Quotes

It’s very hard to live with cognitive dissonance: only a real cynic can believe one thing and say another. So whether it’s a totalitarian system or a free system, the people who are most useful to the system of power are the ones who actually believe what they say, and they’re the ones who will typically make it through.

Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The indispensable Chomsky, New York, 2002, p. 112

Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain.

George Orwell, Nineteen eighty-four, London, 1949

I am simply pointing out what the history of ethics shows all too clearly—how much our thinking has been shaped by what our stages omit to mention. The Greek philosophers never really raised the problem of slavery till towards the end of their speech, and then few of them did so with conviction. This happened even though it lay right in the path of their enquiries into political justice and the value of the individual soul. Christianity did raise that problem, because its class background was different and because the world in the Christian era was already in turmoil, so that men were not presented with the narcotic of a happy stability. But Christianity itself did not, until quite recently, raise the problem o the morality of punishment, and particularly of eternal punishment. This failure to raise central questions was not, in either case, complete. Once can find very intelligent and penetrating criticisms of slavery occurring from time to time in Greek writings—even in Aristotle’s defence of that institution. But they are mostly like Rawls’ remark here. They conclude that “this should be investigated some day”. The same thing happens with Christian writings concerning punishment, except that the consideration, “this is a great mystery”, acts as an even more powerful paralytic to though. Not much more powerful, however. Natural inertia, when it coincides with vested interest or the illusion of vested interest, is as strong as gravitation.

Mary Midgley, Duties concerning islands, Encounter, vol. 60, no. 2, 1983, pp. 36-43

With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but uniformity of opinion of all subjects, now existed for the first time.

George Orwell, Nineteen eighty-four, London, 1949

In looking over the catalogue of human actions (says a partizan of this principle) in order to determine which of them are to be marked with the seal of disapprobation, you need but to take counsel of your own feelings: whatever you find in yourself a propensity to condemn, is wrong for that very reason. For the same reason it is also meet for punishment: in what proportion it is adverse to utility, or whether it be adverse to utility at all, is a matter that makes no difference. In that same proportion also is it meet for punishment: if you hate much, punish much: if you hate little, punish little: punish as you hate. If you hate not at all, punish not at all: the fine feelings of the soul are not to be overborne and tyrannized by the harsh and rugged dictates of political utility.

Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, London, 1789, p. 2

The law of excluded middle is true when precise symbols are employed, but it is not true when symbols are vague, as, in fact, all symbols are.

Bertrand Russell, Vagueness, Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, vol. 1, no. 2, 1923, pp. 84–92, pp. 84-92

[T]his talk about capitalism and freedom has got to be a conscious fraud. As soon as you move into the real world, you see that nobody could actually believe that nonsense.

Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian, and Arthur Naiman, The common good, Tucson, Ariz, 1998, p. 14

These may be the last days. We are taking them one at a time. My latest paralysis was the result of some bleeding inside the brain. My concern is that after my departure something remains of me, not papers, not final philosophical declarations, but love. I hope that that will remain and will not be too much affected by the manner of my final departure, which I would like to be peaceful, like a coma, without a death struggle, leaving bad memories behind. Whatever happens now, our small family can live forever—Grazina, me, and our love. That is what I would like to happen, not an intellectual survival but the survival of love.

Paul Feyerabend, Killing time: the autobiography of Paul Feyerabend, Chicago, 1995, p. 181

He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote:

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:

From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink—greetings!

George Orwell, Nineteen eighty-four, London, 1949

[T]he status quo is the outcome of a system of national selfishness and political expediency, […] not the result of a considered attempt to work out the moral obligations of the developed nations[.]

Peter Singer, Practical ethics, Cambridge, 1993, p. 262

Denn, wie unser physischer Weg auf der Erde immer nur eine Linie, keine Fläche ist; so müssen wir im Leben, wenn wir Eines ergreifen und besitzen wollen, unzähliges Anderes, rechts und links, entsagend, liegen lassen. Können wir uns dazu nich entschließen, sondern greifen, wie Kinder auf dem Jahrmarkt, nach Allem was im Vorübergehen reizt; dann ist dies das verkehrte Bestreben, die Linie unseres Wegs in eine Fläche zu verwandeln: wir laufen sodann im Zickzack, irrlichterlieren hin und her und gelangen zu nichts.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Kunst, glücklich zu sein: dargestellt in fünfzig Lebensregeln, München, 2005

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: ‘Have they discovered evolution yet?’ Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them.

Richard Dawkins, The selfish gene, Oxford, 2009, p. 1

It is as if man had been suddenly appointed managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution—appointed without being asked if he wanted it, and without proper warning and preparation. What is more, he can’t refuse the job. Whether he wants it or not, whether he is conscious of what he is doing or not, he is in point of fact determining the future direction of evolution on this earth. This is his inescapable destiny, and the sooner he realizes it and starts believing in it, the better for all concerned.

Julian (Julian Sorell) Huxley, New bottles for new wine, essays, London, 1957, pp. 13-14

It takes a lot of self-confidence—perhaps more self-confidence than one ought to have—to take a position alone because it seems to you right, in opposition to everything you see and hear.

Noam Chomsky, On Staying Informed and Intellectual Self-Defense, 1999

By speaking with the voice of reason, one is also exposing oneself to reason.

Jon Elster, The market and the forum: Three varieties of political theory, in Derek Matravers and Jon Pike (eds.) Debates in contemporary political philosophy: An anthology, London, 2003, pp. 325–341, p. 113

La mente humana no ha sido hecha para descubrir la verdad, sino para cazar bisontes.

Thomas Moro Simpson, quoted in Torcuato S. Di Tella, Diccionario del político exquisito, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1998, p. 137

Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell 1872-1914, London, 1967

Only a radical change in human nature […] could overcome the tendency for people to find a way around any system that supresses private enterprise.

Peter Singer, Practical ethics, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 43-44

Another argument commonly used against aggregationism is also hard to understand (Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 27). This is the objection that utilitarianism “does not take seriously the distinction between persons”. To explain this objection: it is said that, if we claim that there is a duty to promote maximal preference satisfaction regardless of its distribution, we are treating a great interest of one as of less weight than the lesser interests of a great many, provided that the latter add up in aggregate to more than the former. For example, if I can save five patients moderate pain at the cost of not saving one patient severe pain, I should do so if the interests of the five in the relief of their pain is greater in aggregate than the interest of the one in the relief of his (or hers).

But to think in the way that utilitarians have to think about this kind of example is not to ignore the difference between persons. Why should anybody want to say this? Utilitarians are perfectly well aware that A, B and C in my example are different persons people. They are not blind. All they are doing is trying to do justice between the interests of these people. It is hard to see how else one could do this except by showing them all equal respect, and that, as we have seen, leads straight to aggregationism.

R. M. Hare, A utilitarian approach, in Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer (eds.) A companion to bioethics, Malden, MA, 2009, pp. 80–85, p. 83

The chief characteristic of the twentieth century is the terrible multiplication of the world’s population. It is a catastrophe, a disaster. We don’t know what to do about it.

Ernst Gombrich, quoted in Eric J. Hobsbawm, The age of extremes: a history of the world, 1914 - 1991, New York, 1994, p. 2