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I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.... Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.... Finally, [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.
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Benedict Anderson
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The familiar Olympian system was then agreed upon as a compromise between Hellenic and pre-Hellenic views: a divine family of six gods and six goddesses, headed by the co-sovereigns Zeus and Hera and forming a Council of Gods in Babylonian style.
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Robert Graves (The Greek Myths: The Complete and Definitive Edition)
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I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion… The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations… It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm… Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly die for such limited imaginings. —Benedict Anderson
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Min Jin Lee (Pachinko)
“
In fact, the aim is to blur what is true with what is not, to the point that the truth disappears altogether. By noisily asserting that something is false, you create a fake counter-reality. In time this constructed sovereign version of events becomes real- at least in the minds of those who are watching.
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Luke Harding (A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia's War with the West)
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Give of your magic. Because if you do not give of your personal magic in a beautiful loving expressive way, then you are definitely losing the game of life and others are taking over. So be yourself. Let the magic of yourself begin to shine through. Not in a bombastic way, but in a sincere feeling way. You are a sovereign soul who is capable of filling the world with something different by adding your consciousness to this world and giving something special - your uniqueness.
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Natasha Rendell (Nathon's Keys to Freedom)
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This is why it is often called sovereign grace: it raises the dead. The dead do not raise themselves. God does by his grace. And it is this “glorious grace” that will be praised for all eternity.
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John Piper (From Heaven He Came and Sought Her: Definite Atonement in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective (The Doctrines of Grace))
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his sovereign slumbers in normal times but suddenly awakens when a normal situation threatens to become an exception.13 The core of this authority is its exclusive possession of the right of, or its monopoly of, political decision making. Thus Schmitt’s definition: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.
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Carl Schmitt (Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty)
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But what is sovereignty? It is, they say, the power to make laws. Another absurdity, a relic of despotism. The nation had long seen kings issuing their commands in this form: for such is our pleasure; it wished to taste in its turn the pleasure of making laws. For fifty years it has brought them forth by myriads; always, be it understood, through the agency of representatives. The play is far from ended.
The definition of sovereignty was derived from the definition of the law. The law, they said, is the expression of the will of the sovereign: then, under a monarchy, the law is the expression of the will of the king; in a republic, the law is the expression of the will of the people. Aside from the difference in the number of wills, the two systems are exactly identical: both share the same error, namely, that the law is the expression of a will; it ought to be the expression of a fact. Moreover they followed good leaders: they took the citizen of Geneva for their prophet, and the contrat social for their Koran.
Bias and prejudice are apparent in all the phrases of the new legislators. The nation had suffered from a multitude of exclusions and privileges; its representatives issued the following declaration: All men are equal by nature and before the law; an ambiguous and redundant declaration. Men are equal by nature: does that mean that they are equal in size, beauty, talents, and virtue? No; they meant, then, political and civil equality. Then it would have been sufficient to have said: All men are equal before the law.
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Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (What Is Property?)
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No matter what form a world government with centralized power over the whole globe might assume, the very notion of one sovereign force ruling the whole earth, holding the monopoly of all means of violence, unchecked and uncontrolled by other sovereign powers, is not only a forbidding nightmare of tyranny, it would be the end of all political life as we know it. Political concepts are based on plurality, diversity, and mutual limitations. A citizen is by definition a citizen among citizens of a country among countries. His rights and duties must be defined and limited, not only by those of his fellow citizens, but also by the boundaries of a territory. Philosophy may conceive of the earth as the homeland of mankind and of one unwritten law, eternal and valid for all. Politics deals with men, nationals of many countries and heirs to many pasts; its laws are the positively established fences which hedge in, protect, and limit the space in which freedom is not a concept, but a living, political reality. The establishment of one sovereign world state, far from being the prerequisite for world citizenship, would be the end of all citizenship. It would not be the climax of world politics, but quite literally its end.
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Hannah Arendt (Men in Dark Times)
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The OED defines democracy as: “Government by the people; that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people….” The legitimate government of the United States, as described by our Constitution, has no individuals imbued with such prerogatives. Any individual or group laying claim to sovereign prerogatives is, by definition, acting in opposition to our Constitution—in other words: a traitor.
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Joseph Befumo (The Republicrat Junta: How Two Corrupt Parties, in Collusion with Corporate Criminals, have Subverted Democracy, Deceived the People, and Hijacked Our Constitutional Government)
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The Christian has been drawn unto Christ. Those who wish to boast in having something to do with their salvation, or who insist that the final decision lays with man, resist the clear meaning of Christ's words, "draw." But this is a wondrous term. It is beautiful to hear. Drawn in love. Drawn in mercy. Drawn unto the one who died in my place. It is sovereign action, undertaken by the one who holds the entire universe by His power. It is an irresistible drawing, most definitely, but is a drawing of grace. The one drawing loves the one who is being drawn. And those drawn can never be thankful enough to God who brought them out of darkness into the marvelous light of Christ.
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James R. White
“
For realists, the state is the main actor and sovereignty is its distinguishing trait. The meaning of the sovereign state is inextricably bound up with the use of force. In terms of its internal dimension, to illustrate this relationship between violence and the state we need to look no further than Max Weber’s famous definition of the state as ‘the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’(M. J. Smith 1986: 23).3 Within this territorial space, sovereignty means that the state has supreme authority to make and enforce laws. This is the basis of the unwritten contract between individuals and the state. According to Hobbes, for example, we trade our liberty in return for a guarantee of security. Once security has been established, civil society can begin. But in the absence of security, there can be no art, no culture, no society. The first move, then, for the realist is to organize power domestically. Only after power has been organized, can community begin.
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John Baylis (The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations)
“
When, during and after the Reformation, the universities lost their status as so many autonomous parts of the universal church, they lost their independence correspondingly. In Protestant Europe, they came under the jurisdiction of the national churches and of the rapacious national monarchies; in Catholic Europe --although to a lesser extent--they came under the jurisdiction of the reinvigorated and consolidated Papacy, and of the sovereigns who, as in Spain and France, made royal influence over the church establishment within their realms a condition of their support for the Roman cause. The dissolution of medieval universalism meant that learning, like nearly everything else, was forced to submit to new or more rigid denominations. With the complete or partial secularization of society which followed upon the French Revolutionary era, in nearly every country except Britain, the universities were stripped of what remained of their old rights and became little better than state corporations.
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Russell Kirk (Academic Freedom: An Essay in Definition)
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Christ is our Friend; He is also the Righteous King. God is our Father; He is also the Sovereign Lord. Christianity can be said to be both a religion and a relationship. You may often hear the cliché that it is not a religion, but a relationship only - which, I believe, is a bit too vague a statement - 'religion' has long had different meanings and implications depending on who you ask or where you are coming from. Honestly, it is sometimes the case that Christians like to think they are too cool and free and up-close and personal with God to be like other religions. Perhaps that could be argued, that could be the case, as it is written thus: 'You are no longer a slave to sin, but God's child.' So we might very well assert that Christianity is not at all some stale philosophy centered around legalistic guilt and empty rule-keeping, as the modernists so commonly define religion; although by other definitions we might as well be boasting that it is 'The Religion' simply by claiming that it is too real and too special to be deemed 'just another religion'.
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Criss Jami (Healology)
“
April 12 Moral Dominion Death hath no more dominion over Him . . . in that He liveth, He liveth unto God. Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God. Romans 6:9–11 Co-Eternal Life. Eternal life was the life which Jesus Christ exhibited on the human plane, and it is the same life, not a copy of it, which is manifested in our mortal flesh when we are born of God. Eternal life is not a gift from God, eternal life is the gift of God. The energy and the power which were manifested in Jesus will be manifested in us by the sheer sovereign grace of God when once we have made the moral decision about sin. Ye shall receive the power of the Holy Ghost—not power as a gift from the Holy Ghost; the power is the Holy Ghost, not something which He imparts. The life that was in Jesus is made ours by means of his Cross when once we make the decision to be identified with Him. If it is difficult to get right with God, it is because we will not decide definitely about sin. Immediately we do decide, the full life of God comes in. Jesus came to give us endless supplies of life: “that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.” Eternal Life has nothing to do with Time, it is the life which Jesus lived when He was down here. The only source of Life is the Lord Jesus Christ. The weakest saint can experience the power of the Deity of the Son of God if once he is willing to “let go.” Any strand of our own energy in ourselves will blur the life of Jesus. We have to keep letting go, and slowly and surely the great full life of God will invade us in every part, and men will take knowledge of us that we have been with Jesus.
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Oswald Chambers (My Utmost for His Highest)
“
The sensational event of the ancient world was the mobilisation of the underworld against the established order. This enterprise of Christianity had no more to do with religion than Marxist socialism has to do with the solution of the social problem. The notions represented by Jewish Christianity were strictly unthinkable to Roman brains. The ancient world had a liking for clarity. Scientific research was encouraged there. The gods, for the Romans, were familiar images. It is some what difficult to know whether they had any exact idea of the Beyond. For them, eternal life was personified in living beings, and it consisted in a perpetual renewal. Those were conceptions fairly close to those which were current amongst the Japanese and Chinese at the time when the Swastika made its appearance amongst them.
It was necessary for the Jew to appear on the scene and introduce that mad conception of a life that continues into an alleged Beyond! It enables one to regard life as a thing that is negligible here below—since it will flourish later, when it no longer exists. Under cover of a religion, the Jew has introduced intolerance in a sphere in which tolerance formerly prevailed. Amongst the Romans, the cult of the sovereign intelligence was associated with the modesty of a humanity that knew its limits, to the point of consecrating altars to the unknown god.
The Jew who fraudulently introduced Christianity into the ancient world—in order to ruin it—re-opened the same breach in modern times, this time taking as his pretext the social question. It's the same sleight-of-hand as before. Just as Saul was changed into St. Paul, Mardochai became Karl Marx.
Peace can result only from a natural order. The condition of this order is that there is a hierarchy amongst nations. The most capable nations must necessarily take the lead. In this order, the subordinate nations get the greater profit, being protected by the more capable nations.
It is Jewry that always destroys this order. It constantly provokes the revolt of the weak against the strong, of bestiality against intelligence, of quantity against quality. It took fourteen centuries for Christianity to reach the peak of savagery and stupidity. We would therefore be wrong to sin by excess of confidence and proclaim our definite victory over Bolshevism. The more we render the Jew incapable of harming us, the more we shall protect ourselves from this danger. The Jew plays in nature the rôle of a catalysing element. A people that is rid of its Jews returns spontaneously to the natural order.
In 1925 I wrote in Mein Kampf (and also in an unpublished work) that world Jewry saw in Japan an opponent beyond its reach. The racial instinct is so developed amongst the Japanese therefore compelled to act from outside. It would be to the considered interests of England and the United States to come to an understanding with Japan, but the Jew will strive to prevent such an understanding. I gave this warning in vain. A question arises. Does the Jew act consciously and by calculation, or is he driven on by his instinct? I cannot answer that question.
The intellectual élite of Europe (whether professors of faculties, high officials, or whatever else) never understood anything of this problem. The élite has been stuffed with false ideas, and on these it lives. It propagates a science that causes the greatest possible damage. Stunted men have the philosophy of stunted men. They love neither strength nor health, and they regard weakness and sickness as supreme values.
Since it's the function that creates the organ, entrust the world for a few centuries to a German professor—and you'll soon have a mankind of cretins, made up of men with big heads set upon meagre bodies.
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Adolf Hitler (Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944)
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Rights have become what the political sovereign or ephemeral master decides to dispense and whatever gratifies the undisciplined cravings and desires of the individual.
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Russell Kirk (Academic Freedom: An Essay in Definition)
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Doctrines of Grace Arminianism 1. Election is unconditional
depending only on the
sovereign choice of God. 1. Election and condemnation
are conditioned upon the
foreseen faith or unbelief
of fallen man.
2. The atonement is limited
to the elect. A definite
redemption was made. 2. The atonement was made
universally for all, including
those who refuse to believe.
The effects of Christ’s redemption
depend upon man’s believing or not.
3. Man is depraved, and has
no ability to contribute to his
own salvation, or merit the
merits of Christ. 3. Man is only partially
depraved, and still has a free
will capable of submitting to
God’s truth.
4. God’s grace is irresistible. 4. God’s grace can be resisted.
5. The saints will persevere in
the faith, being kept by the power
of God. Their salvation is certain. 5. There is the possibility that
man, having chosen for God, can also
in like manner fall away from God’s grace.
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Synod of Dort (The Canons of Dort)
“
By banning certain violent groups and allowing others, Facebook will be able to effectively determine the outcome of an election in a sovereign nation. That is, ultimately, what is so troubling about the increasing reliance by governments on corporate policies to accomplish what existing laws cannot. The US list is certainly political—and by many accounts deeply problematic—but what happens when less democratic countries start exerting authority within processes like the GIFCT? Will their definition of “terrorist” hold up in the court of international opinion? As journalist Tom Risen pointed out back in 2014: “Another hurdle for social media sites working to remove objectionable posts is that governments of the different countries where they operate can vary in their motives when pushing for the content’s removal.
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Jillian York (Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism)
“
I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.
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Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism)
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There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos. For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists.
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Carl Schmitt (Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty)
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He is God, besides whom there is no other deity. He knows the unseen and the manifest. He is the Most-Gracious, the Ever-Merciful. He is God, besides whom there is no other deity. He is the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One, Peace in entirety, the Giver of Peace, the Guardian, the Mighty One, the All-powerful, the Most High. Exalted is God above whom they associate with Him! He is God, the Architect, the Originator, the Modeller. All good names are His. All that are in the heavens and the earth give glory to Him. And He is the Mighty, the Wise One. (59:22-24) Allah is the name of the being Who is the Creator of the heavens and the earth and all other creations. The article alif lam appended to the word is for definition, and since the very beginning this name has been specifically used for the Lord of this world. Before the advent of the Prophet (sws), in the times of Arab jahiliyyah also this name was used for Him. This word was also one of the remnants of the religion of Abraham (sws) which the Arabs inherited. Thus the Qur’an says:
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Javed Ahmad Ghamidi (Islam: A Comprehensive Introduction)
“
He comes next to a consideration of the passions. 'Endeavour' may be defined as a small beginning of motion; if towards something, it is desire, and if away from something it is aversion. Love is the same as desire, and hate is the same as aversion. We call a thing 'good' when it is an object of desire, and 'bad' when it is an object of aversion. (It will be observed that these definitions give no objectivity to 'good' and 'bad'; if men differ in their desires, there is no theoretical method of adjusting their differences.) There are definitions of various passions, mostly based on a competitive view of life; for instance, laughter is sudden glory. Fear of invisible power, if publicly allowed, is religion; if not allowed, superstition. Thus the decision as to what is religion and what superstition rests with the legislator. Felicity involves continual progress; it consists in prospering, not in having prospered; there is no such thing as a static happiness—excepting, of course, the joys of heaven, which surpass our comprehension. Will is nothing but the last appetite or aversion remaining in deliberation. That is to say, will is not something different from desire and aversion, but merely the strongest in a case of conflict. This is connected, obviously, with Hobbes's denial of free will. Unlike most defenders of despotic government, Hobbes holds that all men are naturally equal. In a state of nature, before there is any government, every man desires to preserve his own liberty, but to acquire dominion over others; both these desires are dictated by the impulse to self-preservation. From their conflict arises a war of all against all, which makes life 'nasty, brutish, and short'. In a state of nature, there is no property, no justice or injustice; there is only war, and 'force and fraud are, in war, the two cardinal virtues'. The second part tells how men escape from these evils by combining into communities each subject to a central authority. This is represented as happening by means of a social contract. It is supposed that a number of people come together and agree to choose a sovereign, or a sovereign body, which shall exercise authority over them and put an end to the universal war.
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Anonymous
“
Gentiles – those of the Nations who were not Jews by birth or conversion. By definition, a Gentile is a person outside of the covenant promises of God, one who has not made the God of Israel their sovereign, which I will prove in a later chapter.[21]
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Tyler Dawn Rosenquist (The Bridge: Crossing Over Into the Fullness of Covenant Life)
“
Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.1 Only this definition can do justice to a borderline concept. Contrary to the imprecise terminology that is found in popular literature, a borderline concept is not a vague concept, but one pertaining to the outermost sphere. This definition of sovereignty must therefore be associated with a borderline case and not with routine. It will soon become clear that the exception is to be understood to refer to a general concept in the theory of the state, and not merely to a construct applied to any emergency decree or state of siege.
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Carl Schmitt (Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty)
“
Criticism holds the cruelest of powers: the ability to, discursively, attempt to destroy its object without the need to fully understand it. Whether superficial or deep, criticism carries a destructive potential and, invariably, is empty. When they cannot criticize the content, they will criticize the structure, and when they cannot criticize the structure, they will criticize the details – until nothing remains but the criticism itself, that lazy cousin of fame and glory which, unable to compete with them, simply seeks to devalue them. On the other hand, there is the power of action, against which criticism may weigh in its arguments, but it will never have the real legitimacy to confront it – action speaks for itself. Even the most meticulous, definitive, or absolute criticism has, in fact, no power over action, as the latter belongs to the realm of reality, not to that of words. Those who act hold supreme power, even when making mistakes, challenging the establishment, or going beyond the limits of critical analysis. Criticism is always subordinate, while action is sovereign. The object of criticism is its foundation, not the criticism itself. In the end, we will speak of actions, not of those who opposed them.
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Geverson Ampolini
“
as the Reformed faith and its pastoral corollaries is the true intellectual mainstream of Christianity, so the belief in definite, particular, and sovereignly effectual redemption—which the above lines express—is its true intellectual center.
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David Gibson (From Heaven He Came and Sought Her: Definite Atonement in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective)
“
The soul — this enigmatic
something which we feel when we hear the word used, but of which the essence
baffles all science, the divine spark in this living body which in this divinely cruel,
divinely indifferent world has either to rule or to submit — is the counter-pole of the
light-world about us, and hence man’s thought and feeling are very ready to assume
the existence of a world-soul in it. The more solitary the being and the more resolute
it is in forming its own world against all other conjunctures of worlds in the en-
vironment, the more definite and strong the cast of its soul. What is the opposite of
the soul of a lion? The soul of a cow. For strength of individual soul the herbivores
substitute numbers, the herd, the common feeling and doing of masses. But the less
one needs others, the more powerful one is. A beast of prey is everyone’s foe. Never
does he tolerate an equal in his den. Here we are at the root of the truly royal idea of
property. Property is the domain in which one exercises unlimited power, the power
that one has gained in battling, defended against one’s peers, victoriously upheld. It is
not a right to mere having, but the sovereign right to do as one will with one’s own.
Once this is understood, we see that there are carnivore and there are herbivore
ethics. It is beyond anyone’s power to alter this. It pertains to the inward form, meaning, and tactics of all life. It is simply a fact. We can annihilate life, but we cannot
alter it in kind. A beast of prey tamed and in captivity — every zoological garden can
furnish examples — is mutilated, world-sick, inwardly dead. Some of them voluntarily
hunger-strike when they are captured. Herbivores give up nothing in being
domesticated.
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”
Oswald Spengler (Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life)
“
The democratic idiosyncrasy against everything which rules and wishes to rule, the modern misarchism (to coin a bad word for a bad thing), has gradually but so thoroughly transformed itself into the guise of intellectualism, the most abstract intellectualism, that even nowadays it penetrates and has the right to penetrate step by step into the most exact and apparently the most objective sciences: this tendency has, in fact, in my view already dominated the whole of physiology and biology, and to their detriment, as is obvious, in so far as it has spirited away a radical idea, the idea of true activity. The tyranny of this idiosyncrasy, however, results in the theory of "adaptation" being pushed forward into the van of the argument, exploited; adaptation—that means to say, a second-class activity, a mere capacity for "reacting"; in fact, life itself has been defined (by Herbert Spencer) as an increasingly effective internal adaptation to external circumstances. This definition, however, fails to realise the real essence of life, its will to power. It fails to appreciate the paramount superiority enjoyed by those plastic forces of spontaneity, aggression, and encroachment with their new interpretations and tendencies, to the operation of which adaptation is only a natural corollary: consequently the sovereign office of the highest functionaries in the organism itself (among which the life-will appears as an active and formative principle) is repudiated. One remembers Huxley's reproach to Spencer of his "administrative Nihilism": but it is a case of something much more than "administration.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (On the Genealogy of Morals)
“
There are only two possible explanations for a sovereign nation to bankrupt its own citizens and its government in order to set up a huge international surveillance and military system, “the finest fighting force the world has ever seen” that they do not actually own or control. One, everyone is completely insane, or two, it has not been a sovereign nation for a long time. Now is the time to remember the definition of a terrorist.
”
”
Heather Marsh (Binding Chaos: Mass Collaboration on a Global Scale)
“
Here on a frontier back road more than half a century before the Civil War, two different, racialized definitions of sovereign liberty faced off against each other. The first, represented by Jackson, imagined "free born" to mean white born and "liberty" to mean the ability to do whatever they wanted, including to buy and sell humans and move them, unrestrained by interior frontiers, across a road that by treaty belonged to an indigenous nation.
”
”
Greg Grandin
“
Mankiw’s famous quote was ‘People react to incentives, all else is just explanation’. However, poor people are helpless. They do not have or face a willingness to pay choice in helpless scenarios. A literal application of definition of demand would imply that the poor people do not have demand for the essential goods. Their wants are not backed up by purchasing power. Economics does not differentiate between essential and non-essential wants. If a rich person demands golf course in a locality near a big population of homeless people, then, the golf course will be built first if he can afford it. Are poor willing to give fewer dollar votes by choice to buy the essential needs? Is it their conscious and sovereign decision?
”
”
Salman Ahmed Shaikh (Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World)
“
So much that it seems consistent only for porosity37—seen as a kind of productive fragility that overcomes rigid dualisms—to be the key concept by which the nature of the city is revealed and interpreted in all its profundity. Porosity is the principle of the true life of Naples: At the base of the cliff itself, where it touches the shore, caves have been hewn. As in the paintings of hermits from the Trecento, a door appears here and there in the cliffs. If it is open, one looks into large cellars that are at once sleeping places and storerooms. Steps also lead to the sea, to fishermen’s taverns that have been installed in natural grottoes. Faint light and thin music rise up from there in the evening. As porous as those stones is the architecture. Buildings and action merge in courtyards, arcades, and staircases. The space is preserved to act as a stage for new and unforeseen configurations. What is avoided is the definitive, the fully formed. No situation appears as it is, intended forever, no form asserts its “thus and not otherwise.” . . . Because nothing is finished and concluded. Porosity results not only from the indolence of the southern craftsman but above all from the passion for improvisation. For that space and opportunity must be preserved at all costs. Buildings are used as a popular stage. They are divided into innumerable theaters, animated simultaneously. All share innumerable stages, brought to life simultaneously. Balcony, forecourt, window, gateway, staircase, roof are at once stage and theater box. Even the most miserable wretch is sovereign in his dim, twofold awareness of contributing, however deprived he may be, to one of the images of the Neapolitan street that will never return and, in his poverty, the leisure of enjoying the grand panorama. What is played out on the stairs is the highest school in theatrical direction. The stairs, never entirely revealed, but closed off in the dull northern house-
”
”
Wolfram Eilenberger (Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy)
“
But Protestant establishments, according to our author’s definition, which applies to them, and to them alone, rest on the opposite theory, that the will of the State is independent of the condition of the community; and that it may, or indeed must, impose on the nation a faith which may be that of a minority, and which in some cases has been that of the sovereign alone. According to the Catholic view, government may preserve in its laws, and by its authority, the religion of the community; according to the Protestant view it may be bound to change it. A government which has power to change the faith of its subjects must be absolute in other things; so that one theory is as favourable to tyranny as the other is opposed to it. The safeguard of the Catholic system of Church and State, as contrasted with the Protestant, was that very authority which the Holy See used to prevent the sovereign from changing the religion of the people, by deposing him if he departed from it himself. In most Catholic countries the Church preceded the State; some she assisted to form; all she contributed to sustain. Throughout Western Europe Catholicism was the religion of the inhabitants before the new monarchies were founded. The invaders, who became the dominant race and the architects of a new system of States, were sooner or later compelled, in order to preserve their dominion, to abandon their pagan or their Arian religion, and to adopt the common faith of the immense majority of the people. The connection between Church and State was therefore a natural, not an arbitrary, institution; the result of the submission of the Government to popular influence, and the means by which that influence was perpetuated. No Catholic Government ever imposed a Catholic establishment on a Protestant community, or destroyed a Protestant establishment. Even the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the greatest wrong ever inflicted on the Protestant subjects of a Catholic State, will bear no comparison with the establishment of the religion of a minority. It is a far greater wrong than the most severe persecution, because persecution may be necessary for the preservation of an existing society, as in the case of the early Christians and of the Albigenses; but a State Church can only be justified by the acquiescence of the nation. In every other case it is a great social danger, and is inseparable from political oppression.
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”
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (The History of Freedom and Other Essays)
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The definition of a confederate republic seems simply to be "an assemblage of societies,'' or an association of two or more states into one state. The extent, modifications, and objects of the federal authority are mere matters of discretion. So long as the separate organization of the members be not abolished; so long as it exists, by a constitutional necessity, for local purposes; though it should be in perfect subordination to the general authority of the union, it would still be, in fact and in theory, an association of states, or a confederacy. The proposed Constitution, so far from implying an abolition of the State governments, makes them constituent parts of the national sovereignty, by allowing them a direct representation in the Senate, and leaves in their possession certain exclusive and very important portions of sovereign power. This fully corresponds, in every rational import of the terms, with the idea of a federal government.
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Politics Faculty, Hillsdale College (The U.S. Constitution: A Reader)