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The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.

John Philpot Curran

Das sind, aus Eigennutz geboren, die zwei Erziehungsmittel der Eltern: Tyrannei und Sklaverei in allen Abstufungen, wobei sich die Tyrannei sehr zart äußern kann ("Du mußt mir glauben, denn ich bin Deine Mutter!") und die Sklaverei sehr stolz ("Du bist mein Sohn, deshalb werde ich Dich zu meinem Retter machen"), aber es sind zwei schrecklich Erziehungsmittel, zwei Antierziehungsmittel, geeignet, das Kind in den Boden, aus dem es kam, zurückzustampfen.

Franz Kafka

Brief an Elli Hermann (Herbst 1921)

The graduation of cynicism expressed in a hierarchy of contempt is at least as necessary in the face of constant refutation as plain gullibility. The point is that the sympathizers in front organizations despise their fellow-citizens' complete lack of initiation, the party members despise the fellow-travelers' gullibility and lack of radicalism, the elite formations despise for similar reasons the party membership, and within the elite formations a similar hierarchy of contempt accompanies every new foundation and development. The result of this system is that the gullibility of sympathizers makes lies credible to the outside world, while at the same time the graduated cynicism of membership and elite formations eliminates the danger that the Leader will ever be forced by the weight of his own propaganda to make good his own statements and feigned respectability. It has been one of the chief handicaps of the outside world in dealing with totalitarian systems that it ignored this system and therefore trusted that, on one hand, the very enormity of totalitarian lies would be their undoing and that, on the other, it would be possible to take the Leader at his word and force him, regardless of his original intentions, to make it good. The totalitarian system, unfortunately, is foolproof against such normal consequences; its ingeniousness rests precisely on the elimination of that reality which either unmasks the liar or forces him to live up to his pretense. While the membership does not believe statements made for public consumption, it believes all the more fervently the standard cliches of ideological explanation, the keys to past and future history which totalitarian movements took from nineteenth-century ideologies, and transformed, through organization, into a working reality.

Hannah Arendt

"The Origins of Totalitarianism"

Du findest es sicher unweiblich, wie ich Dir schreibe. Es wirkt lächerlich an einem Mädchen, wenn es sich um Politik kümmert. Sie soll ihre weiblichen Gefühle bestimmen lassen über ihr Denken. Vor allem das Mitleid. Ich aber finde, dass zuerst das Denken kommt, und dass Gefühle oft irreleiten, weil man über dem Kleinen, das einen vielleicht unmittelbarer betrifft, vielleicht am eigenen Leib, das Große kaum mehr sieht.

Sophie Scholl

28. Juni 1940

These men were able to give the counsel they gave because they were operating at an enormous psychological distance from the people who would be maimed and killed by the weapons systems that would result from the ideas they communicated to their sponsors. The lesson, therefore, is that the scientist and technologist must, by acts of will and of the imagination, actively strive to reduce such psychological distances, to counter the forces that tend to remove him from the consequences of his actions. He must -- it is as simple as this -- think of what he is actually doing. He must learn to listen to his own inner voice. He must learn to say "No!"

Finally, it is the act itself that matters. When instrumental reason is the sole guide to action, the acts it justifies are robbed of their inherent meanings and thus exist in an ethical vacuum. I recently heard an officer of a great university publicly defend an important policy decision he had made, one that many of the university's students and faculty opposed on moral grounds, with the words: "We could have taken a moral stand, but what good would that have done?" But the moral good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. That is why an act can itself ennoble or corrupt the person who performs it. The victory of instrumental reason in our time has brought about the virtual disappearance of this insight and thus perforce the delegitimation of the very idea of nobility.

Joseph Weizenbaum

"Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation" (1976)

Guilt is what you feel for what you've done. Responsibility is what you take because of the kinda person that you are.

Tim Wise

The web is for everyone, whatever technology stack they use. The reason we have standards is to enable people to make their own choices about what they do in the privacy of their own servers. We don’t have to use the same libraries, so long as we implement the same standards. It doesn’t matter if you programme with Ruby or PHP or C# or Scala or XQuery, you can build a web application because we have the standards of HTTP, HTML, CSS, Javascript and so on.

Just as in wider society, we need to find compromises that balance the needs and desires of different constituencies. We need to balance the rights that everyone has to code as they wish against the rights that everyone has to have a web that works. We need to make sure that the quiet voices are heard, and support the equal rights of those who tread the less worn paths.

Jeni Tennison

"A Fair Web"

Das Talent gleicht dem Schützen, der ein Ziel trifft, welches die Uebrigen nicht erreichen können; das Genie dem, der eines trifft, bis zu welchem sie nicht ein Mal zu sehn vermögen.

Arthur Schopenhauer

War is a massacre between people not knowing each other in behoof of people knowing, but not massacring each other.

Paul Valery

Die Liebe, die plötzlich entsteht, heilt am schwersten.

Jean de La Bruyère

Maybe people will get as sick of Twitter as they once got sick of cigarettes. Twitter's and Facebook's latest models for making money still seem to me like one part pyramid scheme, one part wishful thinking, and one part repugnant panoptical surveillance.

Jonathan Franzen

http://www.theguardian.co ... ranzen-wrong-modern-world

What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?

Alexis de Tocqueville

Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself - exactly oneself and no one else - and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else.

Simone de Beauvoir

"The Woman Destroyed"

Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves. Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people, you know. It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans.

Hayao Miyazaki

The Morlocks could have descended from today's social network or hedge fund owners, while the ancestors of the Eloi undoubtedly felt lucky initially, as free tools helped them crash on each other's couches more efficiently. What is intriguing about Wells's vision is that members of both species become undignified, lesser creatures. (Morlocks eat Eloi, which is about as far as one can go in rejecting empathy and dignity.)

Jaron Lanier

"Who Owns The Future?"