“ Those who actually dropped the bombs were less responsible than the people who took the decisions higher up the chain of command. In modern technological war, psychological responses are poorly correl… Jonathan Glover
“ A phased decision can avoid there being a key moment when the moral issue about killing civilians has to be confronted. Jonathan Glover
“ The reality is that in many countries torture of the most revolting cruelty happens routinely, often under the auspices of governments with good relations with Europe and the United States, sometimes… Jonathan Glover
“ The hardest - the part that's hard is to kill, but once you kill, that becomes easier, to kill the next person and the next one and the next one." -Varnado Simpson, Charlie Company of My Lai Jonathan Glover
“ A central part of the torturer’s craft is to make his job easier by stripping the victim of protective dignity. Jonathan Glover
“ Stalin’s teachings about gradual, concealed, unnoticeable quantitative changes leading to rapid, radical, qualitative changes permitted Soviet biologists to discover in plants the realization of such… Jonathan Glover
“ Social Darwinism had continued to flourish in German. Together with Mendelian genetics, it was widely thought to provide a scientific basis for the eugenic ‘Racial Hygiene’ movement. Jonathan Glover
“ The genocide [in Rwanda] was not a spontaneous eruption of tribal hatred, it was planned by people wanting to keep power. There was a long government-led hat campaign against the Tutsis. Jonathan Glover
“ The UN lacked the ability to act without the support of its more powerful members, notably the United States. The American government wanted to avoid a repetition of its unsuccessful intervention in S… Jonathan Glover
“ The use of the blockade against Germany to starve large numbers of people to death broke through the moral barrier against the mass killing of civilians. It was the precedent for the 'conventional' bo… Jonathan Glover
“ Above all, the sense of personal responsibility was reduced by the way agency was fragmented. Among the airmen who obeyed the order to drop the bomb, the many scientists who helped to make it, the Pre… Jonathan Glover
“ A woman who was a schoolgirl at Hiroshima asked, “Those scientists who invented the atomic bomb, what did they think would happen if they dropped it? Jonathan Glover
“ In its report issued that year, 1991, Amnesty International recorded protests against human rights abuses in over fifty countries, the protest to thirteen countries making specific reference to tortur… Jonathan Glover
“ Solzhenitsyn described this: It would be hard to identify the exact source of that inner intuition, not founded on rational argument, which prompted our refusal to enter the NKVD schools… People can s… Jonathan Glover
“ Atrocities are easier to commit if respect for the victim can be neutralized. For this reason, humiliation handed out by those with power can be ominous. The link between humiliation and atrocity is o… Jonathan Glover
“ In recent philosophy there has been a growing awareness of the gap between the abstract principles proposed by philosophers and the ways in which people actually think. The kind of rationality admired… Jonathan Glover
“ Part of the Maoist project was the deliberate construction of a new moral identity. To do this it was necessary to destroy people’s previous sense of who they were and to make sure there was no room f… Jonathan Glover
“ Jung Chang said that Mao ruled by getting people to hate each other: ‘Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship. That was why under him there was no real equivalent o… Jonathan Glover
“ The darker side of Nietzsche’s ideas was incorporated into the Nazi belief system. Part of the link was straightforward: some things Nietzsche said were pure Nazi doctrine. His comments that ‘The exti… Jonathan Glover
“ The first step away from being manipulated, and towards a more autonomous outlook, is to stand back from a set of responses and think. Jonathan Glover
