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5 months 2 weeks ago

Some words shall herein be capitalised when used, not as vernacular, but as terms defined. Thus an "idea" is the substance of an actual unitary thought or fancy; but "Idea," nearer Plato's idea of ἰδέα, denotes anything whose Being consists in its mere capacity for getting fully represented, regardless of any person's faculty or impotence to represent it.

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I
2 months 3 weeks ago

In a modern war, fought with modern weapons and on the modern scale, neither side can limit to "the enemy" the damage that it does. These wars damage the world. We know enough by now to know that you cannot damage a part of the world without damaging all of it. Modern war has not only made it impossible to kill "combatants" without killing "noncombatants," it has made it impossible to damage your enemy without damaging yourself.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

Religious minds, which are distrustful of philosophic dogmas, fall into the error - inculcated by philosophy - of supposing that Providence is limited in its action; that is does not extend to the social world or the social relations of mankind, and that God has not determined upon any plan of social organization for the regulation of those relations. If they had a PROFOUND FAITH IN THE UNIVERSALITY OF PROVIDENCE, they would be convinced that all human needs must have been foreseen and provided for, and especially that the most urgent of them all could not have been overlooked - namely, the need of a social order for the regulation of our industrial and social relations.

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The Theory of Social Organization. Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier, p. 5.
3 months 1 week ago

If religion has put forward the proposition that we are all of us sinners, I set another against it: we are all of us perfect! Because, in each moment, we are all we can be, and never need to be more.

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Landstreicher, p. 226
7 months 2 weeks ago

It built itself up endlessly, like a chess game, and the telemetrists began to use a computer to program the computer that designed the program for the computer that programmed the robot-controlling computer.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.

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7 months 1 week ago

Now what has been said about the Jews is also to be understood about Cahorsins, and anyone else depending upon the depravity of usury.

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art. 4
5 months 2 weeks ago

From the same it proceedeth,that men gives different names, to one and the same thing, from the difference of their own passions: As they that approve a private opinion, call it Opinion; but they that mislike it, Haeresie: and yet haeresie signifies no more than private opinion; but has only agreater tincture of choler.

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The First Part, Chapter 11, p. 50
4 months 2 weeks ago

Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order.

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(p. 303)
2 months 4 weeks ago

For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory regarding the limited applicability of such customary idealizations, we must in fact turn to quite other branches of science, such as psychology, or even to that kind of epistemological problems with which already thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence.

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Speech on quantum theory at Celebrazione del Secondo Centenario della Nascita di Luigi Galvani, Bologna, Italy
2 months 2 weeks ago

All law is "situational law." The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality. He has the monopoly over this last decision.

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p.13
6 months 3 weeks ago

All sources of energy upon which industry depends are wasted when they are employed; and industry is expending them at a continually increasing rate. Already coal has been largely replaced by oil, and oil is being used up so fast that East and West alike conceive it necessary to their own prosperity to destroy the industry of the other. And what is true of oil is equally true of other natural resources. Every day, many square miles of forest are turned into newspaper, but there is no known process by which newspaper can be turned into forest. You will say that this need not worry us, since newspapers will be replaced by radio, but radio requires electricity, electricity requires power, and power depends upon raw materials.

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Part I: Man and Nature, Ch. 4: The Limits of Human Power, p. 30
2 months 3 weeks ago

No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms within his own lands.

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Draft Constitution for Virginia (June 1776)
6 months 2 weeks ago

It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Science, ever since the time of the Arabs, has had two functions: (1) to enable us to know things, and (2) to enable us to do things.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Junz found revulsion growing strong within him. A planet full of people meant nothing against the dictates of economic necessity!

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5 months 1 week ago

Consciousness, the craving for more, more, always more, hunger of eternity and thirst of infinity, appetite for God - these are never satisfied. Each consciousness seeks to be itself and all other consciousnesses without ceasing to be itself; it seeks to be God. And matter, unconsciousness, tends to be less and less, tends to be nothing, its thirst being a thirst for repose. Spirit says: I wish to be! and matter answers: I wish not to be!

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2 months 3 weeks 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
2 months 2 weeks ago

The aim of protection, in short, is to prevent the bringing into a country of things in themselves useful and valuable, in order to compel the making of such things. But what all mankind in the individual affairs of every-day life, regard as to be desired is not the making of things, but the possession of things.

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Henry George, page 39,
5 months 5 days ago

The fierce willingness to repudiate domination in a holistic manner is the starting point for progressive cultural revolution.

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Women, Art, and Society: Fourth Edition (2007) by Whitney Chadwick ISBN 0-500-20393-8
3 months 2 weeks ago

We can not... escape the conclusion that the rule of reasoning by recurrence is irreducible to the principle of contradiction. ...Neither can this rule come to us from experience... This rule, inaccessible to analytic demonstration and to experience, is the veritable type of the synthetic a priori judgment. On the other hand, we can not think of seeing in it a convention, as in some of the postulates of geometry. ...it is only the affirmation of the power of the mind which knows itself capable of conceiving the indefinite repetition of the same act when once this act is possible. The mind has a direct intuition of this power, and experience can only give occasion for using it and thereby becoming conscious of it.

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Ch. I. (1905) Tr. George Bruce Halstead
6 months 1 week ago

In peace, as a wise man, he should make suitable preparation for war.

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Book II, satire ii, line 111

If there were no limits to human rationality administrative theory would be barren. It would consist of the single precept: Always select that alternative, among those available, which will lead to the most complete achievement of your goals.

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Simon (1945, p. 240); As cited in:
6 months 3 weeks ago

This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in; those who have read of everything, are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections ; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.

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As quoted in "Hand Book : Caution and Counsels" in The Common School Journal Vol. 5, No. 24 (15 December 1843) by Horace Mann, p. 371
10 months 3 weeks ago

This is probably the fundamental dimension of 'ideology': ideology is not simply a 'false consciousness', an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as 'ideological' - 'ideological' is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence -that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals 'do not know what they are doing'. 'Ideological is not the false consciousness of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by "false consciousness"'. Thus we have finally reached the dimension of the symptom, because one of its possible definitions would also be 'a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject': the subject can 'enjoy his symptom' only in so far as its logic escapes him - the measure of the success of its interpretation is precisely its dissolution.

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7 months 6 days ago

Who are those people by whom you wish to be admired? Are they not these about whom you are in the habit of saying that they are mad? What then? Do you wish to be admired by the mad?

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Book I, ch. 21, 4.
5 months 2 weeks ago

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

Political independence, as the right to owe his existence and continuance in society not to the arbitrary will of another, but to his own rights and powers as a member of the commonwealth.

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3 months 1 week ago

The "imagination that shudders at the Hell of Dante," is not that the same faculty, weaker in degree, as Dante's own? No one but Shakspeare can embody, out of Saxo Grammaticus, the story of Hamlet as Shakspeare did: but every one models some kind of story out of it; every one embodies it better or worse. We need not spend time in defining. Where there is no specific difference, as between round and square, all definition must be more or less arbitrary. A man that has so much more of the poetic element developed in him as to have become noticeable, will be called Poet by his neighbors.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.

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1 month 1 week ago

"In order to properly understand the big picture, everyone should fear becoming mentally clouded and obsessed with one small section of truth."
- Xunzi

See biography for Xunzi:
https://civilsimian.com/Xunzi

Read Xunzi's work:
https://civilsimian.com/user/200/content

#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

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5 months 3 days ago

In the dominant Western religious system, the love of God is essentially the same as the belief in God, in God's existence, God's justice, God's love. The love of God is essentially a thought experience. In the Eastern religions and in mysticism, the love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of living.

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Ch. 2
6 months 2 weeks ago

What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood.

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§ 118
6 months 4 weeks ago

In judging policies we should consider the results that have been achieved through them rather than the means by which they have been executed.

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From an undated letter to Piero Soderini (translated here by Dr. Arthur Livingston), in The Living Thoughts of Machiavelli, by Count Carlo Sforza, published by Cassell, London (1942), p. 85
3 months 2 days ago

If you know that "I", in the sense of the person, the front, the ego, it really doesn't exist. Then...it won't go to your head too badly, if you wake up and discover that you're God.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.

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3 weeks 1 day ago

It sounds so cool the way he says it....but no matter how magical it sounds, it's utter insanity....

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2 months 1 week ago

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

We are constantly railing against the passions; we ascribe to them all of man's afflictions, and we forget that they are also the source of all his pleasures ... But what provokes me is that only their adverse side is considered ... and yet only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small-minded.

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As translated in Diderot (1977) by Otis Fellows, p. 39
7 months 3 weeks ago

It is as useless for a person to want first of all to decide the externals and after that the fundamentals as it is for a cosmic body, thinking to form itself, first of all to decide the nature of its surface, to what bodies it should turn its light, which its dark side, without first letting the harmony of centrifugal and centripetal forces realize its existence and letting the rest come of itself. One must learn to know oneself before knowing anything else (gnothi seauton). Not until a person has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning.

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6 months 3 days ago

Eat not the heart.

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Symbol 30
5 months 3 weeks ago

It is not calling the landed estates, possessed by old prescriptive rights, the 'accumulations of ignorance and superstition', that can support me in shaking that grand title, which supersedes all other title, and which all my studies of general jurisprudence have taught me to consider as one principal cause of the formation of states; I mean the ascertaining and securing prescription. But these are donations made in 'ages of ignorance and superstition'. Be it so. It proves that these donations were made long ago; and this is prescription; and this gives right and title.

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Letter to Captain Thomas Mercer (26 February 1790), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789-December 1791 (1967), p. 95

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