The writers in the New York Review of Books don't pull their punches. One of my favorite examples is by Hans Morgenthau, reviewing W. W. Rostow's View from the Seventh Floor in the July 30, 1964 issue. The Sweet Smell of Success:
read moreWhat is so disturbing and also fascinating in …
Parents are concerned about the legalization of marijuana in Canada. How can we protect our teenage children from using marijuana?
The basic problem is that people don't believe marijuana is dangerous. If they don't believe it's dangerous, even making it illegal doesn't help.
Consider cigarettes. Smoking has been …
read moreTranslated from English by Lenny Nan Zhou. English version.
有些家長們對於加拿大大麻合法化感到擔憂。怎樣保護我們的孩子，使他們不使用大麻？
問題是大家 …
read moreHobbes argues that a government is responsible to keep its destitute citizens from starving to death. From Richard Tuck, Hobbes: A Very Short Introduction (1989).
read more... if the distribution of property works in such a way that people are physically endangered by it, and members of the commonwealth do not have …
Michael Ignatieff observes in The Warrior's Honor (1998) that we have a range of moral obligations. They're strongest to those closest to us.
read moreIn practice, the claims of ethical universalism came to be strongly limited in Christian teaching and then in European natural law by the injunction that a rich …
Hans Morgenthau quotes George Washington on the primacy of self-interest:
read moreA small knowledge of human nature will convince us, that, with far the greatest part of mankind, interest is the governing principle; and that, almost, every man is more or less, under its influence. Motives of public virtue may for …
From the introduction to a 1968 edition of Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848), by J. I. M. Stewart:
read moreIt is not, of course, that [Becky Sharp] exists in a moral vacuum. We are moral beings as we regard her, and from the first we feel a play of sympathy and repulsion …
Saw "Mission Impossible: Fallout" recently. It was a good movie, but it reminded me of this quote from Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty (1990):
read more"Anywhere along here's fine," Chili said, thinking of times he had been asked if he was guilty and not once ever having the urge to say he …
Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech, from January 1941.
read moreIn the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression - everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to …
Jack Vance, Trullion: Alastor 2262:
read more"... I've long felt a lack, or an emptiness. I want a weight to thrust my shoulder against; I want a challenge I can defy and conquer."
"Brave words," said Shira dubiously. "But -"
"But why should I so trouble myself? Because I have but one life …