John von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of von Neumann's advice. It's made me a very happy man ever since. But it was von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility!
The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Indifference creates evil. Hatred is evil itself. Indifference is what allows evil to be strong, what gives it power.
It's fashionable to be indifferent to other people's suffering
Some people can very easily switch off and be guilt free, not that what I'm doing is about guilt, but they can completely disconnect and not care because it doesn't affect them. I've always really cared about what happens and felt a certain responsibility.
Pleasure blinds (so to speak) the eyes of the mind, and has no fellowship with virtue.
I was very apprehensive, mostly because I didn’t want to get caught. By now, I had begun to feel removed from the everyday world of morality. Guilt had become more a fear of getting caught than any sense of right or wrong.
When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to excellence.
[Science] must be amoral by its very nature: The minute it begins separating facts into the two categories of good ones and bad ones it ceases to be science and becomes a mere nuisance, like theology.
Piscary killed people, but he didn’t have the concept of pity or remorse. It would be like telling a shark he was a bad fish and to stop eating people. But Trent? He knew he was doing wrong, and he did it anyway.
The pathology of Western intellectuals has committed them to an adversarial relationship with to the very culture that has produced both the greatest liberation from want, ignorance and superstition and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in human history. No one has explained the origin and development of that intellectual pathology adequately. Though it constitutes one of the deepest flaws and and tragedies of our society. It is a pathology that with each passing decade becomes ever coarser, more crude and more detached from any principle of reality. That pathology allows Western intellectuals to step around the Everest of bodies of the victims of communism with without a tear, an act of contrition or a reevaluation of self, soul and mind.
Mere negation, mere Epicurean infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action; it inspires no enthusiasm; it has no missionaries, no crusades, no martyrs.
If it's possible to have an enemy without making it personal or moral, then that's what I'm trying to do.
