(3089/898) Secrets

547) Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
Questions sur les miracles (1765)
quoted by Sissela Bok in
Secrets (1983)

[Note: This quote, although tremendously popular at the present moment, appearing on t-shirts and bumper stickers, is also very hard to pin down. It appears in none of the standard references, nor in any other book of quotations I've consulted. Wikiquote, however, has this extended quotation, along with the French original:

"Formerly there were those who said: You believe things that are incomprehensible, inconsistent, impossible because we have commanded you to believe them; go then and do what is unjust because we command it. Such people show admirable reasoning. Truly, whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust. If the God-given understanding of your mind does not resist a demand to believe what is impossible, then you will not resist a demand to do wrong to that God-given sense of justice in your heart. As soon as one faculty of your soul has been dominated, other faculties will follow as well. And from this derives all those crimes of religion which have overrun the world."]

548) The reasons for collective secrecy are sometimes overriding, as in certain kinds of administrative and military secrecy; but [...] the reasons cannot simply be extrapolated from claims individuals might make. It is fallacious to argue, for instance, from individual privacy to corporate privacy, or from an individual's right to keep personal documents secret to a government's right to classify information as it sees fit.

Sissela Bok
Secrets (1983)

549) The moral arguments for any secret practices must be capable of being publicly discussed. They should never themselves require secrecy; nor should the existence of the practices themselves. Thus there should be no secrecy about the moral principles supporting medical confidentiality about what patients reveal to their physicians; but in order to debate these principles, and the limitations upon them in different circumstances, it is not necessary to reveal the secrets of individual patients.

Sissela Bok
Secrets (1983)

550) [A] three step procedure for weighing a problematic moral practice such as that of lying to voters and to the seriously ill: first, to ask whether there are alternative courses of action that will achieve the aims one takes to be good without requiring deception; second, to set forth the moral reasons though to excuse of justify the lie, and the possible counterarguments; and third, as a test of these two steps, to ask how a public of reasonable persons would respond to such arguments.

Sissela Bok
Secrets (1983)
summarizing an argument she made in
Lying (1978)

551) If there was any race other than the human race, I'd go join it.

Thomas Gore
Senator from Oklahoma (c. 1935)
quoted by Gore Vidal (his grandson) in
a speech to the National Press Club
carried by C-SPAN (11/4/94)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 710 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.