The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Jonathan Glover

Jonathan Glover

A central part of the torturer’s craft is to make his job easier by stripping the victim of protective dignity.

dignity, torture

Jonathan Glover

Stalin’s teachings about gradual, concealed, unnoticeable quantitative changes leading to rapid, radical, qualitative changes permitted Soviet biologists to discover in plants the realization of such qualitative transitions that one species could be transformed into another’… The slide away from truth-directed science had disastrous results in agriculture. It was also humanly disastrous. Biologists who disagreed were shot or imprisoned.

belief-system, biology, objective-truth, stalinism, truth

Jonathan Glover

The genocide [in Rwanda] was not a spontaneous eruption of tribal hatred, it was planned by people wanting to keep power. There was a long government-led hat campaign against the Tutsis.

hatred, rwanda, rwandan-genocide, tribalism

Jonathan Glover

The first step away from being manipulated, and towards a more autonomous outlook, is to stand back from a set of responses and think.

autonomy, freedom, freedom-of-thought, manipulation

Jonathan Glover

A phased decision can avoid there being a key moment when the moral issue about killing civilians has to be confronted.

killing, morality, war

Jonathan Glover

Those who actually dropped the bombs were less responsible than the people who took the decisions higher up the chain of command. In modern technological war, psychological responses are poorly correlated with degrees of responsibility. In people further back up the chain, this casual distance reduces the psychological resistance they have to overcome.

bombing, killing, morality, war

Jonathan Glover

The hardest – the part that’s hard is to kill, but once you kill, that becomes easier, to kill the next person and the next one and the next one.” -Varnado Simpson, Charlie Company of My Lai

Jonathan Glover

Sir Edward Grey echoed this: More than one true thing may be said about the causes of the war, but the statement that comprises most truth is that militarism and the armaments inseparable from it made war inevitable. Armaments were intended to produce a sense of security in each nation – that was the justification put forward in defence of them. What they really did was to produce fear in everybody.

arms, arms-race, fear, militarism, war

Jonathan Glover

Stalin’s Russia was a trap, in which even those running the system were caught. The leaders were trapped by fear of Stalin and even he was trapped by his fear of their desire to be rid of him. Everything he had to eat or drink had to be tasted by one of his colleagues first. Beria’s behavior at his death showed that his fear was only partly paranoia.

fear, russia, stalin, stalinism, state-terrorism, totalitarianism