George Monbiot Quotes

Nothing in Chomsky's account acknowledges the difference between intending to kill a child, because of the effect you hope to produce on its parents (we call this “terrorism”), and inadvertently killing a child in an attempt to capture or kill an avowed child murderer (we call this “collateral damage”). In both cases a child has died, and in both cases it is a tragedy. But the ethical status of the perpetrators, be they individuals or states, could not be more distinct For Chomsky, intentions do not seem to matter. Body count is all.

I wanted to play around with the format, really tear it to pieces and shake it up. For example, if Mitch saves someone from drowning, and that person then goes out and releases a virus that kills a million people. Imagine the moral implications of that.

A lot of the evil in the world is actually not intentional. A lot of people in the financial system did a lot of damage without intending to.

It's so easy to be wicked without knowing it, isn't it?

The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history.

I don't want to ever intentionally hurt someone, because it is pure entertainment.

Ah, children, pity level-crossing keepers, pity lock-keepers - pity lighthouse-keepers - pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers), caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon.

You can't have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Who’s saved? Who’s not?

There is no cosmic scale on which you can weigh your actions; you learn too late what choices ruin the fragile balance.

I spend a lot of time trying to not do anything bad to anyone, but you can't live your life and not hurt people.

Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness.

Our western science is a child of moral virtues; and it must now become the father of further moral virtues if its extraordinary material triumphs in our time are not to bring human history to an abrupt, unpleasant and discreditable end.

A preemptive action today, however well-justified, may come back with unwelcome consequences in the future. And because... I've done this. I've ordered these kinds of actions - I don't care how precise your bombs and your weapons are, when you set them off, innocent people will die.

There's always got to be room for what you might call benign corruption. Nobody blames a man who steals food to feed his starving children, but on the other hand, somebody who picks up a badge and takes an oath to serve and protect; we do expect a certain level of essential honesty.

We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment.

The loss of innocent life is a tragedy for anyone involved in it, but the numbers are really very low.

When the mother herself kills her son she goes against her own nature, against her own instinct. People talk about 'choice', but when a woman does that, when she destroys the life of her unborn child, then we have arrived at the limit. The level cannot go higher regarding evil.

I never saw no miracle of science that did not go from a blessing to a curse.

I didn't want to be the monster! I didn't want to kill this room full of harmless children! I didn't want to lose everything I'd gained in a lifetime of sacrifice and denial!

Neither the passions not justice nor politics nor the great social forces ever consider the victims they strike.

God save us from people who mean well.

... it is as true in morals as in physics that all force is imperishable; therefore the consequences of a human action never cease.

Because something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children's lives to settle its differences. You can spin it any way you like... But in the end, who does it benefit? No one. The truth is, it benefits no one to live in a world where these things happen

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.

It's possible to make sense of what's morally at stake in an appreciation of the gift of life, or the gift of a child, without necessarily presupposing that there is a giver. What matters is that the gift - in this case, the child - not be wholly our own doing, our own product.