Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by José Saramago

Quote by José Saramago

Work

Blindness

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

José Saramago

Browse famous quotes and profile details for José Saramago. more

You May Also Like

“The hope is that when it comes to dealing with humans whose behaviors are among our worst and most damaging, words like 'evil' and 'soul' will be as irrelevant as when considering a car with faulty brakes, that they will be as rarely spoken in a courtroom as in an auto repair shop. And crucially, the analogy holds in a key way, extending to instances of dangerous people without anything obviously wrong with their frontal cortex, genes, and so on. When a car is being dysfunctional and dangerous and we take it to a mechanic, this is not a dualistic situation where (a) if the mechanic discovers some broken widget causing the problem, we have a mechanistic explanation, but (b) if the mechanic can’t find anything wrong, we’re dealing with an evil car; sure, the mechanic can speculate on the source of the problem—maybe it’s the blueprint from which the car was built, maybe it was the building process, maybe the environment contains some unknown pollutant that somehow impairs function, maybe someday we’ll have sufficiently powerful techniques in the auto shop to spot some key molecule in the engine that is out of whack—but in the meantime we’ll consider this car to be evil. Car free will also equals 'internal forces we do not understand yet.”

EvilCriminal JusticeCriminality
Author:Robert Sapolsky
Create image

“Evil has an ordinary face. It laughs, it cries, it deflects, it rationalizes, it makes great pasta. These [Mafia] killers were people who had crossed an indelible line in human experience by intentionally taking another life. They all constructed their own narrative to explain and justify their own killing. None of them saw themselves as bad people. To a person, they all said the same thing: The first time was really, really hard. After that, not so much.”

EvilMoralityMoral Relativism
Book:A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership
Create image

“Once people with epilepsy were virtuously punished for their intimacy with Lucifer. Now we mandate that if their seizures aren’t under control, they can’t drive. And the key point is that no one views such a driving ban as virtuous, pleasurable punishment, believing that a person with treatment-resistant seizures 'deserves' to be banned from driving... it is important to remember that some, many, maybe even most of the people who were prosecuting epileptics in the fifteenth century were no different from us—sincere, cautious, and ethical, concerned about the serious problems threatening their society, hoping to bequeath their children a safer world. Just operating with an unrecognizably different mind-set.”

EvilCriminal JusticeCriminalityMoral Cognition
Book:Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Create image

“In the years that have been spent learning about my Catholic faith, I have learned many things. One of the things that I’ve learned is that there are two kinds of evil people. There are people who do evil, and there are people who see evil being done and do nothing about it. I have also learned that not all saints are popes, and not all popes are saints.”

EvilCatholicismSaintsSinnersPope FrancisThe Shadow Angel
Book:The Shadow Angel: Night of the Meta-Men
Create image