“[Asuras] "There are means people and there are ends people. The means people create distinctions among means and call it morality. The ends people understand that in this world, in this system we're born into, anything that gets you what you want is a good thing."”
Source: The Burning Plain (1997), p.258 (Chapter 20)
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Michael Nava 38
American writer 1954Related quotes
“Treat people as an end, and never as a means to an end”
“The end is what you want and the means is how you get it.”
Source: Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971), p. 24
"We Are a Powder Drink" (20 August 2008) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My7jqQx0mfo
Satya, January, 2001 http://www.satyamag.com/jan01/newkirk.html.
On animal research and activism against it
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Sometimes paraphrased as "Liberty is telling people what they do not want to hear."
Variant: Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Source: Original preface to Animal Farm; as published in George Orwell: Some Materials for a Bibliography (1953) by Ian R. Willison
Source: The Human Comedy (1943)
Context: Death is not an easy thing for anyone to understand, least of all a child, but every life shall one day end. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us. His body can be taken, but not him. You shall know your father better as you grow and know yourself better. He is not dead, because you are alive. Time and accident, illness and weariness took his body, but already you have given it back to him, younger and more eager than ever. I don't expect you to understand anything I'm telling you. But I know you will remember this — that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world — no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life.
Ethics (New York:1915), § 14, pp. 38-39
The Principles of Ethics (1897), Part I: The Data of Ethics
Context: People … become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end. Just as money, which is a means of satisfying wants, comes to be regarded by a miser as the sole thing to be worked for, leaving the wants unsatisfied; so the conduct men have found preferable because most conducive to happiness, has come to be thought of as intrinsically preferable: not only to be made a proximate end (which it should be), but to be made an ultimate end, to the exclusion of the true ultimate end.