[T]he average number of deaths from poverty each day is equivalent to 100 jumbo jets, each carrying 500 people (mostly children), crashing with no survivors. From a human perspective, severe poverty should be the top story in every newspaper, ever newscast, and every news website, every day.
Leif Wenar, ‘Poverty Is No Pond: Challenges for the Affluent’, in Patricia Illingworth, Thomas Pogge & Leif Wenar (eds.), Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy, Oxford, 2011, p. 104
Looking back, […] almost every war every country has fought was a mistake. When we consider fighting a new war, we are tempted to believe this war is an exception to the rule. But this belief is itself unexceptional.
Jason Brennan, Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know, Oxford, 2012, pp. 80-81
[W]hile the problem of interpersonal comparability of utility is a tricky one, it is not insoluble in principle. It is conceivable that, perhaps several hundred (or a thousand) years from now, neurology may have advanced to the stage where the level of happiness can be accurately correlated to some cerebral reaction that can be measured by a ‘eudaimonometer’. Hence the definition of social welfare [in terms of the sum total of individual happiness] is an objective definition, although the objects are the subjective feelings of individuals.
Yew-Kwang Ng, Welfare Economics: Towards a More Complete Analysis, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2004, p. 4
Lyndon Johnson was a master of self-justification. According to his biographer Robert Caro, when Johnson came to believe in something, he would believe in it “totally, with absolute conviction, regardless of previous beliefs, or of the facts in the matter.” George Reedy, one of Johnson’s aides, said that he “had a remarkable capacity to convince himself that he held the principles he should hold at any given time, and there was something charming about the air of injured innocence with which he would treat anyone who brought forth evidence that he had held other views in the past. It was not an act… He had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the ‘truth’ which was convenient for the present was the truth and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies. He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality.” Although Johnson’s supporters found this to be a rather charming aspect of the man’s character, it might well have been one of the major reasons that Johnson could not extricate the country from the quagmire of Vietnam. A president who justifies his actions only to the public might be induced to change them. A president who has justified his actions to himself, believing that he has the truth, becomes impervious to self-correction.
Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Bbeliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, Orlando, Florida, 2007, p. 7
Most activists, in his experience, would launch big campaigns about big issues and do things that they guessed would be beneficial, like running television ads or sending out direct mail, but they never did the work to figure out whether what they were doing was actually changing policy. He couldn’t stand that there were so many bad, inefficient nonprofits out there, eating up donor money. When a business was based on a bad idea, it failed, but nonprofits never failed—they just kept on raising cash from people who wanted to believe in them. He imagined himself travelling around the country as judge and executioner, closing down hundreds of ineffective N.G.O.s.
Larissa MacFarquhar, ‘Requiem for a Dream’, The New Yorker, March 11, 2013
I try not to speak more clearly than I think.
Niels Bohr, quoted in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, New York, 1986, p. 77
C’est une grande habileté que de savoir cacher son habileté.
François de La Rochefoucauld, Reflexions: ou, sentences et maximes morales, Paris, 1665, sect. 245