Quotes

Il y avait même de pilules pour devenir joyeux. C’est pas très romantique, mais je trouve ça amusant, l’idée que les histoires d’amour qui finissent mal peuvent se guérir avec de la pharmacie.

François Truffaut, L'homme qui aimait les femmes, 1977

Agency is undoubtedly a morally relevant trait; but it is one among many.

Isaac Levi, Conflict and Social Agency, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 79, no. 5, 1982, pp. 231, p. 237

In music, as with so many other forms of artistic expression, that which most like is utterly distinct from that which is liked most.

Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume, Clockwork music: an illustrated history of mechanical musical instruments from the musical box to the pianola, from automaton lady virginal players to orchestrion, New York, 1973

Private property is a legal convention, defined in part by the tax system; therefore, the tax system cannot be evaluated by looking at its impact on private property, conceived as something that has independent existence and validity. Taxes must be evaluated as part of the overall system of property rights that they help to create. Justice or injustice in taxation can only mean justice or injustice in the system of property rights and entitlements that result from a particular tax regime.

Liam B. Murphy and Thomas Nagel, The myth of ownership: Taxes and justice, Oxford, 2002, p. 8

Before I first went to university I had a belief, which I still have, and which is probably shared by the great majority of you. I mean the belief that the way to decide whether a given economic period is good or bad economically is by considering the welfare of people in general at the relevant time. If people are on the whole well off, then on the whole the times are good, and if they are not, then the times are bad. Because I had this belief before I got to university, I was surprised by something I heard in one of the first lectures I attended, which was given by the late Frank Cyril James, who, as it happens, obtained his Bachelor of Commerce degree here at the London School of Economics in 1923. When I heard him he was Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University, where, in addition to occupying the Principalship, he gave lectures every year on the economic history of the world, from its semiscrutable beginnings up to whatever year he was lecturing in. In my case the year was 1958, and in the lecture I want to tell you about James was describing a segment of modern history, some particular quarter-century or so: I am sorry to say I cannot remember which one. But I do remember something of what he said about it. ‘These’, he said, referring to the years in question, ‘were excellent times economically. Prices were high, wages were low . . .’ And he went on, but I did not hear the rest of his sentence.

I did not hear it because I was busy wondering whether he had meant what he said, or, perhaps, had put the words ‘high’ and ‘low’ in the wrong places. For though I had not studied economics, I was convinced that high prices and low wages made for hard times, not good ones. In due course I came to the conclusion that James was too careful to have transposed the two words. It followed that he meant what he said. And it also followed that what he meant when he said that times were good was that they were good for the employing classes, for the folk he was revealing himself to be a spokesman of, since when wages are low and prices are high you can make a lot of money out of wage workers. Such candour about the properly purely instrumental position of the mass of humankind was common in nineteenth century economic writing, and James was a throwback to, or a holdover from, that age. For reasons to be stated in a moment, frank discourse of the Cyril James sort is now pretty rare, at any rate in public. It is discourse which, rather shockingly, treats human labour the way the capitalist system treats it in reality: as a resource for the enhancement of the wealth and power of those who do not have to labour, because they have so much wealth and power.

G. A. Cohen, Freedom, Justice and Capitalism, New Left Review, vol. 1, no. 126, 1981, pp. 3–16, pp. 3-4

[I]n 1997 Americans gave a total of 154 billion to philanthropic causes, either as individuals, or through foundations, corporations, or charitable bequests. But the vast majority of that went to religious institutions, alma maters, and so on, and only a small fraction of it, two billion, went to international aid. Still, two billion sure seems like a big number, so let me note a few other figures for comparison. […] Some years back, I read on the back of a Lays potato chip bag that Americans consumed 390,000,000 pounds of Lays potato chips per year. I found that a staggering number, as it did not include all of the other brands of chips and such that Americans consume: Fritos, Tostitos, Doritos, pretzels, Corn Curls, onion rings, popcorn, and so on. So I did a quick check on the Internet. In the year 2000, Americans spent approximately 190 billion dollars on soft drinks, candy, chips, and other snack foods.

Larry S. Temkin, Thinking about the needy, justice, and international organizations, The Journal of Ethics, vol. 8, 2004, pp. 349–395, pp. 362-363

I could never be in the position that Dickens in Hard Times attributes to Mrs Gradgrind on her deathbed, knowing that there is a pain in the room somewhere, but not knowing that it is mine.

Roger Scruton, Kant: a very short introduction, Oxford ; New York, 1982, p. 44

The importance of thought control of the general population suggests precisely that the role of the critical intellectual is crucial for any movement aiming at liberating social change. [T]he writings of Noam Chomsky offer an outstanding example of what a critical intellectual can do. Political activities of (leftist) intellectuals often oscillate between two extremes: either they absorb themselves entirely into militant work (usually when they are young) and do not really use their specific abilities as intellectuals; or they retreat from that kind of involvement, but then limit themselves to expressing moral indignation disconnected from genuine political analysis.

James A. McGilvray (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Chomsky, Cambridge, UK ; New York, 2005, pp. 280-281

Demasiadas veces se escucha hablar de ‘postmoderno’ sólo para proponer un neoliberalismo despolitizador, que pretende superar ‘viejas izquierdas y derechas’ pero apenas hace del político una figura destinada a decir con énfasis que nadie debe hacerse ilusiones.

Justino E. Combe González, Historia de las relaciones entre Panamá y Estados Unidos, Panamá \textlessCiudad\textgreater, 2004

What is to be deprecated is the notion that one can improve one’s style by using stylish words, or that important occasions necessarily demand important words.

H. W. Fowler and Ernest Gowers, A dictionary of modern English usage, Oxford, 1965, p. 717

Con [su] compañía y las conductas que de ella derivaban, el candidato peronista [adormeció] los reflejos antigolpistas de la población. El mayor de los cargos formulables hoy contra Menem es precisamente el de haber quebrado, por ambición de poder, aquella línea divisoria tan claramente trazada todavía en abril de 1987 entre una civilidad uniformemente democrática y el autoritarismo castrense.

Pablo Giussani, Menem: Su lógica secreta, Buenos Aires, 1990, p. 85

To suppose that there are (positive) legal reasons why a formally valid law can be voided for moral impropriety is a logical error. To suppose that all formally valid laws are morally obligatory is a moral error.

John Dunn, I. Consent in the Political Theory of John Locke, The Historical Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, 1967, pp. 153–182, p. 153-182

A los montoneros les tocó vivir una realmente dramática contradicción entre la mayor oportunidad jamás concedida a un grupo de izquierda en la Argentina para la construcción de un gran movimiento político y la cotidiana urgencia infantil por inmolar esa posibilidad al deleite de ofrecer un testimonio tremebundo de sí mismo.

Pablo Giussani, Montoneros: La soberbia armada, Buenos Aires, 1984, p. 40

Thomas Moro Simpson, Dios, el mamboretá y la mosca: investigaciones de un hombre curioso, Madrid, 1993, pp. 59-61

[E]n numerosos países aflora la tendencia a verlo todo, o casi, desde el punto de vista del entretenimiento. Lo que pueda entretener es bienvenido o bienquisto; lo que no, poco atractivo, mal visto y hasta sospechoso. Y esto ocurre no sólo en el mundo de “los espectáculos”—que, al fin y al cabo, suelen organizarse para mayor y mejor entretenimiento del público—, sino asimismo en casi todas las actividades, incluyendo las antaño juzgadas más graves, como la educación, la religión y la política.

José Ferrater Mora, Mariposas y supercuerdas: diccionario para nuestro tiempo, Barcelona, 1993, p. 260

[B]asta la igual vivacidad de las imágenes y emociones del ensueño frente a las de la realidad para que nuestra vida pudiera, sin ceder en importancia y seriedad, ser toda hecha de ensueño.

Macedonio Fernández, El mundo es un almismo

Thought experiments are not supposed to be realistic. They are supposed to clarify our thinking about reality.

Richard Dawkins, The extended phenotype: The gene as the unit of selection, Oxford, 1982, p. 4

Reporting a moral intuition is not the same as giving a reason.

Don Herzog, Without foundations: justification in political theory, Ithaca, 1985, p. 122

[A]narchism can be regarded as the extreme expression of the modernizing ideals of the French Revolution—liberty, equality and fraternity carried to their logical conclusion.

David Miller, Anarchism, London, 1984, p. 175

Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic ’libertarianism’ of the far right; but anarchism, as pre-figured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism’s principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.

Frederik Pohl, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander (eds.), Galaxy, thirty years of innovative science fiction, New York, 1974