Source: Competing for the Future, 1996, p. 54
Context: Acquired through business schools and other educational experiences and from consultants and management gurus, absorbed from peers and the business press, and formed out of career experiences, a manager's genetic coding establishes the range and likelihood of responses in particular situations.... All of us are prisoners, to one degree or another, of our experience.
Introducing the first broadcast of "This is the News" (September 1947)
Faraday Lecture, the Royal Institution, London (1889) as quoted by Leon Gray, The Basics of the Periodic Table (2013)
“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
The House of the Dead (1862) as translated by Constance Garnett; as cited in The Yale Book of Quotations (2006) by Fred R. Shapiro, p. 210 https://books.google.com.au/books?id=ck6bXqt5shkC&pg=PA210
Lettre sur les aveugles [Letter on the Blind] (1749)
Context: As to all the outward signs that awaken within us feelings of sympathy and compassion, the blind are only affected by crying; I suspect them in general of lacking humanity. What difference is there for a blind man, between a man who is urinating, and man who, without crying out, is bleeding? And we ourselves, do we not cease to commiserate, when the distance or the smallness of the objects in question produce the same effect on us as the lack of sight produces in the blind man? All our virtues depend on the faculty of the senses, and on the degree to which external things affect us. Thus I do not doubt that, except for the fear of punishment, many people would not feel any remorse for killing a man from a distance at which he appeared no larger than a swallow. No more, at any rate, than they would for slaughtering a cow up close. If we feel compassion for a horse that suffers, but if we squash an ant without any scruple, isn’t the same principle at work?
Reverence for Life (1969)
