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7 months 4 days ago

The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the other woes of mankind, is wisdom.

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9 months 2 weeks ago

A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.

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Ch. 25
6 months 3 days ago

The one loves to do good, the other to do harm; the one to help even strangers, the other to attack even its dearest friends.

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9 months 2 weeks ago

I greatly doubt whether the men who become pirate chiefs are those who are filled with retrospective terror of their fathers, or whether Napoleon, at Austerlitz, really felt that he was getting even with Madame Mère. I know nothing of the mother of Attila, but I rather suspect that she spoilt the little darling, who subsequently found the world irritating because it sometimes resisted his whims.

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Ch. 2: Leaders and Followers
5 months 2 weeks ago

Among the foundations of the Higher Mathematics is also the 'Idea of a Limit'. The Idea of a Limit cannot be superseded by any other definitions or Hypotheses.

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8 months 1 day ago

Capitalism dislikes silence.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: 'I have to go to work - as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I'm going to do what I was born for - the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?' 

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(Farquharson translation)(Hays translation) At dawn of day, when you dislike being called, have this thought ready: "I am called to man's labour; why then do I make a difficulty if I am going out to do what I was born to do and what I was brought into the
9 months 1 week ago

My enemy is not the man who wrongs me, but the man who means to wrong me.

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9 months 3 weeks ago

I have no patience with those who say that sexual excitement is shameful and that venereal stimuli have their origin not in nature, but in sin. Nothing is so far from the truth. As if marriage, whose function cannot be fulfilled without these incitements, did not rise above blame. In other living creatures, where do these incitements come from? From nature or from sin? From nature, of course. It must borne in mind that in the apetites of the body there is very little difference between man and other living creatures. Finally, we defile by our imagination what of its own nature is fair and holy. If we were willing to evaluate things not according to the opinion of the crowd, but according to nature itself, how is it less repulsive to eat, chew, digest, evacuate, and sleep after the fashion of dumb animals, than to enjoy lawful and permitted carnal relations?

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In Praise of Marriage (1519), in Erasmus on Women (1996) Erika Rummel
8 months 1 week ago

The philosophical anthropologist ... can know the wholeness of the person and through it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity out and does not remain an untouched observer.

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p. 148
6 months 1 week ago

There is in our souls some native seed of reason, which, if nourished by good counsel and training, flowers into virtue, but which, on the other hand, if unable to resist the vices surrounding it, is stifled and blighted.

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Part 2
8 months 2 weeks ago

I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.

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9 months ago

Friends share all things.

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As quoted in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, "Pythagoras", Sect. 10
9 months 3 weeks ago

Sacred and inspired divinity, the sabaoth and port of all men's labours and peregrinations.

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Book II
5 months 2 weeks ago

I believe the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the white man.

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9 months 2 weeks ago

Social and economic inequalities, for example inequalities of wealth and authority, are just only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular for the least advantaged members of society.

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p. 14.
6 months 3 weeks ago

Though the framework is libertarian and laissez-faire, individual communities within it need not be, and perhaps no community within it will choose to be so. Thus, the characteristics of the framework need not pervade the individual communities. In this laissez-faire system it could turn out that though they are permitted, there are no actually functioning "capitalist" institutions; or that some communities have them and others don't or some communities have some of them, or what you will.

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Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework as Utopian Common Ground, p. 320
6 months 1 week ago

Time and Space ... It is not nature which imposes them upon us, it is we who impose them upon nature because we find them convenient.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

One principle, that I believe is wanting in you, and all our too fervent and impetuous reformers, is the thought, that almost every institution or form of society is good in its place, and in the period of time to which it belongs. How many beautiful and admirable effects grew out of Popery and the monastic institutions, in the period, when they were in their genuine health and vigour! To them we owe almost all our logic and our literature. What excellent effects do we reap, even at this day, from the feudal system and from chivalry! In this point of view, nothing can, perhaps, be more worthy of our applause than the English constitution.

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Letter to Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 March 1812), quoted in Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. II (1858), p. 86
6 months 1 week ago

That's... the crisis. The number of liberal democracies measured by... Freedom House in its annual survey of freedom around the world has been in decline for 16 straight years, and the biggest declines recently have been in the two biggest liberal democracies, India and the United States. So... we're dealing with a big global problem.

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7:18
5 months 2 weeks ago

Congress itself can punish Alexandria, by repealing the law which made it a town, by discontinuing it as a port of entry or clearance, and perhaps by suppressing it's banks. But I expect all will go off with impunity. If our government ever fails, it will be from this weakness. No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as of duty. Good men will obey the last, but bad ones the former only.

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Letter to John Wayles Eppes (9 September 1814). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11, pp. 425-426
9 months 6 days ago

When Darius offered him ten thousand talents, and to divide Asia equally with him, "I would accept it," said Parmenio, "were I Alexander." "And so truly would I," said Alexander, "if I were Parmenio." But he answered Darius that the earth could not bear two suns, nor Asia two kings.

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42 Alexander
10 months 2 weeks ago

What is a rebel? A man who says no. 

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Chapter 1
9 months 2 weeks ago

What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful.

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Page 168
9 months 3 weeks ago

The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greatest part of skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.

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Chapter I, p. 7
6 months 4 days ago

You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you. If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it is still the truth that had to said in the age of the Welfare State.

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Mises' letter to Ayn Rand praising Atlas Shrugged,(23 January 1958), quoted in Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (2007).
7 months 2 weeks ago

I never knew a writer's wife who wasn't beautiful.

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Preface (p. xi)
8 months 1 week ago

Those, no doubt, are in some way fortunate who have brought themselves, or have been brought by others, to obey some ultimate principle before the bar of which all problems can be brought. Single-minded monists, ruthless fanatics, men possessed by an all-embracing coherent vision do not know the doubts and agonies of those who cannot wholly blind themselves to reality.

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9 months 2 weeks ago

I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.

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Act 3, sc. 5
10 months 2 weeks ago

I shall have to test the theory of my father Parmenides, and contend forcibly that after a fashion not-being is and on the other hand in a sense being is not. For unless these statements are either disproved or accepted, no one who speaks about false words, or false opinion whether images or likenesses or imitations or appearances about the arts which have to do with them, can ever help being forced to contradict himself and make himself ridiculous.

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9 months 2 weeks ago

For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad of tiny tremors. The notes know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them then destroys them, without ever leaving them the chance to recuperate and exist for themselves.... I would like to hold them back, but I know that, if I succeeded in stopping one, there would only remain in my hand a corrupt and languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even want that death: I know of few more bitter or intense impressions.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.

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Part 3, Chapter 1
9 months 3 weeks ago

As far as physicians go, chance is more valuable than knowledge.

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Ch. 37
6 months 3 weeks ago

If we are to put interrogators to work in defence of liberal values, their role in the community must receive proper recognition. They will require intensive counselling to overcome the inevitable traumas that this difficult work involves. They must be enabled to see themselves as dedicated workers in the cause of progress. Psychotherapy must be available to help them avoid the negative self-image from which some torturers have suffered in the past.

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9 months 2 weeks ago

Inequalities are permissible when they maximize, or at least all contribute to, the long term expectations of the least fortunate group in society.

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Chapter III, Section 26, pg. 151
9 months 2 weeks ago

In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God?

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p. 18
9 months 2 weeks ago

The yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation: he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him, and, united to the nature which is proper to him, he goes, he acts as animating original matter. To some extent, and at rare intervals even I am a yogi .

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Quoted in R. Malhotra and V. Viswanathan, Snakes in the Ganga: Breaking India 2.0., 2022
9 months 2 weeks ago

Monsieur ... I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.

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6 months 1 week ago

Space, subjectively, is the coexistence of perceptions - perceiving two objects at once.

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Ch. 6 : Our Souls
4 months 3 days ago

Just accept it....universality is unquestionable....

Free books here:
https://civilsimian.com/books-list

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8 months 3 weeks ago

The created World is but a small Parenthesis in Eternity.

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Part III, Section XXIX
5 months 2 weeks ago

I believe... that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.

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Letter to John Adams
5 months 2 weeks ago

Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions-not outside.

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(Hays translation) IX, 13
8 months 2 weeks ago

The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, the proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade. All the foregoing measures are directed to this end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizing effects to precisely the degree that the proletariat, through its labor, multiplies the country's productive forces.

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8 months 1 week ago

Intuition is a method of feeling one's way intellectually into the inner heart of a thing to locate what is unique and inexpressible in it.

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Quoted in Georgia O'Keeffe, 1887-1986 : Flowers in the Desert (2000) by Britta Benke, p. 28

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