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8 months 2 weeks ago

The only possible solution which will preserve Germany's honor and Germany's interest is, we repeat, a war with Russia.

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Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, Erste Abteilung, Volume 7, March to December 1848, p. 304.
6 months 1 week ago

Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia.

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(p. 130)
7 months 1 week ago

This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.

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8 months 1 week ago

If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.

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p. 50e
5 months 2 weeks ago

The result of toppling tyranny in divided countries is usually civil war and ethnic cleansing.

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The death of this crackpot creed is nothing to mourn, The Guardian
7 months 1 week ago

Creation is in fact a fault, man's famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator's example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed.

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8 months 2 weeks ago

The necessity of speaking, the predicament of having nothing to say, and the desire for tact are three things that can turn the greatest man into a laughingstock.

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9 months 2 weeks ago

Socrates did not stop with a philosophical consideration of mankind; he addressed himself to each one individually, wrested everything from him, and sent him away empty-handed.

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4 months 1 week ago

That one hundred and fifty lawyers should do business together ought not to be expected.

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On the U.S. Congress, in his Autobiography, 6 January 1821
7 months 4 days ago

When we rise out of the night into the new life and there begin to receive the signs, what can we know of that which - of him who gives them to us? Only what we experience from time to time from the signs themselves. If we name the speaker of this speech God, then it is always the God of a moment, a moment God.

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p. 15
8 months 1 week ago

Enjoyment of the work consists in participation in the creative state of the artist.

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p. 117
8 months 2 weeks ago

I shall, without further discussion of the other theories, attempt to contribute something towards the understanding and appreciation of the Utilitarian or Happiness theory, and towards such proof as it is susceptible of. It is evident that this cannot be proof in the ordinary and popular meaning of the term. Questions of ultimate ends are not amenable to direct proof. Whatever can be proved to be good, must be so by being shown to be a means to something admitted to be good without proof.

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Ch. 1
5 months 3 weeks ago

Our bodies are perishable, wealth is not at all permanent and death is always nearby. Therefore we must immediately engage in acts of merit.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Truth and clarity are complementary.

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As quoted in Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism : Philosophical Responses to Quantum Mechanics (2000) by Christopher Norris, p. 234
9 months 2 weeks ago
The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real. He says, for example, "I am rich," when the proper designation for his condition would be "poor." He misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names. If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him. What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. It is in a similarly restricted sense that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth. He is indifferent toward pure knowledge which has no consequences; toward those truths which are possibly harmful and destructive he is even hostilely inclined.
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We never know, believe me, when we have succeeded best.

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Essays and Soliloquies
8 months 2 weeks ago

If a person is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we attempted to excuse in precisely the same way the person who is bad, we should be laughed at.

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E. Payne, trans., vol. 2, p. 230
4 months 4 weeks ago

No man has ever been so far advanced by Fortune that she did not threaten him as greatly as she had previously indulged him.

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9 months 2 weeks ago

It is not necessary to ask whether soul and body are one, just as it is not necessary to ask whether the wax and its shape are one, nor generally whether the matter of each thing and that of which it is the matter are one. For even if one and being are spoken of in several ways, what is properly so spoken of is the actuality.

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6 months 4 weeks ago

He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance separated from him by an abyss. The variety of constraints pressing upon man give rise to the illusion of several distinct species that cannot communicate.

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p. 192
5 months 2 weeks ago

In a free system any large, popular, revolutionary movement should be able to bring about its ends by such a voluntary process. As more and more people see how it works more and more will wish to participate in or support it. And so it will grow, without being necessary to force everyone or a majority or anyone into the pattern.

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Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; Utopian Means and Ends, p. 327
4 months 1 week ago

We are all made for mutual assistance, as the feet, the hands, and the eyelids, as the rows of the upper and under teeth, from whence it follows that clashing and opposition is perfectly unnatural.

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II, 1
8 months 1 week ago

Why in the world shouldn't they have regarded with awe and reverence that act by which the human race is perpetuated. Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.

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Intentionality, and Romanticism (1997) by Richard Thomas Eldridge, p. 130
7 months 2 weeks ago

I hate tyranny, at least I think I do; but I hate it most of all where most are concerned in it. The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny. If, as society is constituted in these large countries of France and England, full of unequal property, I must make my choice (which God avert!) between the despotism of a single person, or of the many, my election is made. As much injustice and tyranny has been practised in a few months by a French democracy, as in all the arbitrary monarchies in Europe in the forty years of my observation.

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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. 96
7 months 4 days ago

Diogenes, in his mud-covered sandals, tramps over the carpets of Aristippus. The cynic pullulated at every corner, and in the highest places. This cynic did nothing but saboter the civilisation of the time. He was the nihilist of Hellenism. He created nothing, he made nothing. His role was to undo - or rather to attempt to undo, for he did not succeed in his purpose. The cynic, a parasite of civilisation, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail. What would become of the cynic among a savage people where everyone, naturally and quite seriously, fulfils what the cynic farcically considers to be his personal role?

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Chapter XI: The Self-Satisfied Age
5 months 4 weeks ago

Identical in the physical processes by which he originates-identical in the early stages of his formation-identical in the mode of his nutrition before and after birth, with the animals which lie immediately below him in the scale-Man, if his adult and perfect structure be compared with theirs, exhibits, as might be expected, a marvellous likeness of organization. He resembles them as they resemble one another-he differs from them as they differ from one another.-And, though these differences and resemblances cannot be weighed and measured, their value may be readily estimated; the scale or standard of judgment, touching that value, being afforded and expressed by the system of classification of animals now current among zoologists.

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Ch.2, p. 83
4 months 1 week ago

The rights of men to the use of land are not joint rights: they are equal rights. Were there only one man on earth, he would have a right to the use of the whole earth or any part of the earth. When there is more than one man on earth, the right to the use of land that any one of them would have, were he alone, is not abrogated: it is only limited. The right of each to the use of land is still a direct, original right, which he holds of himself, and not by the gift or consent of the others; but it has become limited by the similar rights of the others, and is therefore an equal right.

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Part I : Declaration, Ch. III : "Social Statics" - The Right of Property
7 months 6 days ago

... and where men build on false grounds, the more they build, the greater is the ruine.

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The Second Part, Chapter 26, p. 140
8 months 1 week ago

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.

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Terminus
7 months 3 weeks ago

Declining from the public ways, walk in unfrequented paths.

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Symbol 5
6 months 4 weeks ago

It is because of my wretchedness that I am "I." It is on account of the wretchedness of the universe that, in a sense, God is "I" (that is to say a person).

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p. 83
5 months 4 days ago

In the whole world, that day, there was not a more entirely unimportant-looking pair of people than this Miner and his Wife. And yet what were all Emperors, Popes and Potentates, in comparison? There was born here, once more, a Mighty Man; whose light was to flame as the beacon over long centuries and epochs of the world; the whole world and its history was waiting for this man. It is strange, it is great.

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7 months 2 weeks ago

Whoever hasn't yet arrived at the clear realization that there might be a greatness existing entirely outside his own sphere and for which he might have absolutely no feeling; whoever hasn't at least felt obscure intimations concerning the approximate location of this greatness in the geography of the human spirit: that person either has no genius in his own sphere, or else he hasn't been educated to the level of the classic.

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Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), "Critical Fragments," § 36
4 months 3 weeks ago

One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.

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Shulubin, in Cancer Ward (1968) Pt. 2, Ch. 10
4 months 2 weeks ago

God is imperiled. He is not almighty, that we may cross our hands, waiting for certain victory. He is not all-holy, that we may wait trustingly for him to pity and to save us. Within the province of our ephemeral flesh all of God is imperiled. He cannot be saved unless we save him with our own struggles; nor can we be saved unless he is saved. We are one. From the blind worm in the depths of the ocean to the endless arena of the Galaxy, only one person struggles and is imperiled: You. And within your small and earthen breast only one thing struggles and is imperiled: the Universe.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

To be angry with a man is to hate him; to hate him is to wish him harm; but to wish him well, even if he has done you harm, is the mark of a great mind.

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Seneca, On Anger (De Ira) 2.34.5 (translated by John W. Basore)
6 months 1 week ago

The unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies.

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(p. 70)
6 months 3 weeks ago

But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

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All About Love: New Visions, 1999
4 months 1 week ago

No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.

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Letter to Judge John Tyler (June 28, 1804); in: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition (ME) (Lipscomb and Bergh, editors), 20 Vols., Washington, D.C., 1903-04, Volume 11, page 33
7 months 6 days ago

The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will.

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p. 70
9 months 3 days ago

Self-sufficiency is the greatest of all wealth.

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4 months 3 days ago

We may assume the existence of an aether; only we must give up ascribing a definite state of motion to it, i.e. we must by abstraction take from it the last mechanical characteristic which Lorentz had still left it. ... But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable media, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it.

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On the irrelevance of the luminiferous aether hypothesis to physical measurements, in [https://www.refcm.org/scripture-science-stott/aarch/pages/12-einstein-sidelights-relativity.htm an address at the University of Leiden (5 May 1920)]
6 months 1 week ago

The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.

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p. 98
7 months 2 weeks ago

Doth the reality of sensible things consist in being perceived? or, is it something distinct from their being perceived, and that bears no relation to the mind?

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Philonous to Hylas
7 months 2 weeks ago

In the pursuit of truth we must beware of being misled by terms which we do not rightly understand. That is the chief point. Almost all philosophers utter the caution; few observe it.

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Paragraph 1
6 months 1 week ago

Wherever a man is, there will be a lie.

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Episodes in the Story of a Mine.
9 months 3 days ago

Ten thousand do not turn the scale against a single man of worth.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Reason not with him, that will deny the principal truths!

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4 months 3 weeks ago

If life is all subjective, why not be subjectively happy rather than subjectively sad?

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On the Wisdom of America (1950), p. 155
4 months 3 weeks ago

The introduction of numbers as coordinates by reference to the particular division scheme of the open one dimensional continuum is an act of violence whose only practical vindication is the special calculatory manageability of the ordinary number continuum with its four basic operations. The topological skeleton determines the connectivity of the manifold in the large.

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Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science (1949), p. 90

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