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Quote by Kilroy J. Oldster

“Personal autonomy including freedom of thought and action enable a person to escape fallacies and oppression. Life challenges everyone daily. I can achieve personal liberation from pain and suffering by acknowledging unfavorable facts bracketing my existence and honestly laboring to overcome personal bouts of insanity. The truth is the beacon that calls loudest to me. Self-understanding and taking responsibility for my own actions frees me from the agony of infinite despair.”

Quote by Kilroy J. Oldster

Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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Dead Toad Scrolls

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Kilroy J. Oldster

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“Much of contemporary "realism" turns out to be just a variation on good old fashioned fatalism: people feel relieved of responsibility by recourse to the concept of 'nature'. By nature, however, we are born ignorant. Therefore should we try not to learn? Some people produce more than the usual amount of androgens and therefore become excessively aggressive. Does that mean we should freely express violence? We cannot. Submission to genetic programming can become dangerous, because it leaves us helpless.”

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“Western notions of individual autonomy and rule of law simply do not apply in the desert. An attack on one tribesman is an attack on all, and in a landscape where a murderer can quickly and quietly slip away, it matters little whether the accused is guilty or innocent. His entire clan is held accountable for thar—retribution. The resulting skein of honor and revenge, so familiar in the modern Middle East, is eternal, seemingly without beginning and without end. When the first recourse of victims is to their cousins, and not to the police or to an independent judicial system, poverty and political instability are the usual outcomes.”

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Book:A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World
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“Politics always puts forward Ideas: Nation, Empire, Union, Economy, etc. But none of these forms has value in itself; it has it only insofar as it involves concrete individuals. If a nation can assert itself proudly only to the detriment of its members, if a union can be created only to the detriment of those it is trying to unite, the nation or the union must be rejected. We repudiate all idealisms, mysticisms, etcetera which prefer a Form to man himself.”

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Book:The Ethics of Ambiguity
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