Quotes
The success of my endeavours was due, I think, to a rule of ‘method’: that we should always try to clarify and strengthen our opponents’ position as much as possible before criticizing him, if we wish our criticism to be worth while.
Karl R. Popper, The logic of scientific discovery, London, 2008
With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Fortnightly Review, vol. 291, 1891
There have been times in my life when I came very near thinking that I could not lose even a single game.
José Raúl Capablanca, My chess career, New York, 1920
It would be good if we could somehow insulate our passions from our reasoning powers; and to some extent we can. Some people are quite good at compartmentalizing their emotions. Often, however, they don’t have very strong emotions in the first place. They may get what they want, but they do not want very much. Granting supreme importance to cognitive rationality is achieved at the cost of not having much they want to be rational about.
Jon Elster, Nuts and bolts for the social sciences, Cambridge, 2012, p. 70
Those readers troubled by the fact that millions of people will die this year, who could have been saved for a few dollars each, might want to consider making a contribution to Oxfam. In the United States, the address is: Oxfam America, P.O. Box 4215, Boston MA 02211-4215.
Shelly Kagan, Normative ethics, Boulder, Colorado, 1998, p. 316
Red flags and red guards, professional vanguards,
Stalin and Lenin, and rule from the Kremlin,
The Central Committee has told me to sing:
‘These are a few of my favourite things.’
Strict iron discipline and militarization,
Subject the nation to centralization.
Deep in my conscience I hear someone say:
‘When will the state start to wither away?’
When the Tsar falls,
Commissar calls,
Or I’m feeling sad,
I simply remember from March to September
Freedom was to…
Be had.
Alan Carter, Marx: a radical critique, Brighton, 1988, p. xiv
A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create: the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the hart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope informed and fortified by thought.
Bertrand Russell, Roads to freedom, London, 1918, p. 111
We’re working on our relationships constantly, and our feelings and reflections, but look what’s left out of that. What’s left out is a deteriorating world. So shy hasn’t therapy noticed that? Because psychotherapy is only working on that “inside” soul. By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the baking system’s sick, the schools, the streets—the sickness is out there.
James Hillman and Michael Ventura, We've had a hundred years of psychotherapy, and the world's getting worse, San Francisco, Calif., 1992, pp. 3-4
Money has an enormous voice. It has never spoken louder.
George Steiner, Teaching in the age of mockery, The Independent, 2003
Deontology is individualistic: we are not in it together, but each on our own. To say that the compliance effects of a constraint against killing should be fairly distributed among all agents would be like saying that the children of two families that have no contact with each other should all be treated fairly by the four parents.
Liam B. Murphy, Moral demands in nonideal theory, Oxford, 2000, p. 94
[E]very candidate of the party that votes is being forced this year to take a stand on abortion, and if the stand should be taken on law and not on the Good Book, the result can be very ugly indeed for the poor politician because abortion is against God’s law: “Thou shalt not kill.” Since this commandment is absolute any candidate who favors abortion must be defeated as a Satanist. On the other hand, any candidate who does not favor capital punishment must be defeated as permissive. In the land of the twice-born, the life of the fetus is sacred; the life of the adult is not.
Gore Vidal, United States: essays: 1952-1992, New York, 2001, p. 953
Conflict of interest is a social phenomenon unlikely to disappear, and potential recourse to violence and damage will always suggest itself if the conflict gets out of hand Man’s capability for self-destruction cannot be eradicated–he knows too much! Keeping that capability under control–providing incentives to minimize recourse to violence–is the eternal challenge.
Thomas C. Schelling and Morton H. Halperin, Strategy and arms control, Washington, 1985, p. 5
The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity.
Henry David Thoreau, A week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers ; Walden, or, Life in the woods ; The Maine woods ; Cape Cod, New York, N.Y, 1854
Human beings are not the only creatures smart enough to suffer[.]
Daniel C. Dennett, Précis of Consciousness Explained, Philosophy and phenomenological research, vol. 53, no. 4, 1993, pp. 889–892, p. 449
The role that intuitions can play in moral philosophy is the role that we are content to let them play in other departments of thought (it is only in moral philosophy that they have risen so far above their epistemological station). In mathematics, the natural sciences, and other branches of philosophy, finding a conclusion intuitively repugnant does not close an argument; it is a reason to start looking for a good argument.
James Griffin, Well-being: Its meaning, measurement, and moral importance, Oxford, 1988, p. 2
El sujeto romántico encuentra siempre dentro de sí la impresión de que fuera de él algo colosal acontece; pero a menudo, cuando quiere precisar esa enorme contingencia, se sorprende sin nada entre las manos.
José Ortega y Gasset, El espectador, Madrid, 1916
[D]eveloped states have been more willing to appeal to moral values and to use such appeals in justification of initiatives—such as the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia—that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War. But these appeals only heighten the puzzle. If it makes sense to spend billions to endanger thousands of lives in order to rescue a million people from Serb oppression, would it not make more sense to spend similar sums, without endangering any lives, on leading many millions out of life-threatening poverty?
Thomas W. Pogge, Priorities of Global Justice, Metaphilosophy, vol. 32, no. 1, 2001, pp. 6–24, pp. 6-7
If one looks at the works of the major apologists for capitalism, Milton Friedman, for example, or F. A. Hayek, one finds the focus of the apology always on the virtues of the market and on the vices of central planning. Rhetorically this is an effective strategy, for it is much easier to defend the market than to defend the other two defining institutions of capitalism. Proponents of capitalism know well that it is better to keep attention directed toward the market and away from wage labor or private ownership of the means of production.
Bertell Ollman (ed.), Market socialism: the debate among socialists, New York, 1998, p. 11
A story that supports the status quo is generally considered to be neutral and is not questioned in terms of its objectivity while one that challenges the status quo tends to be perceived as having a ‘point of view’ and therefore biased.
Sharon Beder, Global spin: the corporate assault on environmentalism, Dartington, Totnes, Devon, UK : White River Junction, Vt, 1996, p. 205
Call them soldiers, call them monks, call them machines: so they were but happy ones, I should not care.
Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon or the inspection house etc., Dublin, 1791