“The most effectual method to keep men honest is to enable them to live so. The tenderness of conscience is too often overmatched by the sharpness of want; and principle, like chastity, yields with just reluctance enough to excuse itself.” Immediately after a 1989 international trade ban on ivory, illegal elephant poaching was nearly stopped …
Monthly Archives: February 2007
On Learning From the Past
“Were a man to be totally deprived of memory, he would be incapable of forming any just opinion.” There is the memory of a singles person’s life, that of whole nations and tribes, and the collective memory of all humanity. In all cases, to forget what has gone before is to deny the light of …
On What Makes a Cold Heart
“Arrogance and meanness, though in appearance opposite, are vices of the same heart.” Through arrogance we find a haughty sense of pride that disregards all but itself. Through meanness comes cruelty and malevolence that lashes out and injures others. Both are torn from the same soiled cloth of a heart despairing for its own compassion. …
On Not Giving Up
It ought not to be, that because we cannot do everything, that we ought not to do what we can.
-Thomas Paine
On the Problem of Assuming the Worst – Accepting a Heart of Darkness
For as certainly as a man predicts ill, he becomes inclined to wish it. The pride of having his judgment right hardens his heart, till at last he beholds with satisfaction, or sees with disappointment, the accomplishment or the failure of his predictions.
-Thomas Paine
On the War in Iraq, Nearly Four Years On
No human foresight can discern, no conclusion can be formed, what turn a war might take, if once set on foot by an invasion.
On the Golden Rule
Give to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself – that is my doctrine.
-Thomas Paine
On the Need for Government Oversight and Citizen Involvement
Can we possibly suppose that if Governments had originated in a right principal, and had not an interest in pursuing a wrong one, the world could have been in the wretched and quarelsome condition we have seen it?
-Thomas Paine, Rights of Man