"An ethic gone wrong is an essential preliminary to the sweat shop or the concentration camp and the death march."

Simon Blackburn Philosophy See all quotes by Simon Blackburn →

React to this quote

More by Simon Blackburn

“In Michigan recently a man won a lawsuit for substantial damages because, he claimed, a rear-end collision in his car had made him a homosexual.”

“But if nothing does as well as something about which nothing can be said, it vanishes.”

“Why should thinkers mock the simple pieties of the people?”

“Thoughts are strange things. they have 'representational' powers: a thought typically represents the world as being one way or another. A sensation, by contrast, seems to just sit there.”

“Chance is as relentless as necessity.”

“Myself, I have never seen a bumper sticker saying "Hate if you Love Jesus", but I sometimes wonder why not. It would be a good slogan for the religious Right.”

Resonant Thoughts

"… the affectation of readiness for death is a stage rôle, and stoicism is a stupid resource though the only one. Non dolet, Pæte! One is ashamed of it even in the acting."

— Henry Adams

Politics1838–1918

#death

"Let us now shrink from parodying Hegel, and state that for our patrician ‘the romantic is the real, the real the romantic’."

— R. W. K. Paterson

Philosophy1933

#death

"Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen…"

— Ernest Hemingway

Literature1899–1961

#death

"Some people think that we are stuck in physical reality like flies in flypaper or victims in quicksand, so that each motion we make only worsens our predicament and hastens our extinction. Others see …"

— Jane Roberts

Literature1929–1984

#mind