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

Simon Blackburn, Being Good (2001)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "An ethic gone wrong is an essential preliminary to the sweat shop or the concentration camp and the death march." by Simon Blackburn?
Simon Blackburn photo
Simon Blackburn 29
British academic philosopher 1944

Related quotes

“Squads of soldiers descended upon isolated Cherokee farms and at bayonet point marched the families off to what today would be known as concentration camps”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
Context: ... five thousand finally consented to be marched westward, but another fifteen thousand clung to their neat farms, schools, and libraries "of good books." So General Winfield Scott set about systematically extirpating the rebellious ones. Squads of soldiers descended upon isolated Cherokee farms and at bayonet point marched the families off to what today would be known as concentration camps. Torn from their homes with all the dispatch and efficiency the Nazis displayed under similar circumstances... No way existed for the Cherokee family to sell its property and possessions, and the local Whites fell upon the lands, looting, burning, and finally taking possession.

Jack Kevorkian photo

“The Supreme Court of the United States… has validated the Nazi method of execution in… concentration camps, starving them to death!”

Jack Kevorkian (1928–2011) American pathologist, euthanasia activist

Quoted in "Years of Minutes"‎ - Page 329 - by Andy Rooney - 2004
2000s, 2004

Johannes Grenzfurthner photo

“Christianity is a death cult gone horribly wrong.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

from documentary Traceroute

Hannah Arendt photo

“The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life.”

Part 3, Ch. 12, § 3.
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Context: The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.

Joseph Stalin photo

“The idea of a concentration camp is excellent.”

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

On ideas of eradicating 'counter-revolutionaries and traitors' in Estonia, as quoted in Stalin : A Biography (2004) by Robert Service, p. 158; also in Bol'shevistskoe rukovodstvo. Perepiska, 1912-1927, p. 36.
Contemporary witnesses

Michael Moore photo

“The next wave of fascists will not come with cattle cars and concentration camps, but they'll come with a smiley face and maybe a TV show … That’s how the 21st-century fascists will essentially take over.”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

" Michael Moore: Fascists Now Come With ‘A Smiley Face And Maybe A TV Show’ https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/michael-moore-donald-trump_us_5829c5bce4b02d21bbc97cab" - stated right after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, and inspired by the 1980 book, Friendly Fasicism (November 14, 2016)
2016

“Here's a thought for sweat shop owners: Air Conditioning. Problem solved.”

Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) American stand-up comedian

Do You Believe in Gosh?

Betty Friedan photo
Noam Chomsky photo

“You can't have non-violent resistance against the Nazis in a concentration camp”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Chronicles of Dissent, December 13, 1989 http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/interviews/db-8912.html
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s
Context: Non-violent resistance activities cannot succeed against an enemy that is able freely to use violence. That's pretty obvious. You can't have non-violent resistance against the Nazis in a concentration camp, to take an extreme case...

Arthur Miller photo

“The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) playwright from the United States

Paris Review (Summer 1966)
Context: If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.

Related topics