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4 months 3 weeks ago

God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

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Letter to William Stephens Smith (13 November 1787). Manuscript at the Library of Congress.
6 months ago

Here we come to the nub of the issue: the alleged moral force of the term "natural". If any creature, by its very nature, causes terrible suffering, albeit unwittingly, is it morally wrong to change that nature? If a civilised human were to come to believe s/he had been committing acts that caused grievous pain for no good reason, then s/he would stop - and want other moral agents to prevent the recurrence of such behaviour. May we assume that the same would be true of a lion, if the lion were morally and cognitively "uplifted" so as to understand the ramifications of what she was doing? Or a house cat tormenting a mouse? Or indeed a human sociopath?

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"Reprogramming Predators", BLTC Research, 2009
8 months 2 weeks ago

But what then is this confrontation below the language of reason? Where might this interrogation lead, following not reason in its horizontal becoming, but seeking to retrace in time this constant verticality, which, the length of Western culture, confronts it with what it is not, measuring it with its own extravagance?

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Preface to 1961 edition
7 months 2 weeks ago

It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher. To an earlier age knowledge was power - merely that and nothing more; to us it is life and the summum bonum. Emancipation from the bonds of self, of one's own prepossessions, importunately sought at the hands of that rational power before which all must ultimately bow, - this is the characteristic that distinguishes all the great figures of nineteenth-century science from those of former periods.

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"The Century's Great Men in Science" in The 19th Century : A Review of Progress During the Past One Hundred Years in the Chief Departments of Human Activity (1901), published by G. P. Putnam's Sons.
8 months 4 days ago

This, therefore, is mathematics: she reminds you of the invisible form of the soul; she gives life to her own discoveries; she awakens the mind and purifies the intellect; she brings light to our intrinsic ideas; she abolishes oblivion and ignorance which are ours by birth.

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As quoted by Morris Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times
6 months 3 weeks ago

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.

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"The Implosion of Meaning in the Media," p. 79
9 months 1 week ago

Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the 'new, wonderful good society' which shall now be Rome, interpreted to mean 'more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.

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This is also from the 1965 essay by Justice Millard Caldwell. It is not clear if this is based in any specific dialogue.
8 months 2 weeks ago

The dissimulation of the woven texture can in any case take centuries to undo its web: a web that envelops a web, undoing the web for centuries; reconstituting it too as an organism, indefinitely regenerating its own tissue behind the cutting trace, the decision of each reading. There is always a surprise in store for the anatomy or physiology of any criticism that might think it had mastered the game, surveyed all the threads at once, deluding itself, too, in wanting to look at the text without touching it, without laying a hand on the "object," without risking- which is the only chance of entering into the game, by getting a few fingers caught- the addition of some new thread.

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Plato's Pharmacy
4 months 2 weeks ago

The human mind loves the bondage of words and is apt, when freed from one form of their tyranny, to set up another more oppressive than the last. The highest function of philosophy is to enforce the attitude of meditation and therewithal restrain the excessive volubility of the tongue. To us it seems that the reflective thinker wins his greatest victories when by what he says he compels us to recognise the relative insignificance of anything he can say. His task is not to capture Reality, but to free it from captivity.

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7 months 1 week ago

During the last quarter of a century all the authority associated with the function of spiritual guidance ... has seeped down into the lowest publications. ... Between a poem by Valéry and an advertisement for a beauty cream promising a rich marriage to anyone who used it there was at no point a breach of continuity. So as a result of literature's spiritual usurpation a beauty cream advertisement possessed, in the eyes of little village girls, the authority that was formerly attached to the words of priests.

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"Morality and literature," p. 164
4 months 3 weeks ago

There can be no safer deposit on earth than the Treasury of the United States.

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Letter to Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette (1825) ME 19:281
7 months 2 weeks ago

All exercise of authority perverts, and submission to authority humiliates.

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As quoted in Michael Bakunin (1937), E.H. Carr, p. 453
4 months 2 weeks ago

A good prescription is still more profitable than an absolution.

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As quoted by Friedrich Albert Lange, History of Materialism and Critique of its Present Importance Tr. Ernest Chester Thomas (1882) 2nd edition, Vol. 2, p. 55.
8 months 3 weeks ago

I've got a one-dimensional mind.

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Said to Rupert Crawshay-Williams; Russell Remembered (1970), p. 31
4 months 2 weeks ago

The vices are very justly man's executioners.

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Chapter X, p. 85
8 months 3 weeks ago

In wildness is the preservation of the world. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The city imports it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.

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7 months 4 weeks ago

A constellation of the most pedantic, obstinate ignorance and presumption, mixed with a kind of rustic incivility, which would try the patience of Job.

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Declaration about the scholars of England, particularly those of Oxford
7 months 2 weeks ago

When we are young, we take a certain pleasure in our infirmities. They seem so new, so rich! With age, they no longer surprise us, we know them too well. Now, without anything unexpected in them, they do not deserve to be endured.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

The Managers of that Trade themselves, and others, testify, that many of these African nations inhabit fertile countries, are industrious farmers, enjoy plenty, and lived quietly, averse to war, before the Europeans debauched them with liquors, and bribing them against one another; and that these inoffensive people are brought into slavery, by stealing them, tempting Kings to sell subjects, which they can have no right to do, and hiring one tribe to war against another, in order to catch prisoners. By such wicked and inhuman ways the English are said to enslave towards one hundred thousand yearly; of which thirty thousand are supposed to die by barbarous treatment in the first year; besides all that are slain in the unnatural wars excited to take them. So much innocent blood have the Managers and Supporters of this inhuman Trade to answer for to the common Lord of all!

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The mind is the ruler of the soul. It should remain unstirred by agitations of the flesh--gentle and violent ones alike. Not mingling with them, but fencing itself off and keeping those feelings in their place. When they make their way into our thoughts, through the sympathetic link between mind and body, don't try to resist the sensation. The sensation is natural. But don't let the mind start in with judgments, calling it 'good' or 'bad.'

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(Hays translation) V, 26
5 months 6 days ago

History seeks for man: but he is I, you, we. Sought as a mysterious essence, as the divine, first as God, then as man (humanity, humaneness, and mankind), he is found as the individual, the finite, the unique one.

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Cambridge 1995, p. 217
8 months 3 weeks ago

They should always be heard, and fairly and kindly answer'd, when they ask after any thing they would know, and desire to be informed about. Curiosity should be as carefully cherish'd in children, as other appetites suppress'd.

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Sec. 108
7 months 1 week ago

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

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"The Sublime and the Good", in the Chicago Review, Vol. 13 Issue 3 (Autumn 1959) p. 51.
4 months 2 weeks ago

The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by Nature be attained. No citizen will have an advantage over any other citizen save as is given by his industry, skill, and intelligence; and each will obtain what he fairly earns. Then, but not till then, will labor get its full reward, and capital its natural return.

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Book VIII, Ch. 3
4 months 2 weeks ago

The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were on the heights; they have developed this 'defeat' into one of the historical defeats which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And that is why the future victory will bloom from this 'defeat'. 'Order reigns in Berlin!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I will be!

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"Order reigns in Berlin", Last written words. Collected Works 4
9 months ago

Above all, every relation must be considered as suspicious, which depends in any degree upon religion, as the prodigies of Livy: And no less so, everything that is to be found in the writers of natural magic or alchemy, or such authors, who seem, all of them, to have an unconquerable appetite for falsehood and fable.

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Aphorism 29
8 months 3 weeks ago

And the final event to himself has been, that, as he rose like a rocket, he fell like the stick.

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On Edmund Burke's reactions to the American and French revolutions.
5 months 2 weeks ago

What has philosophy got to do with measuring anything? It's the mathematicians you have to trust, and they measure the skies like we measure a field.

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Matteo in Concerning the New Star
8 months 3 weeks ago

What potent blood hath modest May!

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May-Day
4 months 3 weeks ago

As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks. Never think of taking a book with you.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

The evil effect of science upon men is principally this, that by far the greatest number of those who wish to display a knowledge of it accomplish no improvement at all of the understanding, but only a perversity of it, not to mention that it serves most of them as a tool of vanity.

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Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 52
7 months 3 weeks ago

There is nothing enduring, permanent, either in me or out of me, nothing but everlasting change. I know of no existence, not even of my own. I know nothing and am nothing. Images - pictures - only are, pictures which wander by without anything existing past which they wander, without any corresponding reality which they might represent, without significance and without aim. I myself am one of these images, or rather a confused image of these images. All reality is transformed into a strange dream, without a world of which the dream might be, or a mind that might dream it. Contemplation is a dream; thought, the source of all existence and of all that I fancied reality, of my own existence, my own capacities, is a dream of that dream.

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Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 60
7 months 5 days ago

When I first read The Wretched of the Earth I heard a new history spoken-the voice of the decolonised subject raised in resistance. That voice . . . articulated a yearning for freedom that was so intense and a quality of emotional hunger that was so fierce that it was overwhelming. Dying into the text, I abandoned and forgot myself. The lust for freedom in those pages awakened and resurrected me.

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Gender and Decolonization in the Congo (2010) ISBN 978-0-230-11040-3
8 months 3 weeks ago

Love truth, but pardon error.

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1738
6 months 2 weeks ago

The devil, depend upon it, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.

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The Suicide Club, Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts.
8 months 3 weeks ago

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others, and this is a gift interred only by the self.

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Behavior
7 months 4 days ago

It is the fallacy of all intellectuals to believe that intellect can grasp life. It cannot, because it works in terms of symbols and language. There is another factor involved: consciousness. If the flame of consciousness is low, a symbol has no power to evoke reality, and intellect is helpless.

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p. 112
6 months 2 weeks ago

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

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From tail to tale on the path of pilgrims in life, The Scotsman
9 months ago

The obliteration of the evil hath been practised by two means, some kind of redemption or expiation of that which is past, and an inception or account de novo for the time to come. But this part seemeth sacred and religious, and justly; for all good moral philosophy (as was said) is but a handmaid to religion.

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Book II, xxii, 14
4 months 3 weeks ago

The government of the United States have no idea of paying their debt in a depreciated medium, and... in the final liquidation of the payments which shall have been made, due regard will be had to an equitable allowance for the circumstance of depreciation.

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Letter to Jean Baptiste de Ternant, 1791. ME 8:247
6 months 3 weeks ago

There are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea.

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9 months 5 days ago

Tentative efforts lead to tentative outcomes. Therefore, give yourself fully to your endeavors. Decide to construct your character through excellent actions, and determine to pay the price for a worthy goal. The trials you encounter will introduce you to your strengths. Remain steadfast... and one day you will build something that endures, something worthy of your potential.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle-classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain working men; I am both glad and proud of having done so. Glad, because thus I was induced to spend many a happy hour in obtaining a knowledge of the realities of life-many an hour, which else would have been wasted in fashionable talk and tiresome etiquette; proud, because thus I got an opportunity of doing justice to an oppressed and calumniated class of men who with all their faults and under all the disadvantages of their situation, yet command the respect of every one but an English money-monger.

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p. 27
6 months 2 weeks ago

Logic is figure without a ground.

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(p. 241)
8 months 4 weeks ago

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

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