“In a democracy, politics is an expression and form of public ethics, wherein citizens become aware of their interdependence, and the reciprocity in this relationship reinforces their mutual respect for the rights and duties of each to the other.”
“Richard Weaver in his book, Ethics of Rhetoric” calls a god-term : a charismatic expression drained dry of any objective significance, but remaining an empty symbol intended to win unthinking applause”
“And, substantially they hope to supplant the “disciplining of the higher faculty of the imagination” by what they call “education for democracy.” ... The very banality of the expression helps to ensure its triumph. Who could be against education? Who could be against democracy? Yet the phrase begs two questions: What do you mean by “education”? And what do you mean by “democracy”? The school of Dewey has long been fond of capturing words and turning them to their own purposes: they tried hard to capture “humanism”, and even laid siege to “religion” Now I am convinced that if, by “education,” the champions of this slogan mean merely recreation, socialization, and a kind of custodial jurisdiction over young people, then they are deliberately perverting a word with a reasonably distinct historical meaning and making it into what Mr. Richard Weaver, in his book, Ethics of Rhetoric”, calls a god-term —that is, a charismatic expression drained dry of any objective significance, but remaining an empty symbol intended to win unthinking applause”
“In a world of true abundance you shouldn t have to work to justify your life.”
“Is this one of those situations that involves ethics ? Cause I m a cat, you know. I ve never been very good at those.”
“Helping is not, as conventionally thought, a charitable act that is praiseworthy to do but not wrong to omit. It is something that everyone ought to do.”
“We can check on what people say by seeing what they do.”
“We have no obligation to assist countries whose governments have policies that will undermine the effectiveness of our aid.”
“I argued against the view that the only obligation we have to strangers is to avoid harming them; but even if we were to take that view, the facts of climate change would demonstrate clearly that we are harming hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of the world s poor.”
“What we are doing to strangers in other communities right now is, therefore, far more serious and far more widespread than the harm we would do if we were in the habit of occasionally sending out a group of warriors to rape and pillage a village or two. Yet causing imperceptible harm at a distance by the release of waste gases is a completely new form of harm, and so we lack any kind of instinctive inhibitions or emotional response against causing it. We have trouble seeing it as harm at all.”
“Climate change is already causing, every week, as many deaths as occurred in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.”
“Population growth is not a reason against giving aid but a reason for reconsidering the kind of aid to give.”
“The world does produce enough to feed its inhabitants – in fact we waste vast quantities of grain and soybeans by feeding them to animals, getting back from the animals only a small fraction of the nutritional value of the plant foods we put into them.”
“We have an obligation to help those in absolute poverty that is no less strong than our obligation to rescue a drowning child from a pond.”
“Aesthetic sense is the twin of one s instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable than ethics.”
“Doing the next right thing will always bring more genuine happiness than simply doing the next fun thing.”
“One can with but moderate possessions do what one ought.”