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7 months 3 weeks ago

The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom.

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Second Treatise of Government, Ch. VI, sec. 57
11 months 4 weeks ago

I found there, on the central square (Václavské náměstí), a café that miraculously worked through this emergency. I remember they had wonderful strawberry cakes, and I was sitting there eating strawberry cakes and watching Russian tanks against demonstrators. It was perfect.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

If, while hurrying ostensibly to the temple of truth, we hand the reins over to our personal interests which look aside at very different guiding stars, for instance at the tastes and foibles of our contemporaries, at the established religion, but in particular at the hints and suggestions of those at the head of affairs, then how shall we ever reach the high, precipitous, bare rock whereon stands the temple of truth?

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E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 22-23
7 months 3 weeks ago

Nature offers nothing that can be called this man's rather than another's ; but, under nature, everything belongs to all - that is, they have authority to claim it for themselves. But, under dominion, where it is by common law determined what belongs to this man, and what to that, he is called just who has a constant will to render to every man his own, but he, unjust who strives, on the contrary, to make his own that which belongs to another.

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Ch. 2, Of Natural Right
3 months 1 week ago

I refuse to make money out of my science. My laurel is not for sale like so many bales of cotton.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false.

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6 months 2 weeks ago

But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . .

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Our aim is precisely to establish the human kingdom as a pattern of values in distinction from the material world. But the subjectivity which we thus postulate as the standard of truth is no narrowly individual subjectivism, for as we have demonstrated, it is not only one's own self that one discovers in the cogito, but those of others too. Contrary to the philosophy of Descartes, contrary to that of Kant, when we say "I think" we are attaining to ourselves in the presence of the other, and we are just as certain of the other as we are of ourselves. Thus the man who discovers himself directly in the cogito also discovers all the others, and discovers them as the condition of his own existence. He realizes that he can't be anything unless others recognize him as such. I cannot obtain any truth whatsoever about myself, except through the mediation of another. The other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself.

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p. 45
8 months 1 week ago

I am not my soul.

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Super I ad Corinthios, 15.2
6 months 3 weeks ago

The saying that beauty is but skin deep is but a skin-deep saying.

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Vol. 2, Ch. XIV, Personal Beauty
7 months 5 days ago

The best and greatest winning is a true friend; and the greatest loss is the loss of time.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

I do not believe in what is often called... 'exact terminology'... or in definitions... they do not... add to exactness... I especially dislike pretentious terminology and... pseudo-exactness concerned with it.

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8 months 1 week ago

An unjust law is no law at all.

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On Free Choice Of The Will, Book 1, and 5
3 months 2 weeks ago

If thou canst see sharp, look and judge wisely, says the philosopher.

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VIII, 38
6 months 2 weeks ago

Eternity is absence.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment.

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Introduction
7 months 2 weeks ago

Beneath the humanization of the penalties, what one finds are all those rules that authorize, or rather demand, 'leniency', as a calculated economy of the powder to punish. But they also provoke a shift in the point of application of this power: it is no longer the body, with the ritual play of excessive pains, spectacular branding in the ritual of the public execution; it is the mind or rather a play of representations and sings circulating discreetly but necessarily and evidently in the minds of all. It is no longer the body, but the soul, said Mably. And we see very clearly what he meant by this term: the correlative of a technique of power. Old 'anatomies' of punishment are abandoned, But have we really entered the age of non-corporal punishment?

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Chapter Two, Generalized Punishment, pp. 101
8 months 1 day ago

I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more as I grow older.

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Book iii. Chap 2. Of Repentance
8 months 3 weeks ago

According to one mode... nature is thus denominated, viz. the first subject matter to every thing which contains in itself the principle of motion and mutation. But after another mode it is denominated form, which subsists according to definition: for as art is called that which subsists according to art, and that which is artificial; so likewise nature is both called that which is according to nature, and that which is natural. ...that which is composed from these is not nature, but consists from nature; as, for instance, man. And this is nature in a greater degree than matter: for every thing is then said to be, when it is form in energy... entelecheia, rather than when it is incapacity.

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6 months 1 week ago

The collective is the object of all idolatry, this it is which chains us to the earth. In the case of avarice: gold is of the social order. In the case of ambition: power is of the social order. Science and art are full of the social element also. And love? Love is more or less of an exception: that is why we can go to God through love, not through avarice and ambition.

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p. 121
7 months 2 weeks ago

All those movements which took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which had the Reformation as their main expression and result should be analyzed as a great crisis of the Western experience of subjectivity and a revolt against the kind of religious and moral power which gave form, during the Middle Ages, to this subjectivity. The need to take a direct part in spiritual life, in the work of salvation, in the truth which lies in the Book-all that was a struggle for a new subjectivity.

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p. 782
3 months 3 weeks ago

They have retired into the Judiciary as a stronghold. There the remains of federalism are to be preserved and fed from the Treasury; and from that battery all the works of republicanism are to be beaten down and erased.

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Letter to J. Dickinson
6 months 3 weeks ago

All presentation, all demonstration-and the presentation of thought is demonstration-has, according to its original determination-and this is all that matters to us-the cognitive activity of the other person as its ultimate aim.

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Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 67
3 months 2 weeks ago

The other reason is that what happens to the individual is a cause of well-being in what directs the world--of its well-being, its fulfillment, or its very existence, even. Because the whole is damaged if you cut away anything--anything at all--from its continuity and its coherence. Not only its parts, but its purposes. And that's what you're doing when you complain: hacking and destroying.

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(Hays translation) V, 7
6 months 2 weeks ago

Pragmatism ... reflects with almost disarming candor the spirit of the prevailing business culture, the very same attitude of 'being practical' as counter to which philosophical meditation as such was conceived.

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p. 52.
7 months 3 weeks ago

A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature, and it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured.

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4 weeks 1 day ago

Many bad faith actors are out there hating on philosophy right now. They claim they are expert philosophers and they wasted their time....😁...crazy, if you've done the reading, you know it's silly.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders.

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My Religion (1884)
5 months 2 weeks ago

Orwell's essay speaks to us today. It tells us that patriotism is the sine qua non of survival, and that it arises spontaneously in the ordinary human heart. It does not depend upon any grand narrative of triumph of the kind put about by the fascists and the communists, but grows from the habits of association that we British have been fortunate enough to inherit. We do not use grand and tainted honorifics like "la patrie" or "das Vaterland". We refer simply to this spot of earth, which belongs to us because we belong to it, have lived in it, loved it, defended it and established peace and prosperity within its borders.

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'Brexit will give us back pride in our island roots', The Times (18 November 2017), p. 35
3 months 3 weeks ago

It is as to whether its services or uses are to be exchanged or not which makes a tool an article of capital or merely an article of wealth. Thus, the lathe of a manufacturer used in making things which are to be exchanged is capital, while the lathe kept by a gentleman for his own amusement is not.

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Book I, Ch. 3
6 months 3 weeks ago

The Age of Empty Freedom ... does not know that man must first through labour, industry, and art, learn how to know; but it has a certain fixed standard for all conceptions, and an established Common Sense of Mankind always ready and at hand, innate within itself and there present without trouble on its part;-and those conceptions and this Common Sense are to it the measure of the efficient and the real. It has this great advantage over the Age of Science, that it knows all things without having learned anything; and can pass judgment upon whatever comes before it at once and without hesitation,-without needing any preliminary evidence:-'That which I do not immediately comprehend by the conceptions which dwell within me, is nothing,'-says Empty Freedom.

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p. 20
5 months 2 weeks ago

What is imposed on us by birth and environment is what we are called upon to overcome.

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Part I, p. 28
8 months 3 weeks ago
Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.
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3 months 3 weeks ago

The Sight cannot decompose a compound colour into simple colours, or distinguish a compound from a simple colour

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The future use and the whole effect, if not the very existence, of the process of an impeachment of high crimes and misdemeanors before the peers of this kingdom upon the charge of the Commons will very much be decided by your judgment in this cause... For we must not deceive ourselves: whatever does not stand with credit cannot stand long. And if the Constitution should be deprived, I do not mean in form, but virtually, of this resource, it is virtually deprived of everything else that is valuable in it. For this process is the cement which binds the whole together; this is the individuating principle that makes England what England is.

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Speech in opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings (15 February 1788), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume the Ninth (1899), p. 332
6 months 2 weeks ago

The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past.

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8 months 3 weeks ago

Outside intelligences, exploring the Solar System with true impartiality, would be quite likely to enter the Sun in their records thus: Star X, spectral class G0, 4 planets plus debris.

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6 months 3 weeks 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
7 months 3 weeks ago

Upstart greatness is everywhere less respected than ancient greatness.

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Chapter I, Part II, p. 773.
7 months 3 weeks ago

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

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The New York Herald-Tribune Magazine, 3/6/1938
6 months 2 weeks ago

I know of nothing more terrible than the poor creatures who have learned too much. Instead of the sound powerful judgement which would probably have grown up if they had learned nothing, their thoughts creep timidly and hypnotically after words, principles and formulae, constantly by the same paths. What they have acquired is a spider's web of thoughts too weak to furnish sure supports, but complicated enough to provide confusion.

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On the Relative Educational Value of the Classics and the Mathematico-Physical Sciences in Colleges and High Schools, an address in (16 April 1886)
8 months 1 week ago

And these were the dishes wherein to me, hunger-starven for thee, they served up the sun and the moon.

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III, 6
7 months 3 weeks ago

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

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Marx quoted and translated by Engels (in an 1882 letter to Eduard Bernstein) about the peculiar Marxism which arose in France 1882.
3 months 3 weeks ago

How can anyone see the only way the world can be saved and not be forced to weep?

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3 months 3 weeks ago

The standard that I always come back to is the health of the world, which is the same as our own personal health. We can't distinguish our health from the health of everything else. And we know enough from the ecologists now to know that health is a very complex and un-understandable complexity of relationships that makes the world whole.

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