“Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.”

Remark C, p. 65
The Fable of the Bees (1714)

Source: Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design

&quot;Talk to an Art-Union (A Brooklyn fragment)&quot; http://www.aol.bartleby.com/229/4011.html (1839); later delivered as a lecture at the Brooklyn Art Union (31 March 1851) and printed in the Brooklyn Daily Advertizer (3 April 1851) <br class="br">Context: It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them. And perhaps it is the case that the greatest artists live and die, the world and themselves alike ignorant what they possess. Who would not mourn that an ample palace, of surpassingly graceful architecture, fill’d with luxuries, and embellish’d with fine pictures and sculpture, should stand cold and still and vacant, and never be known or enjoy’d by its owner? Would such a fact as this cause your sadness? Then be sad. For there is a palace, to which the courts of the most sumptuous kings are but a frivolous patch, and, though it is always waiting for them, not one of its owners ever enters there with any genuine sense of its grandeur and glory.<br>I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty.

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

In response to the allegation that the U.S. has operated secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4500630.stm, December 5, 2005.

"On Kindness in General", Spiritual Conferences (1860).

Notes on Nationalism (1945)

Source: The Summer Tree