ethics Archives - Village Connections

April 20, 2009

Published by Village Connections at April 20, 2009

Socially fragmented ethical individuals and powerful, self-interested networks

As this new century unfolds, it seems that people are not as enthusiastic about calling on community to address current problems as they once were; instead they are coming to call on the ethical and responsible individual. I have some major concerns about where this very individualized trajectory is leading us.

The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
Oscar Wilde
The person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
Mark Twain
The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
Henry Ward Beecher
Any fool can get the right answer, it takes real intelligence to first get the right question.
Unknown
There is nothing so practical as a good theory.
Unknown
What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
Henry David Thoreau
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
Lily Tomlin
Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?
William Lloyd Garrison
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
It is the safest of times, it is the riskiest of times.... What the Dickens is going on here?
Denton Morrison
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
Bill Vaughn
This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.
Oscar Wilde
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
Oscar Wilde
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T.S. Eliot
The trouble with our age is that it is all signposts and no destination.
Unknown
The world has achieved brilliance without conscience.
Omar Bradley
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
Paul Valery
One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.
Alvin Toffler
The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.
Oscar Wilde
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E.M. Forster
To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art.
E.M. Forster
The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
E.M. Forster
In a sense, Economic Analysis established my respectability so that I have been able to be disreputable ever since.
Kenneth Boulding
If you haven't found something to be passionate about, keep looking. The possibilities are endless.
Unknown
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
Kenneth Boulding
On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.
Paul Ricoeur
We need the spirit of levity to counteract the laws of gravity.
Christchurch Wizard
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
Thoreau Walden
Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub, It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Tao Te Ching
Shape clay into a vessel; It is the space within that makes it useful.
Tao Te Ching
Cut doors and windows for a room: It is the holes which make it useful.
Tao Te Ching
See simplicity in the complicated. Achieve greatness in little things.
Tao Te Ching
It is by being alive to difficulty that one can avoid it.
Tao Te Ching
Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Every ending has a new beginning.
I Ching Wisdom
In the hands of a great master, all material is productive.
I Ching Wisdom
Only connect...Live in fragments no longer ...
E.M. Forster
The world has become too complex for individuals...to have enough knowledge to tackle complex problems by themselves.
Gerhard Fischer
Conflict will not and should not cease, but will creative be, when wrapped in peace.
Kenneth Boulding
One reason why we fail to learn is that we only talk to those who agree with us.
Kenneth Boulding
...what might I hope for?
Paul Ricoeur
Learning through play.
New Zealand Playcentre movement
Knowledge is transgressive. Nobody, in my awareness, has succeeded anywhere for very long in containing knowledge. It seeps through institutional structures like water through pores of a membrane.
Gibbons & Nowotny
I believe New Zealand can aim to be the first nation to be truly sustainable - across the four pillars of the economy, society, the environment, and nationhood.
NZ Prime Minster Helen Clark, 2007
To learn gives the liveliest of pleasure.
Aristotle
Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues.
C Wright Mills
A compelling story connects personal experience to public narratives, allowing society to "speak itself" through each individual.
Ronald Berger
Human societies not only have an ability to learn, but they also 'learn to learn' and experience themselves as 'constructed'.
Alberto Melucci
Drama is a mirror of society.
Dorothy Heathcote
Whether you are a politician or a bureaucrat, a business person or an academic, you should be paying creative writers and artists to produce your content
Ross Himona
It's all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories.
Thomas Berry
Dare to create!
John Wall