call come at the eleventh hour. The inner agitation of the heart understands what remorse insists upon, that the eleventh hour has come. For in the sense of time, the old man's age is the eleventh hour; and the instant of death, the final moment in the eleventh hour. The indolent youth speaks of a long life that lies before him. The indolent old man hopes that his death is still a long way off. But repentance and remorse belong to the eternal in a man.

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