“In brief, anyone who has worked at one or two workplaces in America is familiar with that type of middle management or upper management individuals whose job is almost exclusively to create unnecessary tasks and procedures that turn the lives of employees under them into an absolute nightmare. What usually happens under such toxic circumstances? Nothing. A deafening silence from most employees. In fact, many employees not only remain silent out of fear of getting fired, they go as far as putting on fake smiles (or even loud laughter) to survive. Some walk around the office with the attitude of ‘I love my job!’ ‘I love my life!’ ‘I am living the dream!’ to please middle and upper management.”
“Musonius ordered a thousand sesterces to be given to a man pretending to be a philosopher, when several people told him the man was a bad and vicious fellow, deserving of nothing good, Musonius answered with a smile, Well then he deserves money .”
“Perhaps the extent of divinely sanctioned cruelty made it impossible to think of human cruelty as a distinct and unmitigated evil. Certainly those Christians who came to doubt the literal accounts of physical torment in hell also worried about the cruelty and vindictiveness ascribed to God. By the eighteenth century these were very common concerns, especially in England, where secular humanitarianism had begun its extraordinary career. It was never to be without its enemies. Religious rigor, the theory of the survival of the fittest, revolutionary radicalism, military atavism, masculine athleticism, and other causes hostile to humanitarianism never abated. Nevertheless, taking cruelty seriously became and remained an important part of Europe s accepted morality, even in the midst of unlimited massacres. Putting cruelty first is, however, a matter very different from mere humanness. To hate cruelty more than any other evil involves a radical rejection of both religious and political conventions. It dooms one to a life of skepticism, indecision, disgust, and often misanthropy. Putting cruelty first has therefore been tried only rarely, and it is not often discussed. It is too deep a threat to reason for most philosophers to contemplate it at all.”
“Sometimes it seems like the digital transformation of society has led us to a binary representation of all things in life. In this journey we call life binary thinking limits the possible. - Tom Golway”
“Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility with regard to everything that has life.”
“Our genetic makeup permits a wide range of behaviors - from Ebenezer Scrooge before to Ebenezer Scrooge after. I do not believe that the miser hoards through opportunist genes or that the philanthropist gives because nature endowed him with more than the normal complement of altruist genes. Upbringing, culture, class, status, and all the intangibles that we call free will, determine how we restrict our behaviors from the wide spectrum - extreme altruism to extreme selfishness - that our genes permit.”
“The very idea that any group of people should get to decide the fate of a country, and all its subjects, who for the most part they have personally never met nor had any interaction with, is intrinsically unethical.”
“Denn bei historischer Forschung geht es doch gerade darum, Fremdartigkeit zu erhalten.”
“Das Weib, die allgegenwärtige Wirklichkeit, brennt sich uns nackt ins Blut, und wo wir mit ihr kämpfen müssen, da ziehen wir sie am besten erst recht nackt aus, in der Tat oder Vorstellung, so gut wir eben können”
“The image of the devil in human history has provided the simplest answer to the problem of evil in all its forms. How is it that human beings, capable of acts of self-sacrifice and moral magnificence, are also able to perpetrate the greatest of horrors? One answer has been the power of an evil, dark force that has helped to corrupt us from the beginning of time—a devil that embodies all of our aggression and rage without any of our capacity for moral imagination ... A Tempter, but also a creative sadist, the monotheistic West’s image of the devil has given us an embodiment of violence. Our dark impulses are us, but they are also not us, according to traditional beliefs about Satan. We act on our most vicious impulses, the logic of the diabolical tells us, because a Tempter pulls us into them, makes us live in our darkness, causes us to forget ourselves or even become a new, wretched self.”
“Owen, of course, was overlooking the fact that his fellow manufacturers were more concerned with their machines than with their workers because the former represented a heavy capital investment whereas the oversupply of unskilled presented no replacement problem. Only when industry must spend money in training its personnel do they become economically as important as machines.”
“Dado el triunfo del enfoque aristotélico tanto en el pasado remoto como inmediato, ¿no ha llegado quizá el momento de enfrentar la posibilidad, e incluso la probabilidad, de que la noción platónica del Yo Interior sea equívoca? Esto es, la posibilidad que no exista ese yo interior. Al buscar dentro , no hemos encontrado nada-- nada estable en cualquier caso, nada perdurable, nada sobre lo cual podamos establecer un consenso, nada concluyente-- porqué no hay nada que encontrar. Los seres humanos somos parte de la naturaleza y, por tanto, es muy probable que aprendamos más sobre nuestro ser interior -sea sobre nosotros mismos, buscando fuera de nosotros atendiendo al lugar que tenemos en ella como animales. En lo cual, en palabras de John Gray <>”
“Mother Nature is the greatest bioterrorist of them all, with no financial limitations or ethical compunctions.”
“Aunque un archivo valioso de los niños perdidos debería estar compuesto, en lo fundamental, por una serie de testimonios o historias orales que registren sus propias voces contando sus experiencias, no me parece correcto convertir a esos niños, sus vidas, en material de consumo mediático. ¿Por qué? ¿Para qué? ¿Para qué otros puedan escucharlos y sentir lástima? ¿Rabia? ¿Y después hacer qué? Nadie decide no ir a trabajar y comenzar una huelga de hambre tras escuchar la radio en la mañana. Todo el mundo sigue con su vida, sin importar la gravedad de las noticias que escuchan, a menos que la gravedad se refiera al clima.”
“We cannot force people to be intelligent, ethical or wise.”
“The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and the public s right to know ; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.”
“Ethical decision is possible only when one is conscious of the conflict in all its aspects.”