Zimbardo --- The Lucifer Effect
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Ideas, Notions, & Quotes
As Dante showed in the Inferno, virtue is not simply refraining from sin; it requires action.
‘Whenever anyone is against his will, that is to him a prison.’
--- Epictetus, Discourses, 2nd C. BCE
‘Nothing by humans is alien to me.’
--- Terence, Roman comedy writer
‘What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self.’
--- Nathaniel Hawthorne
‘No man is an island, entire of itself …. Any man’s death diminishes me. Because I am involved
in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’
--- John Donne, Meditations 27
‘When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find far more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have been committed in the name of rebellion.’
--- C. P. Snow, Either-Or (1961)
‘Sure, this robe of mine doth change my disposition.’
--- Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale
‘The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.’
--- Edmund Burke, British statesman
‘We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.’
--- Martin Luther King, Jr.
As Hannah Arendt has argued, evil is, in the main, banal.