If you’re looking for the best Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century quotes you’ve come to the right place. We compiled a list of 15 quotes that best summarise the message of Jonathan Glover in Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. Let these quotes inspire you!
Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century Quotes
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.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
In its report issued that year, 1991, Amnesty International recorded protests against human rights abuses in over fifty countries, the protest to thirteen countries making specific reference to torture. These are the kinds of thing many of us have a vague background awareness of, without there being much publicity unless the perpetrators are some currently loathed regime, or unless some highly visible Westerner is among the victims.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
Jung Chang said that Mao ruled by getting people to hate each other: ‘Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship. That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
A central part of the torturer’s craft is to make his job easier by stripping the victim of protective dignity.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
In recent philosophy there has been a growing awareness of the gap between the abstract principles proposed by philosophers and the ways in which people actually think. The kind of rationality admired in the theory of knowledge is idealization. In the real world people have to act on beliefs often based on fragmentary and unreliable evidence.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
Above all, the sense of personal responsibility was reduced by the way agency was fragmented. Among the airmen who obeyed the order to drop the bomb, the many scientists who helped to make it, the President, the many political and military advisers involved in the decision, who killed the people of Hiroshima? No one seems to have felt that the responsibility was fully his.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
Part of the Maoist project was the deliberate construction of a new moral identity. To do this it was necessary to destroy people’s previous sense of who they were and to make sure there was no room for it grow back.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
Atrocities are easier to commit if respect for the victim can be neutralized. For this reason, humiliation handed out by those with power can be ominous. The link between humiliation and atrocity is often found.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
A woman who was a schoolgirl at Hiroshima asked, “Those scientists who invented the atomic bomb, what did they think would happen if they dropped it?
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
The use of the blockade against Germany to starve large numbers of people to death broke through the moral barrier against the mass killing of civilians. It was the precedent for the ‘conventional’ bombing of civilians in the Second World War and then for the use of the atomic bomb.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
The UN lacked the ability to act without the support of its more powerful members, notably the United States. The American government wanted to avoid a repetition of its unsuccessful intervention in Somalia, in which thirty American troops were killed. President Clinton issued a directive on UN military conditions. The operations would also have to be directly relevant to American interests. These conditions excluded American support for UN intervention to stop the genocide [in Rwanda].
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
Solzhenitsyn described this: It would be hard to identify the exact source of that inner intuition, not founded on rational argument, which prompted our refusal to enter the NKVD schools… People can shout at you from all sides: ‘You must!’ And your own head can be saying also: ‘You must!’ But inside your breast there is a sense of revulsion, repudiation. I don’t want to. It makes me feel sick. Do what you want without me; I want no part of it.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
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.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
Social Darwinism had continued to flourish in German. Together with Mendelian genetics, it was widely thought to provide a scientific basis for the eugenic ‘Racial Hygiene’ movement.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
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.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish