Jonathan Kozol Quotes

Men err from selfishness; women because they are weak.

Well, I'm having a good time. Which makes me feel guilty too. How very English.

What we call 'evil' doesn't necessarily deserve any kind of respect or understanding, by any means; it just deserves an acknowledgement of its complexity so we can better understand it - so we can help prevent it.

We intellectuals are not stupid: we know the phenomenology of guilt is a bad photocopy of the phenomenology of thought, so it's much cheaper to press that button.

Unfortunately, of course, guilt is an artifact of agricultural-age religion and is designed specifically to prevent humans from thinking and operating on a collective level.

In case you haven't noticed, people get hard-hearted against the people they hurt. Because they can't stand it. Literally. To think we did that to someone. I did that. So we think of all the reasons why it's okay we did whatever we did.

Our repentances are generally not so much a concern and remorse for the harm we have done, as a fear of the harm we may have brought upon ourselves.

I love to get to the underbelly of why people are up in arms about anything. Really, what I see is a big shadow in the West, in America especially, and everyone's afraid of looking stupid. But the truth is, I'm a genius and I'm stupid at the same time.

Guilt can prevent us from setting the boundaries that would be in our best interests, and in other people's best interests.

I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

Sin, guilt, neurosis; they are one and the same, the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

I was trying to protect my wife, I was trying to protect myself from shame, and I really regret it.

The cause of violence is not ignorance. It is self-interest. Only reverance can restrain violence - reverance for human life and the environment.

If the person does not feel guilt he is not in his own mind guilty and will not confess …. Confession in such a case can come only with duress.

All a man can betray is his conscience.

These people did their duty; they acted on my orders, so they are not guilty of anything. I accept their guilt myself. Try me.

…the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood seems to me, of all the philosophical theories, the most attuned to the needs of men in our time, and I see in it the most powerful safeguard men have left against themselves.

The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy, that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

All of us, more than we recognize, are products of the thinking around us. And much of this thinking is little, not big.

One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.

Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn't matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.

I once tried to figure out the first time I felt guilt, and it goes so far back that I might have been an inch long at the time.

Even when we see somebody incredibly evil, there's a rationalization behind what they're doing. They're at their best when they're at the moment.