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4 months 1 week ago

The incorporation of a bank and the powers assumed by legislation doing so have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States by the Constitution. They are not among the powers specially enumerated.

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Opinion on the Constitutionality of the Bill for Establishing a National Bank., 1791. ME 3:146
4 months 5 days ago

The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of all those applauding hands. The people who praise us-how capricious they are, how arbitrary. And the tiny region in which it all takes place.

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(Hays translation) IV, 4
7 months 4 weeks ago

People do not feel in any way ashamed or guilty about spending money on new clothes or a new car instead of giving it to famine relief. (Indeed, the alternative does not occur to them.) This way of looking at the matter cannot be justified. When we buy new clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look "well-dressed" we are not providing for any important need. We would not be sacrificing anything significant if we were to continue to wear our old clothes, and give the money to famine relief. By doing so, we would be preventing another person from starving. It follows from what I have said earlier that we ought to give money away, rather than spend it on clothes which we do not need to keep us warm. To do so is not charitable, or generous. Nor is it the kind of act which philosophers and theologians have called "supererogatory" - an act which it would be good to do, but not wrong not to do. On the contrary, we ought to give the money away, and it is wrong not to do so.

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6 months 6 days ago

The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.

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7 months ago

Elias truly shall first come, and restore all things. But I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed. Likewise shall also the Son of man suffer of them.

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17:11-12 (KJV)
6 months 2 weeks ago

Analytic philosophers - both in the 'constructivist' camp and in the camp that studies 'the ordinary use of words' - are disturbingly unanimous in regarding 2-valued logic as having a privileged position: privileged, not just in the sense of corresponding to the way we do speak, but in the sense of having no serious rival for logical reasons. If the foregoing analysis is correct, this is a prejudice of the same kind as the famous prejudice in favor of a privileged status for Euclidean geometry (a prejudice that survives in the tendency to cite 'space has three dimensions' as some kind of 'necessary' truth). One can go over from a 2-valued to a 3-valued logic without totally changing the meaning of 'true' and 'false'; and not just in silly ways, like the ones usually cited (e.g. equating truth with high probability, falsity with low probability, and middlehood with 'in between' probability).

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"Three-valued logic"
8 months 1 week ago

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. 6. Nature, Addresses and Lectures.

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The American Scholar
6 months 2 weeks ago

The Kropotkins, the Perovskayas, the Breshkovskayas, and hosts of others repudiated wealth and station and refused to serve King Mammon. They went among the people, not to lift them up but themselves to be lifted up, to be instructed, and in return to give themselves wholly to the people. That accounts for the heroism, the art, the literature of Russia, the unity between the people, the mujik and the intellectual. That to some extent explains the literature of all European countries, the fact that the Strindbergs, the Hauptmanns, the Wedekinds, the Brieux, the Mirbeaus, the Steinlins and Rodins have never dissociated themselves from the people.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

To the man who is truly ethical all life is sacred, including that which from the human point of view seems lower in the scale. He makes distinctions only as each case comes before him, and under the pressure of necessity, as, for example, when it falls to him to decide which of two lives he must sacrifice in order to preserve the other. But all through this series of decisions he is conscious of acting on subjective grounds and arbitrarily, and knows that he bears the responsibility for the life which is sacrificed.

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p. 269
4 months 4 weeks ago

Religion in most countries, more or less in every country, is no longer what it was, and should be,-a thousand-voiced psalm from the heart of Man to his invisible Father, the fountain of all Goodness, Beauty, Truth, and revealed in every revelation of these; but for the most part, a wise prudential feeling grounded on mere calculation; a matter, as all others now are, of Expediency and Utility; whereby some smaller quantum of earthly enjoyment may be exchanged for a far larger quantum of celestial enjoyment. Thus Religion too is Profit, a working for wages; not Reverence, but vulgar Hope or Fear.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The freedom of the 'everyday mind' consists rather in not kneeling down in awe. Its mental attitude is better expressed as sitting unmoveable like an object.

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7 months 4 days ago

I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

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1 year 1 week ago

Precisely as an enigma, the symptom, so to speak, announces its dissolution through interpretation: the aim of psychoanalysis is to re-establish the broken network of communication by allowing the patient to verbalize the meaning of his symptom: through this verbalization the symptom is automatically dissolved. This, then is the basic point: in its very construction, the symptom implies the field of the big Other as consistent, complete, because its very function is an appeal to the Other which contains its meaning.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

For a country to have a great writer ... is like having another government. That's why no régime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

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Innokenty, in Ch. 57
6 months 3 weeks ago

Creation spirituality replaced a patriarchal spirituality rooted in notions of fall and redemption.

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Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2014), p.106.
5 months 3 weeks ago

In all ages a chief cause of the intestine disorders of states has been that the natural distribution of power and the legal distribution of power have not corresponded with each other.

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Speech in the House of Commons (28 February 1832), quoted in Speeches of the Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay, M.P. (1854), p. 91
4 months 5 days ago

..If you are troubled by external circumstances, it is not the circumstances that trouble you, but your own perception of them - and they are in your power to change at any time.

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8 months 1 week ago

The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

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Chapter II, Part II, Article I, p. 911.

If I work incessantly to the last, nature owes me another form of existence when the present one collapses.

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Letter to Eckermann
8 months 2 weeks ago

The logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors which have their foundation in commonly received notions than to help the search for truth. So it does more harm than good.

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Aphorism 7
6 months 6 days ago

Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.

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9 months 1 week ago

It is love that leniently and mercifully says: I forgive you everything-if you are forgiven only little, then it is because you love only little. Justice severely sets the boundary and says: No further! This is the limit. For you there is no forgiveness, and there is nothing more to be said.

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4 months 1 week ago

For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well organized and armed militia is their best security.

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Thomas Jefferson's Eighth State of the Union Address
8 months 1 week ago

While we are reading these sentences, this fair modern world seems only a reprint of the Laws of Menu with the gloss of Culluca. Tried by a New England eye, or the mere practical wisdom of modern times, they are the oracles of a race already in its dotage, but held up to the sky, which is the only impartial and incorruptible ordeal, they are of a piece with its depth and serenity, and I am assured that they will have a place and significance as long as there is a sky to test them by.

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4 months 5 days ago

Of Fronto, to how much envy and fraud and hypocrisy the state of a tyrannous king is subject unto, and how they who are commonly called [Eupatridas Gk.], i.e. nobly born, are in some sort incapable, or void of natural affection.

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I, 8
8 months 1 week ago

Genet is a man-failure: he wills the impossible in order to derive from the tragic grandeur of this defeat the assurance that there is something other than the possible.

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p. 213
9 months 5 days ago

Scientists have pushed back the horizon of time from the biblical 6,000 years to 4,600,000,000 years for the age of Earth a 760,000-fold increase.

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8 months 1 week ago

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

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Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 1952
9 months 5 days ago

The same man who could not find it in his conscience to curb his curiosity into the nuclear studies that might someday kill half of Earth would risk his life to save that of an unimportant fellow man.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

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E 52
4 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing in all literature is so depressing as the "Dissertations" of the slave [Epictetus], unless it be the "Meditations" of the Emperor [Marcus Aurelius] ...[after some excerpts from the two books]..... In such passages we feel the proximity of Christianity and its dauntless martyrs; indeed were not the Christian ethic of self-denial, the Christian political ideal of an almost communistic brotherhood of man, and the Christian eschatology of the final conflagration of all the world, fragments of Stoic doctrine floating on the stream of thought? In Epictetus the Greco-Roman soul has lost its paganism, and is ready for a new faith".

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The business of grabbing and money-making, through a violent extractive economy that the 1% have built, is burdening the earth and humanity with unbearable and non-sustainable costs, and has brought us to the brink of extinction. We do not have to escape from the earth; we have to escape from the illusions that enslave our minds and make extinction look inevitable.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

We do not have a complete and satisfying knowledge of the world. We are reduced to the simple conclusion that everywhere in the world there is life like ourselves and that all life is shrouded in mystery. A true acquaintance with the world consists in being filled with a sense of the mystery of existence and life. This mystery becomes only more mysterious with every advance in scientific research. To be filled with the mystery of life is like that which is called in the language of mysticism the "wise ignorance," an ignorance which is nonetheless knowledge of the essential.

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p. 304
4 months 3 weeks ago

My master Attalus used to say: "Evil herself drinks the largest portion of her own poison." The poison which serpents carry for the destruction of others, and secrete without harm to themselves, is not like this poison; for this sort is ruinous to the possessor.

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Line 22
2 months 1 week ago

I think of it like a tree. Even if you stop studying philosophy or critical thinking itself the seed you planted begins growth that just happens by living in the world with the tools you have.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

A physician, after he had felt the pulse of Pausanias, and considered his constitution, saying, "He ails nothing," "It is because, sir," he replied, "I use none of your physic."

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Of Pausanias the Son of Phistoanax
8 months 1 week ago

On recent and contemporary literature student's need is least and our help least. They ought to understand it better than we, and if they do not then there is something radically wrong either with them or with the literature. But I need not labour the point. There is an intrinsic absurdity in making current literature a subject of academic study, and the student who wants a tutor's assistance in reading the works of his own contemporaries might as well ask for a nurse's assistance in blowing his own nose.

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"Our English syllabus", Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939). Reprinted in Image and Imagination: Essays and Reviews by C. S. Lewis (2013), Cambridge University Press
6 months 3 days ago

Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.

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Complete Works, vol. 26, Reflections and Remarks on Human Life, section 4.
4 months 4 weeks ago

Hadst thou not Greek enough to understand thus much: The end of man is an Action, and not a Thought, though it were the noblest.

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Bk. II, ch. 5 The words Carlyle put in italics are a quotation from Book 1 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.
8 months 1 week ago

There are some simple maxims which I think might be commanded to writers of expository prose. First: never use a long word if a short word will do. Second: if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences. Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end.

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"How I Write", The Writer, September 1954
8 months 1 week ago

Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.

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Voyage to England
6 months 4 days ago

Ten years ago, you could have traveled thousands of miles through the United States and never seen a baseball cap turned back to front. Today, the reverse baseball cap is ubiquitous. I do not know what the pattern of geographical spread of the reverse baseball cap precisely was, but epidemiology is certainly among the professions primarily qualified to study it.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

Cannot we understand how these men worshipped Canopus; became what we call Sabeans, worshipping the stars? Such is to me the secret of all forms of Paganism. Worship is transcendent wonder; wonder for which there is now no limit or measure; that is worship.

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7 months 4 days ago

A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...

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4 months 1 week ago

There is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world.

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Letter to Henry Lee

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