"The global conscience is not asleep, but after the turbulence of recent years, it is profoundly confused. Some governments will oppose any exceptions to the principle of sovereignty because they fear criticism of their own policies. Others will defend the sanctity of sovereignty unless and until they again have confidence in the judgment of those proposing exceptions.

"At the heart of the debate is the question of what the international system is. Is it just a collection of legal nuts and bolts cobbled together by governments to protect governments? Or is it a living framework of rules intended to make the world a more humane place?"

-- Madeleine K. Albright, "The End of Intervention", The New York Times

"Contemporary moral experience as a consequence has a paradoxical character. For each of us is taught to see himself or herself as an autonomous moral agent; but each of us also becomes engaged by modes of practice, aesthetic or bureaucratic, which involve us in manipulative relationships with others. Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire ourselves not to be manipulated by others; seeking to incarnate our own principles and stand-point in the world of practice, we find no way open to us to do so except by directing towards others those very manipulative modes of relationship which each of us aspires to resist in our own case. The incoherence of our attitudes and our experience arises from the incoherent conceptual scheme which we have inherited."

-- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

"The morals and intelligence of a democratic people would be no less at risk than its business and industry if government were everywhere to take the place of associations.

"Feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart expands, and the human spirit develops only through the reciprocal action of human beings on one another."

-- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

"The role of neuromarketing is to understand how people feel and react... It in no way sets out to meddle with normal, natural response mechanisms."

-- Elissa Moses, in "Is the Ad a Success? The Brain Waves Tell All", The New York Times