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If you're naturally kind you attract a lot of people you don't like.
Author: William Feather
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Anybody who is 25 or 30 years old has physical scars from all sorts of things, from tuberculosis to polio. It's the same with the mind.
Author: Moses R. Kaufman
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Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure.
Author: Karl Krauss
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Every once in a while someone without a single bad habit gets caught.
Author: Kin Hubbard
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Evaluation and judgment are responses to what exists, sorting the things that pass before us into categories of good, bad, and indifferent. But a rational life, the life of a valuer, does not consist essentially in reaction. It consists in action. Man does not find his values, like the other animals; he creates them. The primary focus of a valuer is not to take the world as it comes and pass judgment. His primary focus is to identify what might and ought to exist, to uncover potentialities that he can exploit, to find ways of reshaping the world in the image of his values.
Author: David Kelley
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We shall assume that what each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but by pictures made by himself or given to him. If his atlas tells him the world is flat he will not sail near what he believes to be the edge of our planet for fear of falling off. If his maps include a fountain of eternal youth, a Ponce de Leon will go off in quest of it. If someone digs up yellow dirt that looks like gold, he will for a time act exactly as if he has found gold. The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do. It does not determine what they will achieve. It determines their effort, their feelings, their hopes, not their accomplishments and results.
Author: Walter Lippmann
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Action based on reason, action therefore which is only to be understood by reason, knows only one end, the greatest pleasure of the acting individual.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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Reason and action are congeneric and homogenous, two aspects of the same phenomenon.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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...the evils of mankind are caused, not by the primary aggressiveness of individuals, but by their self-transcending identification with groups whose common denominator is low intelligence and high emotionality.
Author: Arthur Koestler
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The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.
Author: Arthur Koestler
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Conscious and unconscious experiences do not belong to different compartments of the mind; they form a continuous scale of gradations, of degrees of awareness.
Author: Arthur Koestler
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It is impossible to describe any human action if one does not refer to the meaning the actor sees in the stimulus as well as in the end his response is aiming at.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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Benevolence is a commitment to achieving the values derivable from life with other people in society, by treating them as potential trading partners, recognizing their humanity, independence, and individuality, and the harmony between their interests and ours.
Author: David Kelley
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The rational individualist is not the enemy of benevolence or civility, but their truest exemplar.
Author: David Kelley
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The new frontiers to be conquered are mainly in the convolutions of the cortex.
Author: Arthur Koestler
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Brain-washing starts in the cradle.
Author: Arthur Koestler
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Science does not give us absolute and final certainty. It only gives us assurance within the limits of our mental abilities and the prevailing state of scientific thought.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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From the psychological point of view, the self-asserting emotions, derived from emergency reactions, involve a narrowing of consciousness; the participatory emotions an expansion of consciousness by identificatory processes of various kinds.
Author: Arthur Koestler
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...originality consists of the achievement of new combinations, and not of the creation of something out of nothing.
Author: Richard V. Clemence
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Society cannot contribute anything to the breeding and growing of ingenious men. A creative genius cannot be trained. There are no schools for creativeness. A genius is precisely a man who defies all schools and rules, who deviates from the traditional roads of routine and opens up new paths through land inaccessible before. A genius is always a teacher, never a pupil; he is always self-made.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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There is an accumulative cruelty in a number of men, though none in particular are ill-natured.
Author: Lord Halifax
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...the more original a discovery the more obvious it seems afterwards.
Author: Arthur Koestler
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However human, envy is certainly not one of the sources of discontent that a free society can eliminate. It is probably one of the essential conditions for the preservation of such a society that we do not countenance envy, not sanction its demands by camouflaging it as social justice, but treat it, in the words of John Stuart Mill, as "the most anti-social and evil of all passions.
Author: F.a. Hayek
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From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.
Author: F.a. Hayek
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Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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Facts per se can neither prove nor refute anything. Everything is decided by the interpretation and explanation of the facts, by the ideas and the theories.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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In the world of reality, life, and human action there is no such thing as interests independent of ideas, preceding them temporarily and logically. What a man considers his interest is the result of his ideas.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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It may indeed prove to be far the most difficult and not the least important task for human reason rationally to comprehend its own limitations. It is essential for the growth of reason that as individuals we should bow to forces and obey principles which we cannot hope fully to understand, yet on which the advance and even the preservation of civilization depend.
Author: F.a. Hayek
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This is the constitutional limitation of man's knowledge and interests, the fact that he cannot know more than a tiny part of the whole of society and that therefore all that can enter into his motives are the immediate effects which his actions will have in the sphere he knows.
Author: F.a. Hayek
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Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause;He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws.
Author: Richard Francis Burton
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The class of those who have the ability to think their own thoughts is separated by an unbridgeable gulf from the class of those who cannot.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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The inertia of the human mind and its resistance to innovation are most clearly demonstrated not, as one might expect, by the ignorant mass- which is easily swayed once its imagination is caught- but by professionals with a vested interest in tradition and in the monopoly of learning. Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse. The academic backwoodsmen have been the curse of genius from Aristarchus to Darwin and Freud; they stretch, a solid and hostile phalanx of pedantic mediocrities, across the centuries.
Author: Arthur Koestler
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To illustrate the difference between the innovator and the dull crowd of routinists who cannot even imagine that any improvement is possible, we need only refer to a passage in Engel's most famous book. Here, in 1878, Engels apodictically announced that military weapons are "now so perfected that no further progress of any revolutionizing influence is any longer possible." Henceforth "all further [technological] progress is by and large indifferent for land warfare. The age of evolution is in this regard essentially closed." This complacent conclusion shows in what the achievement of the innovator consists: he accomplishes what other people believe to be unthinkable and unfeasible.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.
Author: F.a. Hayek
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...it is largely because civilization enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we individually do not possess and because each individual's use of his particular knowledge may serve to assist others unknown to him in achieving their ends that men as members of civilized society can pursue their individual ends so much more successfully than they could alone.
Author: F.a. Hayek
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It is the worst of all superstitions to assume that the epistemological characteristics of one branch of knowledge must necessarily be applicable to any other branch.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.
Author: F.a. Hayek
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The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.
Author: Arthur Koestler
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Reason's biological function is to preserve and promote life and to postpone its extinction as long as possible. Thinking and acting are not contrary to nature; they are, rather, the foremost features of man's nature. The most appropriate description of man as differentiated from nonhuman beings is: a being purposively struggling against the forces adverse to his life.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.
Author: Walter Lippmann
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No man is an island- he is a holon. A Janus-faced entity who, looking inward, sees himself as a self-contained unique whole, looking outward as a dependent part. His self-assertive tendency is the dynamic manifestation of his unique wholeness, his autonomy and independence as a holon. Its equally universal antagonist, the integrative tendency, expresses his dependence on the larger whole to which he belongs: his 'part-ness.'.
Author: Arthur Koestler
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...the integrative tendencies of the individual are incomparably more dangerous than his self-assertive tendencies.
Author: Arthur Koestler
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We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory. - The Heart's Domain.
Author: Georges Duhamel
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Psychoanalysis has changed American psychology from a diagnostic to a therapeutic science, not because so many patients are cured by the psychoanalytic technique, but because of the new understanding of psychiatric patients it has given us, and the new and different concept of illness and health.
Author: Karl A. Menninger
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To dream anything that you want to dream, that is the beauty of the human mind. To do anything that you want to do, that is the strength of the human will. To trust yourself, to test your limits, that is the courage to succeed.
Author: Bernard Edmonds
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A fanatic is a man that does what he thinks the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the case.
Author: Finley Peter Dunne
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Fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity.
Author: Edward Gibbon
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A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit is overcome by habit.
Author: Desiderius Erasmus
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Instinct is action taken in pursuance of a purpose, but without conscious perception of what the purpose is.
Author: Van Hartmann
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The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
Author: Henri L. Bergson
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