Kiran Desai (1971) Indian author
"I am envious of writers who are in India" http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/envious-of-writers-who-are-in-india-kiran-desai/1/180336.html (October 30, 2006), Interview by Nabanita Sircar, India Today
“The reason is easy to understand, for it is the common good and not private gain that makes cities great.”
Book 2, Chapter 2
Discourses on Livy (1517)
Context: It is truly a marvelous thing to consider to what greatness Athens arrived in the space of one hundred years after she freed herself from the tyranny of Pisistratus; but, above all, it is even more marvelous to consider the greatness Rome reached when she freed herself from her kings. The reason is easy to understand, for it is the common good and not private gain that makes cities great. Yet, without a doubt, this common good is observed only in republics, for in them everything that promotes it is practised, and however much damage it does to this or that private individual, those who benefit from the said common good are so numerous that they are able to advance in spite of the inclination of the few citizens who are oppressed by it.
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Niccolo Machiavelli130
Italian politician, Writer and Author 1469–1527Related quotes
Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist
"No One Left To Lie To" (1991).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)
Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist
Source: (1776), Book V, Chapter I, Part III, p. 821.
“On this very spot a great city once stood,
It oozed with evil but it felt so good… ~ City”
Steve Kilbey (1954) British artist
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Heraclitus (-535) pre-Socratic Greek philosopher
Fragment 92, as translated by G.W.T. Patrick, trans.
Numbered fragments
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst
Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 209
Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States
Made that statement during a conference in Ottawa, Canada, in March 2006. He concluded that a trend of international goodwill has been developing since the 2004 tsunami and said, with a hint of optimism, that the world is now at “a time of unprecedented interdependence.” <br class="br"> Source: JW.org http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2007361?q=clinton&p=par <br class="br">2000s
Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist
Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Analysis of Oppression (1955), p. 141
Context: The common run of moralists complain that man is moved by his private self-interest: would to heaven it were so! Private interest is a self-centered principle of action, but at the same time restricted, reasonable and incapable of giving rise to unlimited evils. Whereas, on the other hand, the law of all activities governing social life, except in the case of primitive communities, is that here one sacrifices human life — in himself and in others — to things which are only means to a better way of living. This sacrifice takes on various forms, but it all comes back to the question of power. Power, by definition, is only a means; or to put it better, to possess a power is simply to possess means of action which exceed the very limited force that a single individual has at his disposal. But power-seeking, owing to its essential incapacity to seize hold of its object, rules out all consideration of an end, and finally comes, through an inevitable reversal, to take the place of all ends. It is this reversal of the relationship between means and end, it is this fundamental folly that accounts for all that is senseless and bloody right through history. Human history is simply the history of the servitude which makes men — oppressed and oppressors alike — the plaything of the instruments of domination they themselves have manufactured, and thus reduces living humanity to being the chattel of inanimate chattels.
“Law: an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community.”
Thomas Aquinas book Summa Theologica
Summa Theologica (1265–1274), Unplaced by chapter