"Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit."

-- Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

"In a world where maintaining options has no cost, such a tendency would [be] non-consequential. However, we believe that in most day-to-day cases, there is substantial cost to keeping options open, which would lead to erroneous behavior. There are many situations in which decision makers encounter trade-offs between the future availability of options and their maintenance costs. We have already mentioned dating and choosing a major in college. Other examples include trade-offs between focusing on one’s current work and looking for new employment elsewhere; whether to specialize in a way that suits one’s current employer or instead to invest in skills that are valued by other potential employers. These results might also shed light on one of life’s greater mysteries: Why do some people channel surf rather than, for example, enjoy a single movie? The answer might be the fear of losing other options."

-- Jiwoong Shin and Dan Ariely, in "The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors", The New York Times

"If you want to know which bits of Kant contemporary Kantians will reject, follow the emotions."

-- Joshua Greene, "The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul", in The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Disease, and Development

"What we are looking for, in the end, is a world consensus on certain norms of conduct enforceable on governments. To be accepted in any given society, these would in each case have to repose on some widely acknowledged philosophical justification, and to be enforced, they would have to find expression in legal mechanisms. One way of putting our central question might be this: what variations can we imagine in philosophical justifications or in legal forms that would still be compatible with a meaningful universal consensus on what really matters to us, the enforceable norms?"

-- Charles Taylor, "Conditions of an Unforced Consensus on Human Rights", from The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights

Kyoto, Japan

"Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit."

-- Anthony Bourdain, in "I Love You, But You Love Meat", The New York Times

"A nation is an imagined political community... imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion... All communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined."

-- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities

honestly
what will become of me
don't like reality
it's way too clear to me
but really
life is dandy
we are what we don't see
missed everything daydreaming

-- Nelly Furtado, "All Good Things (Come To An End)"

"A society made up of an extremely large mass of unorganized individuals, which an overgrown state attempts to limit and restrain, constitutes a veritable sociological monstrosity. For collective activity is always too complex to be capable of finding expression in the one single organ of the state. Moreover, the state is too remote from individuals, its connections with them too superficial and irregular, to be able to penetrate the depths of their consciousness and socialize them from within. This is why, when the state constitutes the sole environment in which men can fit themselves for the business of living in common, they inevitably 'contract out', detaching themselves from one another, and thus society disintegrates to a corresponding extent. A nation cannot be maintained unless, between the state and individuals, a whole range of secondary groups are interposed. These must be close enough to the individual to attract him strongly to their activities and, in so doing, to absorb him into the mainstream of social life."

-- Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society

Agra, India

"[T]he diversity of opinion on moral questions is found to rest not on disagreement about fundamental moral principles, but partly on differences in the circumstances of different societies, and partly on different views which people hold, not on moral questions but on questions of fact."

-- David Ross, The Foundations of Ethics

"[Suicide] is a closed world with its own irresistible logic... Once a man decides to take his own life he enters a shut-off, impregnable but wholly convincing world where every detail fits and each incidence reinforces his decision."

-- A. Alvarez, from "Making Sense of the Great Suicide Debate", The New York Times

"If the old perennial belief in the possibility of realizing ultimate harmony is a fallacy, and the positions of the thinkers I have appealed to -- Machiavelli, Vico, Herder, Herzen -- are valid, if we allow that the Great Goods can collide, that some of them cannot live together, even though others can -- in short, that one cannot have everything, in principle as well as in practice -- and if human creativity may depend upon a variety of mutually exclusive choices: then, as Chernyshevsky and Lenin once asked, 'What is to be done? How are we to choose between possibilities? What and how much are we to sacrifice to what?' There is, it seems to me, no clear reply... The best that can be done, as a general rule, is to maintain a precarious equilibrium that will prevent the occurrence of desperate situations, of intolerable choices -- that is the first requirement of a decent society."

-- Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity

"The question of the science of mental health must become an absolutely new and revolutionary one, yet one that reflects the essence of the human condition: On what level of illusion does one live?"

-- Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Hoi An, Vietnam

"I find comfort in the fact that the longer I’m in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that a striving for power and rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience."

-- Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope

"On a reductive-monistic view (of values) when one trades the pleasures (and anxieties) of a family life for a career as a sailor one is getting, or hoping to get, the same thing one is giving up, be it happiness, pleasure, desire-satisfaction, or something else. So long as one plans correctly and succeeds in carrying out one's plans there is no loss of any kind. One gives up the lesser pleasure one would derive from family life for a greater pleasure of life at sea. If value-pluralism is correct this view is totally wrong. What one loses is of a different kind from what one gains. Even in success there is a loss, and quite commonly there is no meaning to the judgement that one gains more than one loses. When one was faced with valuable options and successfully chose one of them one simply chose one way of life rather than another, both being good and not susceptible to comparison of degree."

-- Joseph Raz, "Multiculturalism: A Liberal Perspective", in Ethics in the Public Domain