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Quote by Sōseki Natsume

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The Three-Cornered World

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Sōseki Natsume

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“Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power. In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them.”

ScienceTechnologyPowerAmorality
Book:THE ABOLITION OF MAN
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“Ideas like cosmic justice, collective hope, and national redemption had no meaning for me. The truth was in the everything that came after atheism, after the amorality of the universe is taken not as a problem but as a given. It was then that I was freed from considering my own morality away from the cosmic and the abstract. Life was short, and death undefeated. So I loved hard, since I would not love for long.”

LoveJusticeAtheismAmorality
Book:We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
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“We see here that Plato recognizes only one ultimate standard, the interest of the state. Everything that furthers it is good and virtuous and just; everything that threatens it is bad and wicked and unjust. Actions that serve it are moral; actions that endanger it, immoral. In other words, Plato’s moral code is strictly utilitarian; it is a code of collectivist or political utilitarianism. The criterion of morality is the interest of the state. Morality is nothing but political hygiene. This is the collectivist, the tribal, the totalitarian theory of morality: ‘Good is what is in the interest of my group; or my tribe; or my state.’ It is easy to see what this morality implied for international relations: that the state itself can never be wrong in any of its actions, as long as it is strong; that the state has the right, not only to do violence to its citizens, should that lead to an increase of strength, but also to attack other states, provided it does so without weakening itself. (This inference, the explicit recognition of the amorality of the state, and consequently the defence of moral nihilism in international relations, was drawn by Hegel.)”

PoliticsNationalismTotalitarianismCollectivismDictatorshipsAmoralityState ViolenceAnti IndividualismAnti Democratic ThoughtState Oppression
Book:The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato
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“Too high for common selfishness, he could At times resign his own for others’ good, But not in pity, not because he ought, But in some strange perversity of thought, That swayed him onward with a secret pride To do what few or none would do beside; And this same impulse would, in tempting time, Mislead his spirit equally in crime; So much he soared beyond, or sunk beneath, The men with whom he felt condemned to breathe, And longed by good or ill to separate Himself from all who shared his mortal state.”

ByronAmoralityByronesque
Book:Lara
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“Don't you understand? If that's the case, then - then everything is dicated by random chance! Somewhere, there's a universe where you - for whatever reason - you didn't come looking for me, and I - I slit my throat. And who's to say that this universe is somehow better than that one? How can we claim that we live in a moral universe, and that every other one is immoral?”

ExistentialismMultiverseAmorality
Book:Monsters in a Mirror: Strange Tales from the Chapel Perilous
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“She leaned back in her chair and raised her face to the sun, mildly intoxicated, not so much by the wine as by the scope of this important argument. Seduced, also, by the possibility that she might please herself, simply by wishing it so. As a devil's advocate, he was flawless. And yet, she knew, there was a flaw in his reasoning, just as there was a flaw in his ability to feel.”

SelfishnessCallousnessAmoralitySociopathy
Book:Hotel du Lac
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