“Accountability is mankind’s greatest obstacle. All our challenges stem from that.”
“We have so far to go to realize our human potential for compassion, altruism, and love.”
Source: Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating
“The possibility of pain is where love stems from”
Source: The Humans
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902)
Context: It is especially in the domain of ethics that the dominating importance of the mutual-aid principle appears in full. That mutual aid is the real foundation of our ethical conceptions seems evident enough. But whatever the opinions as to the first origin of the mutual-aid feeling or instinct may be whether a biological or a supernatural cause is ascribed to it — we must trace its existence as far back as to the lowest stages of the animal world; and from these stages we can follow its uninterrupted evolution, in opposition to a number of contrary agencies, through all degrees of human development, up to the present times. Even the new religions which were born from time to time — always at epochs when the mutual-aid principle was falling into decay in the theocracies and despotic States of the East, or at the decline of the Roman Empire — even the new religions have only reaffirmed that same principle. They found their first supporters among the humble, in the lowest, downtrodden layers of society, where the mutual-aid principle is the necessary foundation of every-day life; and the new forms of union which were introduced in the earliest Buddhist and Christian communities, in the Moravian brotherhoods and so on, took the character of a return to the best aspects of mutual aid in early tribal life.
Each time, however, that an attempt to return to this old principle was made, its fundamental idea itself was widened. From the clan it was extended to the stem, to the federation of stems, to the nation, and finally — in ideal, at least — to the whole of mankind.
“Altruism is a barbarism. Love is the word.”
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 170
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Variant: All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone.
Source: Pensées
Source: Esoteric Christianity: Or, The Lesser Mysteries (1914), Chapter IV. The Historical Christ
Der Bürger aber ist tolerant. Seine Liebe zu den Leuten, wie sie sind, entspringt dem Haß gegen den richtigen Menschen.
E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 4
Minima Moralia (1951)
Said in 1989 according to Anders Breivik & Europe's blind right eye https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/anders-breivik-europes-blind-right-eye/article2290619.ece by Praveen Swami published on July 25, 2011 and updated: AUGUST 16, 2016
1980s
