“How sad, that the group with the most access to the truth chose in several strategic instances to look the other way.”

—  John Ashcroft

Source: Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice (2006), p. 263

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 "How sad, that the group with the most access to the truth chose in several strategic instances to look the other way." by John Ashcroft?
John Ashcroft photo
John Ashcroft32
American politician 1942

Related quotes

“How ‘real’ it is one feels when trying to form other groups…Most people will never get this other grouping as clear, stable, and optically real as the former one.”

Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967) German-American psychologist and phenomenologist

Source: Gestalt Psychology. 1930, p. 143; About group formation

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. photo

“Philosophy may have gained by the attempts in recent years to look through the fiction to the fact and to generalize corporations, partnerships, and other groups into a single conception. But to generalize is to omit, and, in this instance, to omit one characteristic of the complete corporation, as called into being under modern statutes, that is most important in business and law.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice

Donnell v. Herring-Hall-Marvin Safe Co., 208 U.S. 267, 273 (1908).
1900s

Daniel Handler photo

“The sad truth is that the truth is sad.”

Daniel Handler book The Carnivorous Carnival

Lemony Snicket
The Carnivorous Carnival (2002)

Miles Davis photo

“Miles said he looked on his need for constant change as a curse. However, Miles, along with Duke Ellington, in terms of looking for models of how you strategize with a band, have been there constantly in the background for me. Not the Beatles as a construct for a group, not Led Zeppelin, not the Floyd. My guides have always been Miles and Duke.”

Miles Davis (1926–1991) American jazz musician

Robert Fripp, on how Miles Davis influenced his leadership in King Crimson. <br class="br">As quoted in a Rolling Stone interview &quot;The Crimson King Seeks a New Court&quot; by Hank Shteamer (15 April 2019) https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/robert-fripp-interview-king-crimson-tour-david-bowie-kanye-west-820783/. <br class="br">Quotes by others

J. B. S. Haldane photo

“The change from one stable equilibrium to the other may take place as the result of the isolation of a small unrepresentative group of the population, a temporary change in the environment which alters the relative viability of different types, or in several other ways…”

J. B. S. Haldane book The Causes of Evolution

Source: The Causes of Evolution (1932), Ch. IV Natural Selection, p. 102.

“Strategic structuring, informal or formal, whereby social agents, including the state, establish a rule regime regulating market access and transactions…”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

The shaping of social organization (1987)

Alhazen photo

“I constantly sought knowledge and truth, and it became my belief that for gaining access to the effulgence and closeness to God, there is no better way than that of searching for truth and knowledge.”

Alhazen (965–1038) Arab physicist, mathematician and astronomer

Firas al-Khateeb, Lost Islamic History https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Islamic-History-Reclaiming-Civilisation/dp/1849043973

Isa Genzken photo

“The show is called 'Wind'. I tried here to make work which looks like wind, and it is the most difficult thing to do; I was thinking of Leonardo da Vinci – as he was, for instance, always wanting to fly. And then, this hand of Michael Jackson is like 'ffffffff', 'I'm leaving' (makes gesture with her hand and mouth in the mirror in the hallway of the gallery, mimicking the action that Jackson is depicted making on the invitation card of her show - Simon Denny). Not in a sad way, but…. in a way a little bit sad too. And then I said 'Isa Genzken', because I always liked him so much. For instance, I would always have jackets like this one. This is my favourite kind of style, and so I said 'ffff' [blowing gesture] 'Now I'm coming'… It's like 'don't be afraid, don't be sad, you know… I'm here.”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

2001 - 2010, Out to Lunch with Isa Genzken' (2009)

Lloyd deMause photo

“There is, for instance, only one page at the beginning of Runciman's three-volume History of the Crusades describing how the participants decided to begin four hundred years of wars, and then several thousand pages devoted to the routes, battles and other events which make up the "history" of the Crusades.”

Lloyd deMause (1931) American thinker

Source: Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), Ch. 2, p. 86.

“But it's exactly the other way around for an out-group member.”

Robert Trivers (1943) American evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist

As quoted in Science at the Edge: Conversations with the Leading Scientific Thinkers of Today (2008), p. 170
Context: People are often unconscious of some of the mechanisms that naturally occur in them in a biased way. For example, if I do something that is beneficial to you or to others, I will use the active voice: I did this, I did that, then benefits rained down on you. But if I did something that harmed others, I unconsciously switch to a passive voice: this happened, then that happened, then unfortunately you suffered these costs. One example I always loved was a man in San Francisco who ran into a telephone pole with his car, and he described it to the police as, "the pole was approaching my car, I attempted to swerve out-of-the-way, when it struck me."
Let me give you another, the way in which group membership can entrain language-usages that are self-deceptive. You can divide people into in-groups or out-groups, or use naturally occurring in-groups and out-groups, and if someone's a member of your in-group and they do something nice, you give a general description of it &ndash; "he's a generous person". If they do something negative, you state a particular fact: "in this case he misled me", or something like that. But it's exactly the other way around for an out-group member. If an out-group member does something nice, you give a specific description of it: "she gave me directions to where I wanted to go". But if she does something negative, you say, "she's a selfish person". So these kinds of manipulations of reality are occurring largely unconsciously.

Related topics